by Rainier Wong

Created on: August 24, 2009

Social networking has indeed brought a lot of changes to the Internet especially the way we use the Internet. Some of the changes include the way we send and receive messages; the way we share photos; the way we share videos; and the way we play games.

We can now send messages to our friends who are connected with us on social networking sites as we use to do with emails. Unlike a normal email, we can choose to receive messages only from our friends. This is a better control on spams and scams. We can chat with friendson a social networking site as we have done with instant messaging software before.

Sharing photos can now be done on social networking sites. As it is with photo-sharing sites, we can upload our photos and create albums to contain the photos. Friends who view the photos can post comments. We can tag our friends' photos that contain images of ourselves.

We can now upload videos for our friends to watch on social networking sites. We can also embed videos that have been uploaded either by ourselves or someone else on another website. Our friends can comment on the videos.

We can play various types of online games either by ourselves or with friends on social networking sites and compare scores as we have done on games websites. In addition, some sites like Facebook allow members to create their own games and other applications to entertain friends and other members.

Social networking sites also change the way we perceive things. Many people accept gifts from friends sent on social networking sites with applications even though they cannot really see the real thing. For example, if you send a toaster virtually to your friend, he or she does not expect you to give him or her areal one that can actually toast some bread. Some games on social networking sites also have the option of sending gifts to friends to help them to score better on the games.

With social networking websites, we can now use the Internet to update our friends on our status and tell them what we have been doing in life so far without having to email to them. We can also know the status of our friends as well as what they have been doing lately.

Instead peformingeach of the different tasks mentioned above on a different website, we can now use the same social networking site to perform the different tasks. From our own profile pages we can launch the different applications to perform the different tasks.

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