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Made by: Florentine de Beer & Maartje Drok

Twitter is a free social networking website were you can write and read messages known as “tweets”, those small messages have the maximum of 140 characters. Twitter is founded by a company named “Obvious Corp” in October 2006 in San Francisco.

Nowadays Twitter is one of the most popular social networking website worldwide, even famous persons and politics are joining this hype. I think this is ridiculous and a waste of your time. First of all I am not interesting in what people are doing every single minute of the day. Secondly you have 140 characters each message that is 2 sentences, so you communicate one thought a time. You know who else communicate one thought a time; 3 year old children, would you like to be compared with a 3 year old kid? Do something useful with your time instead of writing messages and  following other peoples life. For example last year when news channel CNN and actor Ashton Kutcher started a competition on Twitter: “Who has the first million followers on Twitter.” I really don’t understand why those people want to have one million followers. Ashton Kutcher is already famous and CNN is a news channel so I don’t see the point of this competition. This counts for everybody who are using Twitter, why should you want to share everything you do with the rest of the world. People are always complaining that nowadays everything is online and that you can’t hide anything anymore for the world. It is just your own fault if you want to have a private life don’t use Twitter or other public social websites.  

 I think Twitter is just a hype and in a couple of years they will invent a new social networking website, which will be again a hype and everybody will forget  Twitter. Till that time I refuse to register myself on Twitter and I will try to convince other people about my statement: ”If you don’t have anything to say, put it on Twitter” and “If you do have anything to say, don’t put it on Twitter.”  

 Since a couple of years they also provide online conferencing, that means that a company in the Netherlands can have an online meeting with a company on the other side of the world. Several websites worldwide provide these kind of service, were you can buy and download a program. The prices can run up from €15,- to €1000,-, it depends on the number  of participants, the tools you want to use and the time you need for the meeting. The benefits for a company to use online conferencing are; fast International communication, low costs because the company  don’t have to pay for flights, hotels or expensive phone calls to foreign countries and the employees who are normally going for a business trip can stay at the office and continue their work. There are also some unprofitable things about online conferencing; you are not always sure of a good internet connection, you need to calculate time difference, you can’t use body language, eye and personal contact.

Because of all these negative points there is a change that the meeting is not that successful as the company wanted to have. That’s why it is still not really popular, but at the moment with the credit crunch it is much cheaper than a business trip and more companies are using the online conferencing.

There are lots of benefits if you communicate trough internet;  it is fast, cheap and you can keep up contacts with people all over the world. There are also dangers and negative sides if you communicate trough internet; the change is bigger that there is miscommunication, because you can’t use body language, eye contact, tone of voice and so on.When you Email or chat with a friend, that person doesn’t know if you are joking, angry or sarcastic and that’s why there is a lot of miscommunication trough internet. Some foundations who are helping children who are bullied did some research. Since internet is popular at school children are getting bullied more often. Namely trough msn, which is a program that you can download on internet and you can add other people and chat with them.  On public websites like Facebook, Hyves, Twitter  you have to be really careful with communication and giving information about yourself and other people. You don’t know the other person and maybe it is somebody totally different then the person tells you he/she is.  Also be careful with posting pictures and videos on your website because most of them are public and everybody can see them. Nowadays children raise up with computers, internet, games and when a kid only plays games on the internet, than it can be a danger because it can be really difficult for them to make friends and to communicate in a proper way in real life.

You see that there are not only benefits if you communicate trough internet but there are also a lot of dangers and negative sides. In a lot of countries the government is already making campaigns about these dangers, to make the people alert.