Her inbox is full of everything from college event notifications and updates from friends to invitations to vampire-slaying games.
But one thing she won’t find is a message from her older sister, Emily Harrington, who comes home to check on her MySpace page.
“In all honesty, most of my friends use MySpace, so it is just more convenient. Facebook just seems to be more geared towards college students, and I didn’t use these Web sites until after I had graduated,” Harrington said.
Exactly the reasons her sister prefers using Facebook to keep in touch.
“Facebook allowed me to bridge the gap between high school and college, allowing me to keep in contact with old friends,” Kresie said. “In addition, it’s a great communication tool. I’ve been able to use it to create a group specifically for a class project so that the group members can communicate progress to each other.”
The Kansas City area sisters aren’t the only ones disagreeing over social networking choices.
First popularized by industry giant MySpace, social networking has become an Internet-age global phenomenon attracting millions of users and garnering substantial revenue for advertisers seeking to direct their messages to targeted audiences based partly on age, location and hobbies.
For now, MySpace continues to dominate this young industry, but the competition is growing more intense from Facebook. Other competitors, such as AOL, don’t appear to be going away, either. In response, MySpace on Thursday unveiled a package of online music services aimed at regaining market share and challenging Apple’s iTunes
Why the buzz behind this business? Consider social networking sites as launching pads that allow people all over the world to connect with each other. That helps explain why research firm eMarketer is pegging ad spending on social networking sites to jump to $2.7 billion by 2011.