Online Communications

Ways of communicating on the Internet are gradually becoming more important in the world we live in today, with the amount of ways you can communicate online increasing everyday. In this post I am going to talk about all the ways of communicating online, how they are used and the advantages and disadvantages of selected ways. I’m also going to talk about a few very popular social networking sites and how they have a huge impact.

Email

One of the main ways in which communication is used in today’s world is email. Email is the most common as it is very easy to use and is very efficient. There are three main email servers that are used, they are: Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail and Gmail, together these three have over 800 million users that use the service regularly with Hotmail standing at the top of that list with 355 million active users.

I personally am a user of both Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail and use them both all the time, for me I use Yahoo! Mail more than Hotmail as when I was younger I only had my Hotmail account and signed up for lots of junk mail to be sent to that email address, I know have many unread emails on that account as I never normally use that account anymore, I now use my Yahoo! Mail account more often as it isn’t as packed with junk mail as my other account.

The advantages of email are obviously that it is very simple to use and sends an email within seconds to the recipient, but the disadvantages would be than an email can fail and not send if you incorrectly spell an email address wrong or the server is down, but this rarely happens.

Instant Messaging

Another way of communicating online is instant messaging, many web servers offer instant messaging but the main way would be through Windows Live Messenger, this uses the email server Hotmail, it has over 330 million users and is the leading instant messaging service. It allows users to talk to a friend or relative through the Internet and users can send a voice message, picture or video through the service, it also allows users to draw pictures or actually write messages using a virtual pen, so it actually looks that the user has hand written the comment.

It recently has added a feature where as an online user can send a message to an offline user so that when the offline user comes online they will receive the message straight away.

I personally, don’t really use instant messaging services as much as I used to as some social networking sites offer a service that allows you to chat instantly to another online user.

Instant messaging has its own language as well, words that get abbreviated to either resemble another world, like ‘brb’ (meaning: be right back) or ‘lol’ (meaning: laugh out loud), or letters that if spoken out loud sound the same as an actual word, like ‘ru’ (meaning: are you) or ‘ne’ (meaning: any), that in the real world would sound really silly is spoken out loud, here is a video to show this: 

Social Networking

A social network is a network of people joined by a relationship, such as friendship, they can then communicate through the site as long as they have a profile, different sites offer different things, like fans can now ‘follow’ their favourite celebrity through a social network. Social networking is becoming such a big thing that the average Facebook user spends 1.2 days a month on the site.

Many sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Bebo, MySpace and Tumblr have thousands of active users. The more popular sites, Facebook and Twitter, have 950 million active users between them with Facebook dominating with 750 million alone. Different sites offer different things; on Facebook you can ‘Like’ a status from another user, send private mail, ‘Poke’ another user, you can now also play interactive games where you play along with friends, examples of this are Farmville or Cityville. Another site, in Twitter allows users to ‘follow’ their favourite celebrities through the site, letting users to view celebrity’s ‘Tweets’ on their homepage as soon as they are posted. I personally am a member of both Facebook and Twitter and use them both quite frequently, if I were being honest I haven’t really got into using Twitter as much as I use Facebook as I personally find looking and waiting for celebrities to post what they are doing or their thoughts pretty boring, where as on Facebook, I find myself on it longer than I would want to be and then think that I haven’t really done anything for the amount of time I might of spent on there. There are ‘Groups’ and ‘Pages’ on Facebook that agree with me, like this one:

Internet Forums

Internet forums are another example that IT is becoming more prominent in the world as they are a key to getting information quickly if you cant find it anywhere else on the web. You can create an account on the majority of Internet forums for free, once you are on there you can leave a comment asking a question about something you want to know about and, depending on the popularity of the forum, have a reply within seconds of posting. You can also help out other users of the site by answering questions that they may have already asked.

As well as instant messaging, forums have their own lingo, which is used on forums, words such a ‘thread’ that means a single conversation, ‘post’ that means user-submitted message, although ‘post’ is used on other sites such as social networking sites, it still is used on forums.

I use forums quite frequently and sometimes I use forums to get information on something without having to ask a question as it has already been asked, I can type a question into a search engine like Google, and it will have a result from a forum that I can use to find the answer.

Online Conferencing

Online conferencing has become a very important tool in most businesses in the modern world, although it used within households between families and friends, it was firstly set up for businesses. It allows people to chat face to face over the Internet and have a proper conversation if they cannot be together for whatever reason.

It also allows businesses to have a conference meeting over the Internet, with the members of the conference being where ever they like, as long as they have an Internet connection, in times of need, when a worker cannot get into work for any reason they can still have the conference but rather than in the physical sense, the virtual sense.

Earlier in this blog, I spoke about the instant messaging site Skype, Skype also allows registered users to make ‘video calls’ for free, but this only allows users to make a ‘video call’ to one person at a time, whereas on other sites such as WebEx, they charge a small fee for the privilege of talking to more than one person.

Online conferencing does have its disadvantages as well though, if the network goes down a conference could not happen, if the network signal is not very strong it can cause an amount of ‘lag’ causing the conference to take longer than needed and possibly making it too hard to put together a speech as some parts of it may not be heard or seen over the web cam or microphone.

Blogs and Blogging

I enjoy blogging as it makes uploading things to the Internet very easy, it offers services to upload videos, photos, text and sound clips which makes it very helpful to present information. I use a blog to upload all my work for my A-Level ICT course which makes everything easier for my teachers to check my work rather than sending documents over an email and having to save it and use up memory on the hard drive of a computer.

Many people all over the world use blogs to write about all sorts of topics, and get their opinion across about many things.

Chat Rooms

There are many online chat rooms that you can use over the Internet without having an account, and some require that a user have an account. There are many uses of a chat room but one the main uses of a chat room would be the share information with other users, the difference between online chat rooms and instant messaging is that chat rooms are designed to chat to multiple people in the same conversation, whereas instant messaging sites and software is predominantly made for one on one chat.

I have used chat rooms before but I generally do not use them, as I prefer to use instant messaging services like Windows Live Messenger as I can then talk to people I know. There are obviously advantages to online services but then disadvantages that come with it like the fact that in most case you do not really know who you are talking to as anyone can join in a chat whereas on instant messaging services you generally know who you are talking to as you know them personally.