In the past, people could communicate with their friends and neighbors through a limited number of channels. For example, they could speak with one another face to face. If they lived far away, they could write long letters to one another. Before the invention of the railroads and the highways, these letters often took weeks or months to reach their destination. (That statement assumes that the letter reached its destination at all. Many letters got lost on the way. They fell into rivers or gorges, or they were stolen by bandits.) Later in the history of human communication, people who lived far away could talk to one another on the telephone. Still later, they could write electronic letters (called emails) to one another.

Today, there are thousands of possible ways for people to communicate with each other. These communications options include the traditional means of communication, such as letters, phone conversations, emails, and face to face conversations. However, in addition to these traditional means of communication, people can also communicate with one another through social media websites such as Facebook and Twitter, although thousands of others can be found on social media site lists. The top social media sites have become extremely popular over the course of the last ten years for a number of reasons. For example, many of the best social media sites give users an opportunity to post status updates which instantly inform friends, neighbors, coworkers, and relatives about the user’s thoughts, feelings, and actions. Furthermore, these users can also see their friends’, neighbors’, coworkers’, and relatives’ status updates; consequently, they always feel like they know what everybody is doing or thinking at every moment in time. Many of these users rely upon social media site lists which rank and review these websites. They need these social media site lists because few users have unlimited free time to expend upon social media interactions; therefore, these users user social media site lists to distinguish between great social media websites and mediocre ones.

However, some users who subscribe to social media sites dislike these features because they believe that they intrude upon their privacy. They do not want to know what everybody does or thinks at every hour of the day; they do not want others to know every intimate detail of their personal lives. Consequently, these users search social media site lists or social bookmark services for sites which offer advanced privacy settings. They often scour these social media site lists for hours to ensure that they do not surrender important personal information to the companies which own these websites. These users also rely on social media site lists to inform them when companies change their privacy settings without informing their users. In essence, they use these social media site lists to police companies such as Facebook and Twitter.