INTRODUCTION
A social network is a social structure that maps out the relationships between individuals. In a wide spectrum we all belong to one giant social network, but we also belong to smaller, tighter social networks defined by our families, our friends, where we live, where we work, where we went to school, our hobbies and interests and much more.
- Definition of Social Networks
Social networking is defined as the grouping of persons collectively into to particular groups, frequently like a little community or a neighborhood. Although social networking is possible in the flesh, especially in schools or in at work, it's most popular online. This is because contrary to just about all high schools, universities, or business establishments, the net is satiated with billions, if not more, of humans who are interested in meeting other internet users and acquiring friendly relationships.
When it concerns social networking online, websites are employed.
The term "social network" has been around since the 1950s, but the meteoric rise of social-networking Web sites like MySpace, Facebook and LinkedIn has turned a dusty sociological phrase into the hottest buzzword of the Internet age.
These sites are called social networking sites. Social networking sites are, in some respects, like an online community of internet users. Contingent on the social networking website in hand, many of these online community members share a common bond, whether that bond be spare-time activities, religious belief, or political sympathies. Once you're granted access to a social networking site you will be able to start to socialize. This socialization may include reading the profiles or profile pages of other members which contain the personal information of users or even getting hold of them.
The friends that you are able to make are amidst the numerous profits to social networking online. Another one of those profits includes diverseness. Unlike in most schools or bodies of work, the web affords humans, from all-round the Earth, admittance to social networking sites. This means that although you're in the U.S.A., you could develop a cyberspace friendly relationship with an individual in Russia. Not only will you earn afresh acquaintance, you but may also ascertain a thing or II about afresh civilization.
If networking on the web sounds comparable something you would be interested in, you're boosted to learn more about it, such as the perils of social networking. These risks often regard internet predators or persons who claim to be someone that they're not. Tho' risk does survive with networking online, it also lives with networking out in real life. As when you're assembling acquaintances at a bar, school, or work, you're suggested to continue with cautiousness online. By being cognizant of your environment and make money online who you're talking to, you should be able safely savoring social networking online.
Once you've ascertained everything that you feel you need to discover, about social networking online, you are able to start to explore networking communities of interests to fall in. This can easily be handled by executing a standard cyberspace search. Your research will in all likelihood bring back a number of results, including MySpace, FriendWise, FriendFinder, Yahoo! 360, Facebook, Orkut, and Classmates.
- Social Networks History
In the early 1930s, a self-published psychologist named Dr. Jacob Levi Moreno introduced the sociogram, the first formal attempt to map out the relationships within a group of people. Moreno's sociogram -- a cluster of individual points, or "nodes," connected by straight lines -- became a powerful tool for identifying social leaders, outsiders, and what he called the "sociometric star," the person to whom all others are connected [source: Psybernet].
In 1954, anthropologist J. A. Barnes used the phrase "social network" to describe the complex relationships in a Norwegian fishing village [source: The Bumble Bee].
- Purpose
When you create a profile on a social-networking site, you literally put yourself on the social-networking map. You can use the Web site to:
- look up old friends; make new ones
- share music, photos and videos
- join groups based on interests such as politics, hobbies or favorite TV shows
- find jobs or love; or browse for the weirdest profile picture
- How popular are social-networking sites
According to ComScore, MySpace drew more than 114 million visitors ages 15 and older in June 2007, a 72 percent increase over June 2006. Facebook jumped 270 percent in the same year, up to 52 million visitors a month. According to Alexa, seven of the top 20 most visited Web sites in the world are social-networking sites, such as MySpace or Friendster, or contain significant social-networking components like YouTube or Hi5.
But as social-networking sites go mainstream, the demographics are shifting. By August 2006, more than two-thirds of MySpace visitors were over 25 years old, with more than 40 percent between the ages of 35 and 54. Now that non-university students can sign up for Facebook accounts, more than half of that site's members are out of college. [source: ComScore]
This isn't just a U.S. phenomenon. Social-networking sites have gone global. In June 2007, Google's Orkut drew 49 percent of its visitors from Latin America (mostly Brazil) and 43 percent from the Asia-Pacific region. In that same month, a full 89 percent of visitors to Friendster were from the Asia-Pacific region and 63 percent of visitors to Bebo were from Europe [source: ComScore].
Social networks are important because they give us social capital. Social capital is the "resources accumulated through the relationships among people" [source: Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication]. These resources can come in several forms.
Useful information: medical tips, driving directions, movie recommendations
Personal relationships: family, friends, neighbors, colleagues
Ability to organize and form groups: local government, sports teams, knitting circles
Social capital makes it easier for us to find useful information and increases a community's capacity to organize and achieve goals. Social networks can also breed negative side effects.
Fig 1: This diagram shows how connections happen.
There are many relationships that make up social networks, and it's natural that some people in your network will be more closely related to you than others. Sociologists identify two major types of relationships in social networks: strong ties and weak ties. Examples of strong ties could be family, close friends and immediate co-workers, while weak ties could be a childhood friend you haven't seen in 10 years, the clerk at the bookstore or a classmate with whom you don't hang out very often [source: BT Technology Journal[1]].
1.5 What Social-networking Sites Do
Different social-networking sites promote different types of interactions and activities. To understand why people use social-networking sites, it's helpful to first break down these sites into some general categories.
1.5.1 Community Social-networking Sites
This is a broad term for any social-networking site whose purpose is to help users identify and enlarge their social networks by searching for existing contacts and finding new ones.
Some of these community sites aim for a particular demographic: LinkedIn attracts working professionals; the original Facebook stuck to college kids; Black Planet, Asian Avenue and Mi Gente target racial and ethnic affiliations. But other sites, like MySpace, Yahoo 360 and Hi5 are general community sites in which users can form smaller groups based on interests or demographics.
1.5.2 Media Sharing Sites
These are sites where the main activities are uploading photos and videos and viewing other user's photos and videos. You don't have to be a member of the site to look at other people's pictures and movies, but you have to join to upload your own.
Once you've joined, you can invite other users to be your friend, at which point they'll be added to your page as links with profile photos. YouTube is the most popular video-sharing site and Flickr is one of the best-known photo-sharing sites. We should mention that many of the general community sites include media-sharing elements, like the ability to post pictures, videos and music on personal profiles.
1.5.3 Social Bookmarking Sites
Bookmarking is the practice of saving a link to a Web site in your Web browser. Social bookmarking, on the other hand, is saving that same link to a special social bookmarking Web site where other people can see what you're bookmarking.
When you save a link to a social bookmarking Web site, you tag it with as many keywords as you like. Other people can look up bookmarks by tags, or they can browse by the most popular or most recent bookmarks.
If you like the kind of links someone else is collecting, you can add that person to your network and receive notifications when they add a new bookmark. Examples of popular social bookmarking sites are del.icio.us, Digg and Furl.
1.5.4 Blogging Social Networks
These are social-networking sites, which bring together individuals and their blogs. Instead of a simple profile, each user keeps a running Weblog on topics of their choice. Sites like Livejournal, Blogger and Xanga allow users to search and browse for interesting blogs. When you find a kindred spirit, add his blog to your list of friends. You can form communities with other bloggers.
1.5.5 Music Social Networks
Sites like Pandora, Last.Fm and iLike are a new breed of social-networking sites based on sharing music with friends. Pandora and Last.Fm work like streaming radio stations. You enter an artist name and the Web site creates a play list of songs that it thinks you'll like. You can play the full list in your browser and even rate the songs so that the Web site gets to know your tastes better. You can share your play lists and favorite songs with "friends" who are part of your network.
Many of the more than 300 social-networking sites fall outside these five categories. But no matter the specific audience or goal of a social-networking site, they can all be powerful social-networking tools by strengthening our connections.
When asked who they think is the audience for their Facebook profile, a survey group of college students came up with the following list, ranked from most likely audience to least likely:
- High school friends
- People in my classes
- Other friends
- Total strangers at same college
- Someone I met at a party
- Family
Social-networking sites increase our capacity to form weak ties. On a social-networking site, you can add "friends" who like the same band, even though you know nothing else about them. It's not uncommon for frequent users of online social networks to have hundreds or thousands of "friends."
Another emerging trend is to "build your own" social network. Web sites like Ning and Me.com allow anyone to create or join stand-alone social networks built around specific themes or interests. Companies can use these sites to build social networks around their brand, or individuals can build more tightly focused communities than on the larger social-networking sites.
1.6 Challenges faced while using social networking
We are Building a content repository aggregating content of different social networking sites from the internet and bring them together on a single platform. It provides real time results for various keywords with updates from different places on the web. In this project we are aggregating data from different social networking sites like facebook, twitter, linkedln updates and aggregate them on a single platform to deliver content on different topics.
Man is called a social animal and to be in the society he has to keep contacts for various reasons like to expand his business, to find his friends over the internet, to make new contacts, to find a life partner, to find jobs, to learn cooking, for shopping, etc, etc. Due to the current advancements in web and the internet he uses all the features and if these are available on a single site he will be saving time and can view all information and on a single platform.
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