High Tech Household

Despite popular perceptions, Social Networking has been around for as long as networked computers have existed.  Early computer enthusiasts would connect their computers over phone lines through the use of modems and communicate through message boards or forums.  Online services such as Compuserv, AOL, and Prodigy gave ways for more people to interact via message boards, chat, and email.  When the Internet first came on the scene, sites such as GeoCities and Tripod gave users the ability to interact, as well as set up their own web pages.

In the last few years, social networking has exploded with sites such as Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and LinkedIn.  Social Networking also includes blogs and social bookmarking sites such as Digg, del.icio.us, Reddit, and StumbleUpon.  Social Media sites such as YouTube and Flickr round out the social networking platform.  This series will look briefly at all of these types of sites.  Further information and tutorials will be provided in future posts beyond the scope of this series.  Part I of this series will focus on Social Networking Sites in particular.

The Major Social Networks

Social Networks are sites that typically allow users to create a profile page for themselves, and then find other people that they know (“friends”) and interact with them.  Social Networks allow people to interact by posting updates on what they are doing, and often provide apps to allow for expandability.  The major social networking sites are Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, and Bing.

Facebook:  Facebook is currently the largest of the social networking sites.  It began its life as a way for college students and professors to interact (in fact, you used to have to have a .edu email address from a university to join).  Since it has opened up to the rest of the world, it has become the de facto social network.  Facebook offers good control of who can see what on your profile, and allows you to maintain a large friend list with limited profiles, and have an expanded profile for your closer friends.  Facebook also provides the ability to create and join networks, which allow for users to interact around a group, a company, or an event.  If you are new to social networking, Facebook is the place to start.  Facebook has become the site of choice for keeping up with old friends, posting photos online, and just catching up.

MySpace: Before FaceBook, MySpace was the most popular of the social networking sites.  MySpace offered greater flexibility in the creation of pages, but it was harder to set up a profile/page than it was on FaceBook.  MySpace has become very popular in the music industry from aspiring musicians to major headliners to post news to their fans and provide samples of their work.  Originally not as secure as FaceBook, MySpace has made strides in recent years in providing some of the same security control and featuresets as FaceBook.  MySpace is still very popular, and allows users to easily post multimedia, something that is not as common on FaceBook.

LinkedIn: LinkedIn is the social networking site for business professionals.  It allows professionals to post their resume, info about their company, and network with each other for business purposes.  I have personally witnessed the importance and effectiveness of LinkedIn.  My company was looking to partner with another company because they provided a service that would be beneficial to our product.  We had tried to contact someone at the office via traditional means, but always reached dead ends.  Finally, our CEO decided to find and contact their CEO via LinkedIn, and we had a meeting set up for the following week.  LinkedIn is a great source for professionals to discover new opportunities.

Ning: Ning is one social networking site you probably have not heard of, but is the most popular of the Social Networking Sites beyond the “big three” mentioned above.  It is important because Ning is a platform that allows users to create their own social networking sites.  Ning has been used to create social networking sites for educational institutions, political activism, corporate branding, artists, churches, computer programmers, etc.  The possibilities are limitless.  Ning allows extendability through its OpenSocial API, which allows any developer to extend the functionality of Ning.

Other Social Networks

There are many other smaller social networking sites that aren’t as big as the four above, but they deserve mention:

• Bebo: Bebo is a smaller Social Network, which recently created hooks into other social networks to allow users to view their profiles across networks in one place.
• Orkut: Owned and operated by Google, Orkut is a popular social networking site in countries other than the U.S., particularly Brazil and India.
• Hi5: Never been able to compete with the top 3, Hi5 is similar to FaceBook but popular in Central America.
• Frendster: Frendster was actually the first of the modern social networking sites.  Competitive with FaceBook and MySpace in regards to features, it just doesn’t have the same marketing presence as the other two.
• Xanga: A niche social networking site, Xanga is focused on video, photos, and blogging.

What About Twitter?

Ah yes, Twitter.  Twitter is in and of itself its own animal in the Social Networking world.  It is also the most complicated to explain and describe.  For this reason, I have decided that it deserves its own post in part 2 of this series.

Wrapping It Up

Social Networking has overtaken the web, and has changed the way people interact using the Internet, and it has proven itself to be beyond just a fad.  While newer technologies and sites may eventually overtake the sites mentioned in this article, social networking is here to stay as a medium.