Social networking service
A social networking service is an online service, platform, or site that focuses onbuilding and reflecting of social networks or social relations among people, e.g., whoshare interests and/or activities. A social network service essentially consists of arepresentation of each user (often a profile), his/her social links, and a variety of additional services. Most social network services are web based and provide meansfor users to interact over the internet, such as e-mail and instant messaging. Onlinecommunity services are sometimes considered as a social network service, thoughin a broader sense, social network service usually means an individual-centeredservice whereas online community services are group-centered. Social networkingsites allow users to share ideas, activities, events, and interests within theirindividual networks. The main types of social networking services are those which contain categoryplaces (such as former school year or classmates), means to connect with friends(usually with self-description pages) and a recommendation system linked to trust.Popular methods now combine many of these, with Facebook and Twitter widelyused worldwide, Nexopia (mostly in Canada); Bebo, VKontakte, Hi5, Hyves (mostlyin The Netherlands), Draugiem.lv (mostly in Latvia), StudiVZ (mostly in Germany),iWiW (mostly in Hungary), Tuenti (mostly in Spain), Nasza-Klasa (mostly in Poland),Decayenne, Tagged, XING, Badoo and Skyrock in parts of Europe; Orkut and Hi5 inSouth America and Central America; and Friendster, Mixi, Multiply, Orkut, Wretch,renren and Cyworld in Asia and the Pacific Islands and Twitter, Facebook, LinkedInand Orkut in India. There have been attempts to standardize these services to avoid the need toduplicate entries of friends and interests (see the FOAF standard and the OpenSource Initiative).Although some of the largest social networks were founded on the notion of digitizing real world connections, many networks focus on categories from booksand music to non-profit business to motherhood as ways to provide both servicesand community to individuals with shared interests.
History
The potential for computer networking to facilitate new forms of computer-mediatedsocial interaction was suggested early on. Efforts to support social networks viacomputer-mediated communication were made in many early online services,including Usenet, ARPANET, LISTSERV, and bulletin board services (BBS). Manyprototypical features of social networking sites were also present in online servicessuch as America Online, Prodigy, and CompuServe.
Early social networking on the World Wide Web began in the form of generalizedonline communities such as Theglobe.com (1995), Geocities (1994) and Tripod.com(1995). Many of these early communities focused on bringing people together tointeract with each other through chat rooms, and encouraged users to sharepersonal information and ideas via personal webpages by providing easy-to-usepublishing tools and free or inexpensive webspace. Some communities - such asClassmates.com - took a different approach by simply having people link to eachother via email addresses. In the late 1990s, user profiles became a central featureof social networking sites, allowing users to compile lists of "friends" and search forother users with similar interests.New social networking methods were developed by the end of the 1990s, and manysites began to develop more advanced features for users to find and managefriends. This newer generation of social networking sites began to flourish with theemergence of Makeoutclub in 2000, followed by Friendster in 2002, and soonbecame part of the Internet mainstream. Friendster was followed by MySpace andLinkedIn a year later, and finally, Bebo. Attesting to the rapid increase in socialnetworking sites' popularity, by 2005, MySpace was reportedly getting more pageviews than Google.Facebook, launched in 2004, has since become the largest social networking site inthe world. Today, it is estimated that there are now over 200 active sites using a wide varietyof social networking models.
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