If you ’ve revise your Facebook condition , post exposure of last night ’s party to Flickr for your booster to see or made a business physical contact through LinkedIn , then you ’ve used a social networking web site . But what exactly is a social networking site ? What are the key attributes that limit it asunder from other World Wide Web site ? How do they give up people to form on-line communities and share societal networking information ?
Some of the earliest sites that we would recognize as being similar to today ’s social networking sites come out in the mid nineties , when the net come out grow in popularity . These former sites sharpen on letting users reconnect with multitude they had hump in the past , or retrieve out how they were connected to other site users .
Friendster appeared in 2002 and follow a similar model , but it offered extra feature of speech like photo sharing and it quickly became the first of the " big " social networking site . Since then , however , Friendster has decline in popularity and is no longer one of the top 20 social networking sites in the United States [ germ : Hitwise ] . After Friendster issue forth MySpace and Facebook , along with sites like Bebo , Hi5 , Orkut and Yahoo ! 360 . In addition , dozens of site ply to very specific regions or tastes have recoil up . Whether you ’re concerned in Holy Scripture , video games , music or get together people from Denmark , there ’s probably a societal networking site for you .
The idea of an online community goes back much farther than the 1990s , however . Very early forms of the Internet were used to foster societal meshing . The earliest on-line communities were dial - up bulletin - board systems ( BBSes ) such as The Well and legion other regional systems . While these former communities did not have the features substance abuser have come to wait of modern social networking site , they portion out the core idea of join citizenry with rough-cut interests .
What Social Networking Sites Do
The line between what is and is n’t a societal networking site is n’t always a clear one . Internet message boards , for case , facilitate the creation of on-line communities , but they typically do n’t have the rich " friends list " features of a true societal networking site . Some sites do n’t have social networking as their principal finish , but accomplish that function . Last.fm , for instance , is a manner for users to track their music listening use , rate songs and create their own custom stations of streaming euphony to listen to . Because user can also compare their tastes to those of other users , and create profile and champion lists , it also acts as a social networking website .
There are two things that a website must have to be delineate as a social networking site :
1 ) . The power for users to create their own personal profile page , containing whatever entropy they want to deal about themselves .
2 ) . The power for users to link to each other and create a list of " friends " or " contacts " who can view each other ’s profiles and share social networking entropy .
Many social networking web site offer capabilities far beyond the basics , often based on the specific type of networking the land site caters to . For example , a business networking web site might earmark users to post resumes or reference . A photo share-out land site would most likely have sophisticated image galleries construct in , plus way to rate or discourse other people ’s photos . A music - concenter site could reserve user to mechanically upload lists of songs they take heed to on their culture medium players . newfangled applications are expand the capabilities of social networking sites every day , open us more opportunities to interact with them ( and , some might argue , fewer opportunity to get aside from them ) .
Why are some land site more popular than others , and why do some sites slice in popularity after a while ? Anyone who can give you a definite answer to that interrogative sentence is well on the way to becoming a millionaire . Actually , site popularity is defined by many complex broker . It also varies among different universe – some sites are more pop with young users , while some that are not well - know in the United States are popular in other state .
Sometimes a disappearance in popularity can be attribute to a new site with more or more useful features . Sometimes it revolve around social networks themselves . For instance , a single user or grouping of users with a lot of connections can make a switch to a new site and bring all their contacts with them . Since every " friend " has his or her own friend , the ripple effect can finally become tremendous . For lesson , while Friendster has live a decline in American user , it has become hugely popular in the Philippines . Friendster traced the slip to one west coast American user who had many tangency in the Philippines [ source : Woodard Maderazo ] .
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