Social Networks
A social network service focuses on building online communities of people who share interests and/or activities, or who are interested in exploring the interests and activities of others.
The main types of social networking services are those which contain category divisions (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 Social Network Sites:
- Twitter widely used worldwide
- MySpace – mostly used in North America
- LinkedIn – mostly used in North America
Creating your own social network can be done several ways:
- SocialEngine – is a PHP-based white label social network platform. The script includes all of today’s modern social networking features (such as blogs, photo albums, and user groups) while also giving you total control over the appearance and function of your social network, community, or portal.
OpenSocial is a set of common application programming interfaces (APIs) for web-based social network applications, developed by Google along with MySpace and a number of other social networks. It was released November 1, 2007. Applications implementing the OpenSocial APIs will be interoperable with any social network system that supports them, including features on sites such as Hi5.com, MySpace, orkut, Netlog, Sonico.com, Friendster, Ning and Yahoo!
Other social Networks:
- Nexopia – mostly in Canada
- Bebo
- Hi5
- StudiVZ – mostly in Germany
- iWiW – mostly in Hungary
- Tuenti – mostly in Spain
- Decayenne, Tagged, XING , Badoo and Skyrock in parts of Europe
- Orkut and Hi5 in South America and Central America
- Friendster, Mixi, Multiply, Orkut, Wretch, Xiaonei and Cyworld in Asia and the Pacific Islands
There have been some attempts to standardize these services to avoid the need to duplicate entries of friends and interests (see the FOAF standard and the Open Source Initiative), but this has led to some concerns about privacy.
In general, social networking services allow users to create a profile for themselves, and can be broken down into two broad categories: internal social networking (ISN) and external social networking (ESN) sites such as MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and Bebo. Both types can increase the feeling of community among people. An ISN is a closed/private community that consists of a group of people within a company, association, society, education provider and organization or even an “invite only” group created by a user in an ESN. An ESN is open/public and available to all web users to communicate and are designed to attract advertisers. ESN’s can be smaller specialised communities or they can be large generic social networking sites.