Social Networks bring together communities of people with common interests and what keeps them together is sharing their experiences.Online Social Networking Services have created new ways to communicate and share information. They assist people in either managing their existing set of friends or business contacts online, or in using referrals to find new ones. Increasingly they allow users to share their experiences using words, pictures and/or videos.
Below we list the most common services in use today and will update as new services gain tractiont:
Bebo
Launched: July 2005
Founder: Michael and Xochi Birch
Owner: AOL
Proposition: Blog early, blog often
Features: users can blog, listen to music, and share information, photos, and videos with others. Bebo Bands (now generalised to Bebo Groups) allows artists or groups to upload unlimited music and music content (like videos or albums) to the site. Users can download music from Bebo, which now connects its users directly to the iTunes store. Bebo also allows users to search and view a variety of videos that members have uploaded to the site as well.
Audience: School and college students
Launched: Early 2004
Founder: Mark Zuckerberg launched The Facebook, a social network that was at the time exclusively for Harvard students
Proposition: users may choose to join one or more networks, organised by city, workplace, school, and region which help users connect with other members of this network
Features: Users can create profiles including photos and lists of personal interests, exchange private or public messages, and join groups of friends. Does not allow users to customise their pages. The Wall is a space on every user's profile page where the user posts messages, photos and videos friends can reciprocate by posting messages for the user to see. A news feed appears on every user's homepage and highlights information including profile changes, posts, upcoming events, and birthdays related to the user's friends.
Platform: launched the Facebook Platform on May 24, 2007 providing an API for software developers to build applications to interact with core Facebook features.
Audience: anyone with an email address - 50 million active users. 11% of users are over the age of 35, and the fastest growing demographic is users over 30.
Flickr
Launched: 2004
Founder: Vancouver-based Ludicorp
Owner: Yahoo!
Proposition: share personal photographs and videos and provides both private and public image storage
Features: largest photography social networking site on the Internet which allows users to organise their photos into sets and uses tags allowing searchers to find images related to particular topics
Platform: comprehensive web-service API that allows programmers to create applications
Audience: has more than 2 billion photographs online, with 3 million to 5 million new photographs added daily
Launched: 2002
Founder: Reid Hoffman
Owner: Founders and various VC companies
Proposition: purpose of the site is to allow registered users to maintain a list of contact details of people they know and trust in business It takes advantage of the "six degrees of separation" concept first proposed by Stanley Milgram in the 1960s, such that any given user is at most just six personal connections away from any other business person.
Features: professional networking site that allows members to create business contacts, search for jobs, and find potential clients. Individuals have the ability to create their own professional profile that can be viewed by others in their network, and also view the profiles of their own contacts.
Audience: One of the first business-oriented social networking companiescurrently supporting more than 30 million registered users across 150 industries
MySpace
Launched: 2003Founder: Tom Anderson
Owner: News Corporation
Proposition: lets friends share, message and stay connected
Features: The site lets you browse profiles, blog, email and join groups. MySpace also has videos, music and classifieds. Music artists can add friends, stream singles, and sell music, a concoction that has led to extremely viral success for artists such as Lily Allen and M.I.A. Allows users to customise their profiles using HTML and CSS
Audience: teenagers and adults internationally.
Plaxo
Launched: July 2005
Founders: Sean Parker (Napster co-founder), Todd Masonis and Cameron Ring
Owner: Private
Proposition:Online Address Book
Features:Provides automatic updating of contact information. Users and their contacts store their information on Plaxo's servers. When this information is edited by the user, the changes appear in the address books of all those who listed the account changer in their own books. Once contacts are stored in the central location, it is possible to list connections between contacts and access the address book from anywhere.
Audience:
Second Life
Launched: June 23, 2003
Founder: Linden Lab
Owner: Private
Proposition:A Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG) but is more of a social and creative outlet than an arena for combat.
Features: A free free client programme called the Second Life Viewer enables its users, called Residents, to interact with each other through avatars. Residents can explore, meet other residents, socialize, participate in individual and group activities, and create and trade virtual property and services with one another, or travel throughout the world, which residents refer to as the grid.
Audience: 18+. Many companies, such as Sears and Dell, have seen Second Life as a new way to reach consumers, and have established a presence there. It is also being used increasingly as an alternative method of teleconferencing.
Launched: July 2005
Founder: Obvious
Owner:
Proposition:A microblogging platform
Features:users send and read short (under 140 characters) text-based posts --called tweets--to subscribers (known as followers) of a given person's twitter feed. Tweets are are displayed on the user's profile page and delivered to other users who have subscribed to them . Senders can restrict delivery to those in their circle of friends or, by default, allow anybody to access them. Users can send and receive tweets via the Twitter website, SMS or external applications. The service is free to use over the Internet, but using SMS may incur phone service provider fees.
Audience:In November 2008, Jeremiah Owyang of Forrester Research estimated that Twitter had 4-5 million users. In March 2009, a Nielsen.com blog ranked Twitter as the fastest growing site in the Member Communities category for February 2009. Twitter had a growth of 1382%.
YouTube
Launched: February 2005
Founder: Chad Hurley, Jawed Karim and Steve Chen, former PayPal employees
Owner: Google
Proposition:Video sharing
Features:Unregistered users can watch videos, registered users can upload an unlimited number of videos and comment on any video. Video clips can also be shared using supplied Flash code on other websites.
Audience: The wide range of topics covered by YouTube has turned video sharing into one of the most important parts of Internet culture.
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