SOCIAL NETWORKING

Social Networking mainly spotlights on structuring online communities of people who share interests and/or activities, or who are interested in exploring the interests and activities of others. Most social networks are web based and provide a variety of ways for users to interact, such as e-mail and instant messaging services.

Social networking has encouraged new ways to communicate and share information. Social networking websites are being used regularly by millions of people. Apart from that Social Networking, these days, are highly appreciated for business promotion.

While it could be said that email and websites have most of the essential elements of social networks, the idea of proprietary summarized services has added popular uptake recently.

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 methods now combine many of these, with Facebook widely used worldwide; MySpace, Twitter and LinkedIn being the most widely used in North America; Nexopia (mostly in Canada); Bebo, Hi5, MySpace, dol2day (mostly in Germany), Tagged, XING; and Skyrock in parts of Europe; Orkut and Hi5 in South America and Central America; and Friendster, Multiply, Orkut, Xiaonei and Cyworld in Asia and the Pacific Islands.

There have been some efforts to regulate 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. 
 
An increasing number of business commentators are becoming interested in studying Facebook and other social networking tools. Social science researchers have begun to investigate what the impact of this might be on society as well as on businesses all round the globe. Typical articles have investigated issues such as Identity, Privacy, E-learning, Social capital and Teenage use.

A special issue of the Journal for Computer-Mediated Communications was dedicated to studies of social network sites. Included in this issue is an introduction to social network sites.

A 2008 book published by Forrester Research, Inc. titled Groundswell builds on a 2006 Forrester Report about social computing and used the term "groundswell" to refer to "a spontaneous movement of people using online tools to connect, take charge of their own experience, and get what they need-information, support, ideas, products, and bargaining power--from each other."