Social Networking
From IT Jalakam - Unofficial IT syllabus for grade 10 students
Definition (Wikipedia)
A social network is a social structure made of nodes (which are generally individuals or organizations) that are tied by one or more specific types of interdependency, such as friendship, kinship, financial exchange, dislike, sexual relationships, or relationships of beliefs, knowledge or prestige.
Well in simple words it's a place to meet other people. It's a great way to reunite with old school/college friends, and keep in touch with family/relatives/friends. Photos, videos and other things can be shared with friends.
The social networking concept really took off with the success of Google's Orkut.
How it works:
You sign up as an individual.
Look for friends and request for a connection.
They accept, a connection is made. This is the primary link.
You are also meet their friends, this is a secondary link.
You go on meeting people and forming primary, secondary, tertiary, etc level connections, till you are surrounded in a spiders web like network
Some Social Networking Sites
Orkut is a free-access social networking service owned and operated by Google. The service is designed to help users meet new friends and maintain existing relationships. The website is named after its creator, Google employee Orkut Büyükkökten.
Facebook is a global social networking website that is operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. Users can add friends and send them messages, and update their personal profiles to notify friends about themselves. Additionally, users can join networks organized by city, workplace, school, and region. The website's name stems from the colloquial name of books given at the start of the academic year by university administrations with the intention of helping students get to know each other better.
MySpace is a social networking website. Its headquarters are in Beverly Hills, California, USA, where it shares an office building with its immediate owner, Fox Interactive Media, which is owned by News Corporation.
Hi5 is a social networking website. The company was founded in 2003 by Ramu Yalamanchi who is also the current CEO. As of January 2009, Hi5 claims to have over 60 million active members.
Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read messages known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the author's profile page and delivered to the author's subscribers who are known as followers.
LinkedIn is a business-oriented social networking site founded in December 2002 and launched in May 2003 mainly used for professional networking. As of July 2009, it had more than 43 million registered users, spanning 170 industries.
