Any article or conversation about Web 2.0 (of which the 23 Things comprise a part) will inevitably stress the newly acknowledged primacy of the experience of the Web for the user. And the vehicle for converting the user’s experience from that of a solitary, passive viewer (as in what might be called Web 1.0) to one of rich, dynamic content and broad, interactive participation is social networking.
You’ve heard this new site and that new service referred to this way, but what is 'social networking'? The term is older than you might assume, originating not in the digital age but in the mid-20th century. Coined by sociologists, social networks were defined as ‘a map of the relationships between individuals, indicating the ways in which they are connected through various social familiarities’. Web 2.0 has extended this concept to allow Web users to create their own social networks, sharing experiences and events, communication, news, photographs, music, video, and other content with not only their real-world family and friends but also the virtual world of ‘friends’ on-line with whom they share interests.
The many social networking sites can be divided basically into two sets. Generic networks exist primarily to help friends keep in touch. These sites, such as MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, and Ning, provide users the freedom to add pictures, slideshows, audio and video excerpts, and even custom designs. Another group of social networking sites might be described as ‘specific’—that is, they concentrate on users’ specific common interests such as video (YouTube), photography (Flickr), music (last.fm), or books (Library Thing). The features offered by these ‘specific’ sites tend to be much more geared toward the nature of their content, and are often not as malleable as their 'generic' cousins. This may not be a bad thing, judging from some of the custom ‘designs’ one will see in, for instance, MySpace.
In this exercise, we’ll look into some of the most popular generic social networking sites, in preparation for Thing #7, in which you’ll set up your own MySpace page. Go to the linked names for each of these sites and view the designs of some of their users’ profile pages, as well as the groups hosted. Although we'll use MySpace for the next exercise, you may find one of the other networks strikes your fancy for personal use.
MySpace
By far the most popular of the social networking sites, boasting over 180 million users, MySpace has entered the ranks of cultural phenomena. Alexa Internet, which gauges Web traffic, currently lists MySpace as the world’s sixth-most-popular English-language Web site. Users create pages that typically sport personal profiles, blogs, photos, music, and videos. Page designs may be altered—there are countless Web sites offering custom coding aimed at MySpace users, often to chaotic effect. Users create networks by adding friends to their accounts and requesting that other users do the same for them. Groups are also created for friends with common interests. MySpace has a musical element as well, as many amateur, unsigned, and even well-known bands maintain pages that serve as de facto fan sites, affording communication between bands and their supporters, and featuring up to five tunes to which users can listen (and sometimes download).
Facebook
Facebook bills itself as ‘a social utility that connects people with friends and others who work, study and live around them. People use Facebook to keep up with friends, upload an unlimited number of photos, share links and videos, and learn more about the people they meet.’ Facebook in fact outstrips even photo-sharing site Flickr in users of its photo section. Originally restricted to university and college students, then expanded to include high-schoolers, Facebook membership is now open to everyone, and hosts over 28 million users. The second-most-visited social networking site in the US, Facebook is the dominant such site in Canada, Norway, South Africa, and much of the Middle East.
Ning
Unlike the other major social networking services, Ning distinguishes itself by focusing on the creation of groups and offering the user a fully customisable platform on which to ‘create your own social network for anything.’ Employing tags to describe these networks, users find groups with which they have an affinity, with less emphasis than the other sites on finding individual friends.
Other social networking sites
Although MySpace dominates the field in the US, Mexico, Australia, and southern Europe, there are other social networking sites that actually have more users internationally than US runner-up Facebook.
Worldwide, the site with the second-greatest number of users is Google’s Orkut. Most popular in Brazil and South Asia, it is approaching 60 million users. Not far behind Orkut, San Francisco-based Hi5 has 50 million users and is most popular in Central America and the Andean countries, and also Portugal, Tunisia, and Mongolia. Bebo, based in San Francisco as well, is the number one social networking site in Ireland and New Zealand, and has overtaken MySpace in the UK. And Friendster, probably the first social networking site you heard of back a few years ago, is still alive and well and the most popular site in Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines, with nearly 30 million users.
So if you’d like to bring an international aspect to your social networking, one of these sites is certain to please.
Further reading
"The Social Networking Faceoff" in Read/Write Web
Wikipedia’s List of social networking websites (with brief thematic descriptions and user counts)
The world map of social networks in Valleywag
Alexa traffic ranking of the Web’s top 500 sites
Learning 2.0 is a discovery learning program created by Helene Blowers. Content and style for the UCSC Library's program has been borrowed and duplicated with permission.