Complete 8 page APA formatted essay: Social Networking Site.Download file to see previous pages As our social network continues to grow, we find it difficult to manage. We forget some of our close fri

Complete 8 page APA formatted essay: Social Networking Site.

Download file to see previous pages

As our social network continues to grow, we find it difficult to manage. We forget some of our close friends at school. We lose connections with important people whom we like to keep in constant touch. Isn't it nice if we have some kind of a computer system to help us keep track of our personal network Social networking sites do just that. In addition to being a tool to manage your existing relationships, they also help you to build new relationships. With the popularity of the World Wide Web and the increased penetration of Internet access, a number of such services now exist.

Chapter 2 will present the findings from research in to existing social networking sites such as MySpace (www.myspace.com) and Facebook (www.facebook.com). Variety of user experience and the tools which enable individuals to be online publishers will be explored in chapters 3 and 4 respectively. Chapter 5 will focus on the features of uconnect which will make it special. A comparison of the existing sites will be presented in chapter 6 followed by a summary of the report in chapter 7.

History of social networking on the Internet goes back to as much as late 1970s. Community interactions services such as Usenet were among the first networking services to operate. [2] Though it's predominantly a textual medium, Usenet is still in widespread use among various interest groups such as academic, technical, social and much more. Site such as Classmates.com, SixDegrees.com and Epinions.com were developed in the mid to late 90s. [2]

Sites with much more rich multimedia capabilities became popular after the turn of the new millennium. Out of these sites MySpace and Facebook stand out today as the two most popular social networking sites. [3] However, there are other popular sites such as Bebo, Xanga, Orkut, Friendster, Hi5, Blogger and Window Live Spaces.

Features offered commonly are the ability to set up personal profiles, customizing the profile pages to suit your styles, setting up blogs, instant messaging, sending of invitations to friends and photo and video uploading.

Youtube is another social networking site which offers a different type of service. Its main focus is letting people share multimedia (primarily video) content. People upload content varying from home made fun movies to sports events to incidents that capture news highlights day to day. Youtube calls the profiles as "Channels". As the name suggest, people can broadcast their own video channel over Youtube to a worldwide audience.

Social networking sites exhibit a come and go type of existence. According to an analysis published by the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, these sites are "unusually vulnerable to the next 'new new' thing. As quickly as users flock to one trendy Internet site, they can just as quickly move on to another, with no advance warning". [4] This is further evident in the decision of Yahoo to shut down its social networking arm, Yahoo 360o, recently. [5] Also, there is an element of hype around the potential value of these sites.