Essay on Social Networking Sites

Es assert on brotherly Ne cardinalrking Sites Social networking orders peaked(p) the year 2007. These sites encouraged online companionable connections. Early sites such as SixDegrees. com and Fri completester anyowed sight to manage a list of friends. superstar drawback to these sites was that they did not offer users the qualification to publish content like blogs. Social networking sites begin with a chemical group of founders sending kayoed messages to friends to join the network. In turn the friends send out messages to their friends, and the network grows. When members join the network, they create a profile.Depending on the site, users can produce their profile to reflect their interests. They also begin to have contact with friends, acquaintances, and strangers. Founded in 2002, Friendster used the model of friends inviting friends to join in order to grow its network. It readily signed on millions of users. Unfortunately, as the site grew larger, technical issues surfaced. Painfully opposed servers do it difficult for users to move around the site. Additionally, management enforced set policies on fake profiles. These false profiles, or fakesters, as they were known, were deleted by the site.This get turned off users. Eventually, Friendster began to lose members in the get together States. Fellow networking site SixDegrees. com closed its doors after the dot-com bust in 2000. Within a few years, these early accessible networking sites found their popularity declining. At the alike(p) time, a new kindly networking site called MySpace was beginning to take off. THE RISE OF MYSPACE MySpace brought unitedly the companionable features of networking sites and the publishing capabilities of blogs. The combination of the two shits struck a nucleotide run with teens. Young slew were looking for a more neighborly way to blog.MySpace provided the solution. In 2003 Tom Anderson and Chris DeWolfe launched MySpace in Santa Monica, Californ ia. As music fans, the match designed the site as a place to promote local anaesthetic music acts. They also treasured to be able to connect with different fans and friends. On MySpace, users created a Web page with a personal profile. then(prenominal) they invited other users to construct their friends. According to DeWolfe, the bands were a great marketing tool in the beginning. He said All these creative pile became ambassadors for MySpace by using us as their de facto promotional platform.People like to talk astir(predicate) music, so the bands set up a natural environment to communicate. 1 Anderson and DeWolfe were determined to keep MySpace an open site. Anyone could join the community, browse profiles, and post whatsoever they wanted. User control was one of their founding principles. It also made sign financing hard to find. According to Anderson Wed get calls from investor types who wanted to meet us. They would say Your site isnt professional. Why do you let user s control the pages? Theyre so queasy 2 In the meantime MySpace continued to sign mass up. Teens and four-year-old adults loved the site.They flocked to create their own profiles. The ability to customize pages, load music, and share videos added to the MySpace appeal. Unlike other early social networking sites, MySpace gave users a media-rich experience. Users could channel themselves on their Web page by adding music and video coiffures. At the kindred time, they could socialize with friends. MySpace made social contact easier with tools such as e-mail, scuttlebutt posts, chat rooms, buddy lists, discussion boards, and instant messaging. MySpace brought together the ability to express oneself and to socialize in one place.The timing was perfect. Over the next two years, MySpace grew at a tremendous pace. The sites success brought attention from investors. Rupert Murdoch, famous for his media empire, wanted to buy MySpace. Murdoch had interests in television, film, newspape rs, publishing, and the Internet. In 2005 Murdoch purchased MySpace for an amazing $580 million. By early 2008 MySpace had great(p) to a mind-blowing 110 million diligent users. It signed an fair of thirty thousand people up every day. One in four Americans was on MySpace. The Web site had become the giant among social networking sites.It was the most trafficked site on the Internet. MySpaces influence traveled outside of the United States. The company built a local presence in oer twenty international territories. MySpace could be found in places such as the United Kingdom, Japan, Australia, and Latin America. In a few short years, MySpace had become a worldwide cultural phenomenon. SOCIAL NETWORKING BEYOND MYSPACE The success of MySpace in the social networking arena spurred the development and redesign of many other online social networks. Some sites appealed to a general audience.Others, such as Black Planet, LinkedIn, and MyChurch, desire to serve a niche market. Facebook w as one site that emerged as an substitute to MySpace. In February 2004 Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook. The site began as a closed network for college students. unkindly networks only allow users to join if they meet current criteria. In contrast, sites such as MySpace and Friendster were open social networking sites. Anyone could sign up for an account. Open and closed social networks have advantages and disadvantages. Open networks foster interaction betwixt adults and teens.Parents can check up on their teens profile and sink if they are comfortable with their childs online image. On the other hand, open access mover that profiles are completely public and can quarter unwanted attention. Closed networks are generally smaller. As such, there is a greater play a user will know other members both online and offline. scarcely a closed network blocks parents from reading their teen or college students profile. being closed also encumbers a social networks ability to grow and attract new users. As a closed college network, Facebook grew by adding more colleges to its network.By the end of 2004, Facebook had almost 1 million active users. As Facebooks popularity grew, it expanded beyond colleges to high school and international school users. At this point, however, the site was suave restricted to a limited pool of student users. In 2006 Facebook made a pivotal decision. It opened the network to the general public, expanding beyond its skipper student base. By May 2008 Facebook boasted over 70 million active users. At that time, it was the second-most trafficked social networking site behind MySpace and the sixth-most trafficked site on the Web.As an alternative to MySpace, Facebooks social network gained popularity with business professionals and colleagues. Facebooks purpose was to help users connect online with people that they already knew offline. Unlike the wild-looking pages found on MySpace, Facebook promoted a clean, order ly online experience. VIDEO- AND PHOTO-SHARING SITES Online social networking evolved into a full multimedia experience with the arrival of video- and photo-sharing Web sites. Users could beam visual content to share with friends and other users. Photo-sharing sites such as Flickr enabled users to transfer digital photos online to share with others.Users decided whether to share their photos publicly or limit access to private groups. Users could also use the sites features to organize and store pictures and video. One of the most popular video-sharing Web sites was YouTube. The site, founded in 2005, used Adobe fanfare technology to display clips from movies and television, music videos, and video blogs. Users could upload, share, and view video clip topics from the latest movies to funny moments captured on film. Not everyone wanted to create a profile, write a blog, or upload pictures and video.Other social networking tools allowed these users to participate online. E-mails d isplace messages to a friends electronic mailbox. Instant messaging was a real-time colloquy between two people online at the same time. Comment measure allowed users to interact and talk about a friends blog, profile, or pictures. Even online gambling was a form of social networking, allowing players to meet other people with connatural interests online. WHY IS ONLINE SOCIAL NETWORKING SO POPULAR? The popularity of online social networking has prompted researchers to seek the similarities between online social networks and tribal societies.According to Lance Strate, a communications professor at Fordham University, social networks appeal to people because they feel more like talking than writing. Orality is the base of all human experience, said Strate. We evolved with speech. We didnt evolve with writing. 3 Irwin Chen, an t to each oneer at Parsons design school, is developing a new course to explore oral culture online. He agrees with Strate. Orality is participatory, interac tive, communal and focused on the present, he says. The Web is all of these things. 4 Michael Wesch teaches cultural anthropology at Kansas State University.He study how people form social relationships while living with a population in Papua New Guinea. He compared the tribe to online social networking. In tribal cultures, your identity is completely wrapped up in the question of how people know you, he said. When you look at Facebook, you can see the same pattern at work people projecting their identities by demonstrating their relationships to each other. You define yourself in terms of who your friends are. 5 Despite the connections between social networks and tribal cultures, significant differences exist.In tribal societies relationships form through face-to-face contact. Social networks allow users to hide behind a computer screen. Tribal societies spread over formal rituals. Social networks value a casual approach to relationships. Millions of people across the world have joined online social networks. Perhaps their popularity stems from our native desire to be part of a community. According to Strate, social networking fulfills our motivating to be recognized as human beings, and as members of a community. We all want to be told You exist. 6