Learn some social basics
First of all, let’s make some stuff clear to everyone. With this Social Networking buzz arround, it can get a bit hard to understand everything and what goes where…
Social Networking websites (what is)
They are websites where people can register for a user account, then fill up personnal information that will be mostly visible to the public. From their account, users can add medias like photos and videos to share and to show to their friends. Some website also have caldendars, forums, marketplaces etc, where users can alos contribute and use. We can fit into this category the MicroBlogging websites. Leaders are Facebook, MySpace, Twitter…
Professional Networking (what is)
Clos eto be the same as Social Networking, these websites are more professional approach than making friends and sharing personal stuff. Mostly making business buddys ands partners for futur or passed co-working. You will find LinkedIn and Plaxo as leaders…
Social Bookmarking sites (what is)
They are websites where people can register for an account, add some info into their profile, and then start adding and sharing some website URLs bookmarks to the community and the world. Digg is one the those leaders.
Let’s have a moment here to have this in the words of Wikipedia :
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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.
Social network analysis views social relationships in terms of network theory about nodes and ties.Nodes are the individual actors within the networks, and ties are the relationships between the actors. The resulting graph-based structures are often very complex. There can be many kinds of ties between the nodes. Research in a number of academic fields has shown that social networks operate on many levels, from families up to the level of nations, and play a critical role in determining the way problems are solved, organizations are run, and the degree to which individuals succeed in achieving their goals.
In its simplest form, a social network is a map of all of the relevant ties between the nodes being studied. The network can also be used to determine the social capital of individual actors. These concepts are often displayed in a social network diagram, where nodes are the points and ties are the lines.
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A social network service focuses on building online communities of people who share interests and/or activities, or who are interested in exploring the interests and activities of others. Most social network services 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.
While it could be said that email and websites have most of the essential elements of social network services, the idea of proprietary encapsulated services has gained 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 Facebookwidely used worldwide; MySpace, Twitter and LinkedIn being the most widely used in North America;[1]Nexopia (mostly in Canada);[2] Bebo,[3] Hi5, MySpace, StudiVZ (mostly in Germany), Decayenne, Tagged,XING;[4], Badoo[5] and Skyrock in parts of Europe;[6] Orkut and Hi5 in South America and Central America;[7] and Friendster, Multiply, Orkut, Wretch, Xiaonei and Cyworld in Asia and the Pacific Islands.
There have been some attempts to standardize these services to avoid the need to duplicate entries of friends and interests (see the FOAFstandard and the Open Source Initiative), but this has led to some concerns about privacy.
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A virtual community, e-community or online community is a group of people that primarily interact via communication media such asnewsletters, telephone, email, internet social network service or instant messages rather than face to face, for social, professional, educational or other purposes. If the mechanism is a computer network, it is called an online community. Virtual and online communities have also become a supplemental form of communication between people who know each other primarily in real life. Many means are used in social software separately or in combination, including text-based chatrooms and forums that use voice, video text or avatars. Significant socio-technical change may have resulted from the proliferation of such Internet-based social networks.
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Social software encompasses a range of software systems that allow users to interact and share data. This computer-mediated communication has become very popular with social sites like MySpace and Facebook, media sites like Flickr and YouTube as well as commercial sites like Amazon.com and eBay. Many of these applications share characteristics like open APIs, service-oriented design and the ability to upload data and media. The terms Web 2.0 and (for large-business applications) Enterprise 2.0 are also used to describe this style of software.
The more specific terms collaborative software and groupware are usually applied narrowly to software that enables collaborative work. Distinctions among usage of the terms “social”, “trusted” and “collaborative” are in the applications or uses, not the tools themselves, although some tools are used only rarely for collaborative work.
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Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the Internet as a platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform.[4]
