What is a Social Network?
Wikipedia defines social networks as follows: “A social network is a social structure made of individuals (or organizations) called "nodes," which are tied (connected) by one or more specific types of interdependency, such as friendship, kinship, common interest, financial exchange, dislike, sexual relationships, or relationships of beliefs, knowledge or prestige”.
There’s also a movie called “The Social Network” coming up this year and that has to do with the founding of Facebook. This movie will be released on the 15th of October 2010 and for more information one can read the film database at: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1285016/
Examples of Social Networks/services, etc.
Some examples of social network sites are: MySpace, Facebook, Badoo, Bebo, Flixster, Flickr, Linkedin, LunarStorm, Meetup.com, Ning, Twitter, etc.
The following are some definitions found at Wikipedia:
• Bebo
“Bebo is an acronym for "Blog early, blog often", is a social networking website, founded in January 2005. Wikipedia also informs the following: “On the 7th of April 2010, AOL announced that they are planning to sell the website or shut it down.[19] This was mainly due to the falling numbers of unique users, Bebo users were moving to the growing Facebook and to MySpace”.
• Flixster
“Flixster is a social movie site allowing users to share movie ratings, discover new movies and meet others with similar movie taste. The site is based in San Francisco, CA and was founded by Joe Greenstein in 2007. Flixster is the parent of website Rotten Tomatoes since January 2010”.
• Flickr
“Flickr is an image and video hosting website, web services suite, and online community. In addition to being a popular website for users to share and embed personal photographs, the service is widely used by bloggers to host images that they embed in blogs and social media.”
• Linkedin
“LinkedIn (pronounced /ˌlɪŋkt.ˈɪn/) is a business-oriented social networking site. Founded in December 2002 and launched in May 2003, it is mainly used for professional networking”.
• Lunarstorm
“LunarStorm, in Swedish often shortened to Lunar, is a commercial, advertisement financed Swedish social networking website for teenagers, of which was also available in the UK before 2007. "LunarStorm" is operated by a company called LunarWorks”
• Meetup.com
“Meetup.com (also called Meetup) is an online social networking portal that facilitates offline group meetings in various localities around the world. Meetup allows members to find and join groups unified by a common interest, such as politics, books, games, movies, health, pets, careers or hobbies”.
• Ning
“Ning is an online platform for people to create their own social networks, launched in October 2005. Ning was co-founded by Marc Andreessen and Gina Bianchini”.
• Twitter
“Twitter is a social networking and microblogging 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. Senders can restrict delivery to those in their circle of friends or, by default, allow open access. Since late 2009, users can follow lists of authors instead of following individual authors. All users can send and receive tweets via the Twitter website ”,
Who should use social networks?
• From the perspective of users.
Everybody should use social networks but there are restrictions to youngsters below 13-14 years old (minimum age to access most of the social network sites).
• From the perspective of companies and authorities.
Companies that want to market their products or authorities that want to publish information on conferences, etc.
What are the positive sides with social networks in the form of websites, services, and tools?
• From the user’s perspective.
There are some social network sites like Linkedin that help people find a job. Among these are: Plaxo (http://www.plaxo.com/ ) which is integrated with Comcast's Simple Hired (http://www.simplyhired.com/), Jobster (http://www.jobster.com/ ), and Myworkster (http://www.myworkster.com/).
Even Youtube (http://www.youtube.com/) is being used to look for a job. People introduce themselves by video and talk about their working experience.
• From the perspective of companies and authorities.
Social networking is used nowadays even for work, in other words, recruiters look for interesting candidates for certain positions at Facebook for example. This means that before people thought that if you had a website at Facebook it was only for the purpose of finding friends.
On the 15th of April there was an article published in”Metro” that talked about a person who found his personnel thanks to Youtube . See link: http://www.metro.se/2010/04/14/53949/simon-hittar-sin-personal-pa-youtube/
Social Media
Definition of Social Media at Wikipedia:
“Andreas Kaplan and Michael Haenlein define social media as "a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0, and that allow the creation and exchange of user-generated content[1]. Businesses also refer to social media as user-generated content (UGC) or consumer-generated media (CGM). Social media utilization is believed to be a driving force in defining the current period as the Attention Age.”
The book “The Social Media Marketing Book” written by Dan Zarella (published by O’Reilly in 2010) states the following:
“IBM owns more than 100 different blogs, a dozen islands in the virtual world of Second Life, several official Twitter accounts, and a popular forum called developerWorks. It publishes a machinima series (a cartoon video made in Second Life) on YouTube, and several employees upload presentations to the media-sharing site SlideShare.”
This gives a clear idea of the power of social media. Social media are being used more and more by companies so one has to be careful with the information that is published.
Dan Zarella also states another example of the power of social media:
“U.S. President Barack Obama has been called the first social media president, and a strong argument could be made for the label. As a candidate, he had one of the most popular Twitter accounts and Facebook pages, and his website contained a social media section where his supporters could create profiles and connect with each other. The campaign was also present on YouTube, Flickr, LinkedIn, MySpace, and Second Life.”
He also adds that “social media is a great equalizer: big brands can be outsmarted without making huge investments, and small brands can make big names for themselves.”
Mashable shows an interesting video by Socialnomics author Erik Qualman and shows some statistics about the growth of social media. See link: http://mashable.com/2010/05/07/social-media-stats-video/
What are the negative sides with social networks in the form of websites, services and tools?
• From the user’s perspective
There are negative sides with social networks as well. People have lost their jobs because they have written something negative about their job on their blog or website.
The website About.com published an interesting article with lots of tips on job search via social networks called “To Blog or Not to Blog - How Blogging and Social Networking Can Impact Your Job Search”. See link: http://jobsearch.about.com/od/jobsearchblogs/a/jobsearchblog.htm
An organization called WorkSmart published an article with some key questions on the usage of social networking at work. See link: http://www.worksmart.org.uk/rights/socialnetworking
Another negative side is that people are not aware of privacy management, in other words, how to set the privacy settings.
In Facebook one can include the following information: Basic information, contact information, personal information, pictures, friends, wall (messages posted on the profile which friends can read), and minifeed/newsfeed. Users can decide on which information can be seen for example only by friends. There are privacy-related profiles one can select: public profiles (viewed by everybody in the user’s network but some information can still be limited by the user), private profiles (viewed only by user’s friends), search profile (profile information seen when one does a search from separate networks). In the latter case these users from separate networks can view full name, the pictures in the profile, the friends list and networks.
Users are given the possibility of deciding by themselves what privacy setting they will choose. The default settings make the profile open to everybody in the network. On the other hand, not all sites clearly explain these privacy settings.
According to the research made by Ofcom:
“
Several areas of potentially risky behaviour are suggested by the qualitative and/or quantitative research. These include:
• leaving privacy settings as default ‘open’ (Ofcom Social Networking qualitative research)
• giving out sensitive personal information, photographs and other content (Ofcom social networking sites research/Get Safe Online Report 2007). This included details such as their phone number, home address or email address. Younger adults are even more likely to do this, with 34% of 16-24 year olds willingly posting this information;
• posting content (especially photos) that could be reputationally damaging (Ofcom Social Networking qualitative research). Examples ranged from posting provocative photos to photographs of teachers drinking and smoking being seen by their pupils and pupils’ parents; and
• contacting people they didn’t know (and/or didn’t know well) online/accepting”
• From the perspective of the companies and authorities
Social networks like Myspace and Facebook are used by law enforcement and companies to investigate information about the users. Stalking and identity thefts are other dangers users can face. User’s do not have much knowledge on privacy management at social networks.
From the perspective of companies social networks worry them because they don’t know how to control the time their employees spend on their social networks privately. Some companies have set some rules.
Sources
Wikipedia accessed on 9 April 2010.
Ofcom - Office of Communications, (research published 2 April 2008) “Social Networking – A quantitative and qualitative research report into attitudes, behaviours and use”.
Strater, Katherine and Richard, Heather, “Strategies and Struggles with Privacy in an Online Social Networking Community”, Department of Psychology, Department of Software and Information Systems Universit
