Social Network Service, страница 2

One popular use for this new technology is social networking between businesses. Companies have found that social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter are great ways to build their brand image. According to Jody Nimetz, author of Marketing Jive, there are five major uses for businesses and social media: to create brand awareness, as an online reputation management tool, for recruiting, to learn about new technologies and competitors, and as a lead gen tool to intercept potential prospects. These companies are able to drive traffic to their own online sites while encouraging their consumers and clients to have discussions on how to improve or change products or services.

One other use that is being discussed is the use of Social Networks in the Science communities. Julia Porter Liebeskind et al. have published a study on how New Biotechnology Firms are using social networking sites to share exchanges in scientific knowledge. They state in their study that by sharing information and knowledge with one another, they are able to "increase both their learning and their flexibility in ways that would not be possible within a self-contained hierarchical organization." Social networking is allowing scientific groups to expand their knowledge base and share ideas, and without these new means of communicating their theories might become "isolated and irrelevant".

Social networks are also being used by teachers and students as a communication tool. Because many students are already using a wide-range of social networking sites, teachers have begun to familiarize themselves with this trend and are now using it to their advantage. Teachers and professors are doing everything from creating chat-room forums and groups to extend classroom discussion to posting assignments, tests and quizzes, to assisting with homework outside of the classroom setting. Social networks are also being used to foster teacher-parent communication. These sites make it possible and more convenient for parents to ask questions and voice concerns without having to meet face-to-face.

Social networks are being used by activists as a means of low-cost grassroots organizing. Extensive use of an array of social networking sites enabled organizers of the 2009 National Equality Marchto mobilize an estimated 200,000 participants to march on Washington with a cost savings of up to 85% per participant over previous methods.

The use of online social networks by libraries is also an increasingly prevalent and growing tool that is being used to communicate with more potential library users, as well as extending the services provided by individual libraries.

A final rise in social network use is being driven by college students using the services to network with professionals for internship and job opportunities. Many studies have been done on the effectiveness of networking online in a college setting, and one notable one is by Phipps Arabie and Yoram Wind published in Advances in Social Network Analysis.

7. Real social networking services

Here is just top 15 most popular social networking websites in May 2011:

1. facebook

2. twitter

3. MySpace

4. Linkedin

Ning

Tagged

hi5

1. myyearbook

Meetup

bebo

mylife

friendster

myHeritage

Multiply

1. orkut

In December 2010, Time Magazine named Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg as person of the year and the film “The Social Network” was cut about the origin of Facebook.

8. Why social networks are so popular?

First of all, it should be said about the audience of social network. There must be certain insight what it requires.

Social networkers differ in their attitudes to social networking sites and in their behavior while using them. Ofcom’s qualitative research indicates that site users tend to fall into five distinct groups based on their behaviours and attitudes. These are:

• Alpha Socialisers – (a minority) people who used sites in intense short bursts to flirt, meet new people, and be entertained.

• Attention Seekers – (some) people who craved attention and comments from others, often by posting photos and customising their profiles.

• Followers – (many) people who joined sites to keep up with what their peers were doing.

• Faithfuls – (many) people who typically used social networking sites to rekindle old friendships, often from school or university.

• Functionals – (a minority) people who tended to be single-minded in using sites for a particular purpose.

And non-users also appear to fall into distinct groups; these groups are based on their reasons for not using social networking sites:

• Concerned about safety – people concerned about safety online, in particular making personal details available online.

• Technically inexperienced – people who lack confidence in using the internet and computers.

• Intellectual rejecters – people who have no interest in social networking sites and see them as a waste of time.

It’s obviously that reasons for usage/non usage don’t change through ages, so all social requests are to be done in any social network site, they compose base. The building blocks of social networking sites are the individual members’ profiles. (Exceptions are such original sites as Twitter, and social nets that were created for people with similar interests, e.g. LastFM, habrahabr, etc.) All other services, games, music, videos, photo-posting geolocation-based abilities, sites realize to make them competitive. And, of course, userability is the most meaningful aspect.

Office of communications investigated the problem and here are the results:

Home internet penetration has increased as have connection speeds

It is likely that increasing home internet access facilitates the use of social networking sites. Although potential users often have alternative points of internet access (for example at school or at work), they are less likely to be subject to restrictions on using social networking sites at home. Furthermore, increased connection speeds and the wider availability of broadband enable richer use of the internet, including uploading as well as viewing content. Whereas social networking site profiles were previously simple and text-based, they can now support images, site customisation, audio and even video content.

Increasing ICT confidence

There are an increasing number of people who have basic computer and internet skills and the confidence to use them. These people are much more likely to take to new online communication technology such as social networking sites.

User-friendly programmes

In the past, setting up one’s own blog or webpage involved a relatively sophisticated knowledge of computer programming. While this has changed over the years, social networking sites have developed a system that, at its most basic, simply involves filling in the gaps or using drop-down boxes. Even on MySpace, where users can design their own sites using html or java, knowledge of programming is not essential. Other users have set up help sites where people can copy and paste script to design their site.

Communication based around social relationships

An important difference between social networking sites and earlier forms of many-to-many conversations such as chat rooms and blogs is that social networking sites are predominantly based on social relationships and connections with people, rather than a shared interest. Online communication has changed from being merely task-based or for sharing information and is increasingly an end in itself.

Social networking sites are part of the wider Web 2.0 context

The specific technology that has enabled this growth in the number and popularity of social networking sites is part of a wider online phenomenon, enabling self-expression, communication and user interaction online, known as Web 2.0. This technology is not unique to social networking sites and has helped the development of other interactive applications such as user-generated content (UGC) sites (like YouTube), file-sharing sites and Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs) such as Second Life, World of Warcraft and Runescape, all sites typical of Web 2.0.

Applications have increased the versatility of social networking sites

Social networking sites are not limited to messaging, communicating and displaying

networks. Nearly all sites allow users to post photos, video and often music on their profiles and share them with others. Started by Facebook, sites have increasingly opened their interfaces to third-party applications. This has led to an expansion in what users can do on social networking sites, from taking part in film trivia quizzes to playing mini games. Established applications and functions have also found their way onto social networking sites in recent years. It is now possible to make voice calls through certain sites using Skype, while Bebo has led the way in incorporating video drama with its KateModern series. Bebo has also signed a deal with the BBC and Channel 4, among others, to provide some of their broadcast content to Bebo users.

9. Risks

Social Network Sites (SNS) are websites that allow users to upload information to a public profile, create a list of online friends, and browse the profiles of other users of the SNS. The websites have membership rules and community standards. Users disclose identity-relevant information via their profile to others. This information is either referential, directly referring to a person, or attributive, describing attributes to the data subject. Although most laws and regulations restrict the access to referential information, attributive information is not protected as such. However, the aggregation of large amounts of attributive information on SNS profiles poses new privacy risks. Information spreads faster through a Social Network Sites than through a real-life network. Information might be disclosed to a group of people unexpectedly, because the digital information is easy copyable, can be stored indefinitely and is searchable.  It especially  harms users when information travels through different spheres, and ends up with people whom it was not intended for. 

The survey shows that there are three main privacy risks for users of Social Network Sites: Total Information Awareness, dissemination to wrongdoers and no control over your identity-relevant information.

Social Network Sites track the activity of their users on their own websites and those of their marketing partners. They are able to gather unprecedented amounts of secondary personal information on their users, sometimes even without the informed consent of the users. An architecture of vulnerability emerges when the government collects this information and uses it to control its citizens. A Dutch judge found the private profile of a SNS user public, because people can be added to the friends list easily. Studies for the United States government have shown that it is easy to collect data from public Internet sources as SNS and connect them to existing government databases. This could lead to the chilling of free speech with respect to political dissidents.

Because of the great amount of identity-relevant information, which disseminates easily through a Social Network Sites, this could end up easily with wrongdoers. Stalkers, bullies and predators use the attributive information on SNS to identify with their victim and use the referential data to contact them. The profiles of users combined with the ease of contacting a user make SNS a useful platform for wrongdoers. The information on the websites can also easily be used to damage someone’s reputation, and with the large amount of attributive data on SNS, it is not difficult to reverse engineer information needed to steal someone’s identity. Although there is no proof that these things are affecting all users of SNS, experts agree that they affect a significant amount of users and can cause great damage to the users.

Social Network Sites interpret the consent that users give when signing up for their services as a broad informed consent, which can be stretched to secondary usage. In reality, users have minimal information and no control over secondary use of their information, the selling of their information or the disclosure of their information to groups unwanted, by the SNS. Above all, others can post information about the user, which can only be deleted after the fact, if possible at all. Information is posted about non-users, but they can not delete this, unless they become members.