A social networking service or social networking site, abbreviated as SNS, is a type of online social media platform which people use to build social networks or social relationships with other people who share similar personal or career content, interests, activities, backgrounds or real-life connections.
Social networking services vary in format and the number of features. They can incorporate a range of new information and communication tools, operating on desktops and on laptops, on mobile devices such as tablet computers and smartphones. This may feature digital photo/video/sharing and diary entries online (blogging). Online community services are sometimes considered social-network services by developers and users, though in a broader sense, a social-network service usually provides an individual-centered service whereas online community services are groups centered. Generally defined as "websites that facilitate the building of a network of contacts in order to exchange various types of content online," social networking sites provide a space for interaction to continue beyond in-person interactions. These computer mediated interactions link members of various networks and may help to create, sustain and develop new social and professional relationships.
Social networking sites allow users to share ideas, digital photos and videos, posts, and to inform others about online or real-world activities and events with people within their social network. While in-person social networking – such as gathering in a village market to talk about events – has existed since the earliest development of towns, the web enables people to connect with others who live in different locations across the globe (dependent on access to an Internet connection to do so).
Depending on the platform, members may be able to contact any other member. In other cases, members can contact anyone they have a connection to, and subsequently anyone that contact has a connection to, and so on.
Facebook has a massive 2.13 billion active monthly users and an average of 1.4 billion daily active users as of 2017.
LinkedIn, a career-oriented social-networking service, generally requires that a member personally know another member in real life before they contact them online. Some services require members to have a preexisting connection to contact other members.
After the COVID-19 pandemic, Zoom, a videoconferencing platform, took an integral place to connect people located around the world and facilitate many online environments such as school, university, work and government meetings.
The main types of social networking services contain category places (such as age or occupation or religion), means to connect with friends (usually with self-description pages), and a recommendation system linked to trust. One can categorize social-network services into four types:
socialization social network services used primarily for socializing with existing friends or users (e.g., Facebook, Instagram, Twitter/X) online social networks are decentralized and distributed computer networks where users communicate with each other through Internet services. networking social network services used primarily for non-social interpersonal communication (e.g., LinkedIn, a career- and employment-oriented site) social navigation social network services used primarily for helping users to find specific information or resources (e.g., Goodreads for books, Reddit)
There have been attempts to standardize these services to avoid the need to duplicate entries of friends and interests (see the FOAF standard). A study reveals that India recorded world's largest growth in terms of social media users in 2013. A 2013 survey found that 73% of U.S. adults use social-networking sites.
Offline and online social networking services Differences between offline and online social networking services Characteristic Offline social network Online social network Degree centrality While the number of cognitively manageable ties is limited to about 150, most people report having 14–56 ties at average Huge number of ties technologically possible, but average number is limited, e.g., Facebook: 395 Symmetry Usually symmetric (reciprocal behavior) Symmetric (e.g., Instagram, LinkedIn, XING) and asymmetric (e.g., Twitter, now X) Affect Positive (92–97%) and negative (3–8%) tie relationships can be managed using high sophisticated coordination mechanisms such as argumentation and negotiation Except through blocking (e.g., Twitter) or hiding (e.g., Facebook) limited support to deal with negative tie relationships Strength 2–8 strong ties and 12–48 weak/latent ties on average 9–37 strong ties and 68–131 weak/latent ties on average Dynamic of change Low due to manual interaction High because of technological support
History
The potential for computer networking to facilitate newly improved forms of computer-mediated social interaction was suggested early on.The Network Nation 2 by S. Roxanne Hiltz and Murray Turoff (Addison-Wesley, 1978, 1993) Efforts to support social networks via computer-mediated communication were made in many early online services, including Usenet,Michael_Hauben, Ronda_Hauben, and Thomas_Truscott (April 27, 1997). Netizens: On the History and Impact of Usenet and the Internet (Perspectives). Wiley-IEEE Computer Society P. ARPANET, LISTSERV, and bulletin board services (BBS). Many prototypical features of social networking sites were also present in online services such as The Source, Delphi, America Online, Prodigy, CompuServe, and The WELL.Katie Hafner, The WELL: A Story of Love, Death and Real Life in the Seminal Online Community (2001) Carroll & Graf Publishers
Early social networking on the World Wide Web began in the form of generalized online communities such as Theglobe.com (1995), GeoCities (1994) and Tripod.com (1995). Many of these early communities focused on bringing people together to interact with each other through chat rooms and encouraged users to share personal information and ideas via personal web pages by providing easy-to-use publishing tools and free or inexpensive web space. Some communities – such as Classmates.com – took a different approach by simply having people link to each other via email addresses. PlanetAll started in 1996.
In the late 1990s, user profiles became a central feature of social networking sites, allowing users to compile lists of "friends" and search for other users with similar interests. New social networking methods were developed by the end of the 1990s, and many sites began to develop more advanced features for users to find and manage friends.Romm-Livermore, C. & Setzekorn, K. (2008). Social Networking Communities and E-Dating Services: Concepts and Implications. IGI Global. p.271 Open Diary, a community for online diarists, invented both friends-only content and the reader comment, two features of social networks important to user interaction.
This newer generation of social networking sites began to flourish with the emergence of SixDegrees in 1997, Open Diary in 1998, Mixi in 1999, Makeoutclub in 2000, Cyworld in 2001,Thelwall, M. & Stuart, D. (2010). Social Network Sites. In Panayiotis Zaphiris & Chee Siang Ang, Social Computing and Virtual Communities, p.271 "In some ways the Korean Cyworld can claim to have been in 2001 the first successful general-purpose social network site, since it did not focus on a particular community or activity but aimed at a mass user-base." "Cyworld, of Korean origin, is a socialising SNS that is dominant in South Korea." (Cyworld was launched in 1999 but added social features in 2001.) Hub Culture in 2002, and Friendster and Nexopia in 2003.Knapp, E. (2005). A Parent's Guide to MySpace. DayDream Publishers. Cyworld also became one of the first companies to profit from the sale of virtual goods.E-Society: My World Is Cyworld , businessweek.com, September 26, 2005Tapping into growing market for virtual goods , seattlepi.com, November 2, 2009 9:56 p.m. PT MySpace and LinkedIn were launched in 2003, and Bebo was launched in 2005. Orkut became the first popular social networking service in Brazil (although most of its very first users were from the United States) and quickly grew in popularity in India (Madhavan, 2007). There was a rapid increase in social networking sites' popularity; in 2005, MySpace had more pageviews than Google.Steve Rosenbush (2005). News Corp.'s Place in MySpace , Bloomberg BusinessWeek, July 19, 2005. (MySpace Page Views figures) Many of these services were displaced by Facebook, which launched in 2004 and became the largest social networking site in the world in 2009."Social graph-iti" : Facebook's social network graphing: article from The Economists website. Retrieved January 19, 2008.
Social media
The term social media was first used in 2004 and is often used to describe social networking services.
Social impact
Web-based social networking services make it possible to connect people who share interests and activities across political, economic, and geographic borders. Through e-mail and instant messaging, online communities are created where a gift economy and reciprocal altruism are encouraged through cooperation. Information is suited to a gift economy, as information is a nonrival good and can be gifted at practically no cost. Scholars have noted that the term "social" cannot account for technological features of the social network platforms alone. Hence, the level of network sociability should determine by the actual performances of its users. According to the communication theory of uses and gratifications, an increasing number of individuals are looking to the Internet and social media to fulfill cognitive, affective, personal integrative, social integrative, and tension free needs. With Internet technology as a supplement to fulfill needs, it is in turn affecting everyday life, including relationships, school, church, entertainment, and family. Companies are using social media as a way to learn about potential employees' personalities and behavior. In numerous situations, a candidate who might otherwise have been hired has been rejected due to offensive or otherwise unseemly photos or comments posted to social networks or appearing on a newsfeed.
Facebook and other social networking tools are increasingly the aims of scholarly research. Scholars in many fields have begun to investigate the impact of social networking sites, investigating how such sites may play into issues of identity, politics, privacy,Gross, R and Acquisti, A (2005). Information Revelation and Privacy in Online Social Networks (The Facebook case) . Pre-proceedings version. ACM Workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society (WPES) social capital, youth culture, and education. Research has also suggested that individuals add offline friends on Facebook to maintain contact and often this blurs the lines between work and home lives. Users from around the world also utilise social networking sites as an alternative news source. While social networking sites have arguably changed how we access the news, users tend to have mixed opinions about the reliability of content accessed through these sites.
According to a study in 2015, 63% of the users of Facebook or Twitter in the USA consider these networks to be their main source of news, with entertainment news being the most seen. In the times of breaking news, Twitter users are more likely to stay invested in the story. In some cases when the news story is more political, users may be more likely to voice their opinion on a linked Facebook story with a comment or like, while Twitter users will just follow the site's feed and retweet the article. In online social networks, the veracity and reliability of news may be diminished due to the absence of traditional media gatekeepers.