Introduction
Gone are the days where children meet on the streets to play their favorite games. Gone are the days where teenagers gather around the neighborhood to gossip about one another. We communicate through pen and paper, but socializing goes beyond face-to-face contact.
As we enter a digital world, our views about socializing extends from handshakes to poking on some network social website. So what is a social network? It is the way of understanding relationships of interactions between individuals, groups, organization and even the entire society itself. So today we have a network social website wherein we do our interactions. We use the Internet to talk about our lives with friends, colleagues and other people. Social networking service focuses on making social relations and interactions among people. In a simple explanation, social networking is a manner for a person to meet other person in the Internet.
History
In the early 1990s, social networking on the Internet started in the form of common online communities. These communities focus on bringing people around the world to communicate with each other through chat rooms. It rouses users to share personal information from making personal WebPages. They made available for the user to make profiles providing compilations of list of friends and interest. Then newer batch of network social website emerges like SixDegrees.com in 1997, it was then followed by Hub Culture and Friendster in 2002. Today, many known network social websites are on the Internet like Google+, Myspace, Twitter, and Facebook.
The main feature of a network social website is its user profile. There you can see the user's information like name, interest, email, school and location. A main feature in user profile is also the list of friends which are also users of the same website. Some network social website includes uploading pictures, add multimedia content and can alter the look of their profile. Other network social website like Facebook allows its users to add applications to their profile. Some network social website can make its users post blogs and can search for other users who shares common interest and locations.
Some network social website put a dedication box so that other people connected to the user can leave messages, testimonials and comments. Other social networking sites offer the ability for the users to create groups that share common interests and organizations. Other websites make the use of trending in real-time web which allows users to post anything they have in their mind and be broadcasted to the world. Other social networking sites allow its users to check into places where they are on real time as well. Many companies use these networking sites to build image brands as well as advertise their products. It is very convenient to post advertisements in social networking sites since most of the people today are engaged into this phenomenon.
Tips
Make sure that your network social website are reputable for giving privacy and security settings. You divulge your information on this site, so make sure you check their security settings and secure your profile. Use the privacy settings on the websites to control who can view your profile. Always remember to be vigilant. There are many people who use social networking sites to cause harm to others.
