Social Networking - What is It? I get asked this fairly often, so I thought I’d give a brief explanation.

Social Networking sites are all different in some respects, but they all have some things in common.

1. As the name implies, they are “social”, and revolve around a community of users who are all actively participating in some way (rather than just passively reading).
2. The users are usually “sharing” something with each other.
3. The users are often giving their opinions of something, either through ratings or approval/disapproval systems.
4. The “shared items” are generally displayed more prominently based upon their ratings and/or popularity, which is based upon how the users rated them.

What gets shared is usually the biggest differentiator amongst the sites. Here are some examples of Things That Get Shared.

1. Bookmarks. Users share bookmarks (most often tagged) with other users. Bookmarking a site implies the user likes the site. Tagging the site gives meaning and context to the bookmark. For example, a discount shoe site might be bookmarked and tagged with the following tags: “shoes, shoe, sale, discount, cheap, footwear, bargain”. When a user wants to find shoes at a bargain price, he or she could search the social bookmark site for pages that other users have liked and have tagged with some of those words. Like any good social site, the more people who bookmark a particular page and the more similar tags that page gets, the more likely it will be presented to a user when that user is searching for that tag. (Please note that the term “bookmark” here does not mean the actual bookmarks you have in your browser, but the concept is the same. When you bookmark a page on a social bookmarking site, the bookmark does NOT get saved in your browser).
2. News/Articles/Stories/Posts. Users share news items they find interesting with other users. You can swap out the word news with almost anything (articles, stories, posts) and it will still function the same way. We’ll stick to news for the moment in the example. Let’s say you read a breaking news item on CNN.com that Willie Nelson got drunk, got mad, and shot a politician’s favorite magnolia tree. (I’ve obviously just made that up out of thin air, so please don’t go around reporting that as truth, when it clearly is not). If that happened, that would be big news, and you’d jump on your favorite social news site and tell everyone about it. You’d usually do so by giving an interesting Title to your piece (so people will want to see more), a short description, and a link to the CNN news article. After users read the story, they would then give your submission a Thumbs Up or Thumbs Down. If you wasted their time by sending them to some lame, stupid story, you’d probably get a lot of Thumbs Downs. If you helped them find informative, interesting things, you’d probably get a lot of Thumbs Ups. If you were the owner of a web page that got a lot of Thumbs Ups, your page would get a whole heck of a lot of traffic.
3. Reviews. Users share their reviews of things…local restaurants, etc. Enough said.
4. Themselves. Users share themselves, and their likes and dislikes, as well as the minutia of their usually insanely boring lives via places like MySpace.

I’m sure there are lots of other examples of things being shared via social sites, but that should be enough to help you understand what social networking is all about. If not, maybe as a child, you never grasped the concept of sharing or you weren’t socialized at an early enough age.

(from Smash Mouth. "AllStar" Astro Lounge. Interscope Records, 1999.)

Posted on July 16th, 2007 by DazzlinDonna
Filed under: Tech Advice