Post about "Social Networking"

Social Networking Sites

Social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter have become a mainstream part of the American and world pop culture. “Social networking” is the term used to describe websites where people set up their own personal web page, use this to meet new friends and reunite with old friends, and otherwise create a network of friends and contacts on the Internet.Online social networks have become a way to keep in touch with your oldest friends in the world, share your love of games, network for love, reignite old romantic flames, or even further your career through business networking. Because tweeting and Facebooking provides such a variety of advantages and options to such a wide range of people, social network sites have become a mainstream online phenomenon.FacebookFacebook is the site people wanting to contact old classmates and childhood friends use. When you establish a page, you’ll get friend suggestions according to your current address, your childhood addresses, and the schools you attended. Once you start to add friend, you might receive suggestions from their list of friends, so that you have an ever-expanding network of people you might have known throughout your life. Eventually, you tend to reunite with dozens, if not hundreds, of old friends and acquaintances.Another aspect to Facebook is the tendency people have to meet their old boyfriends and girlfriends online and catch up on old times. Often, the nostalgia for a lost love turns into a reunion of another sorts, or people who had mutual crushes in their teen years or college days end up hooking up for romantic relationships, to see what might have been or fulfill a long-standing fantasy. This has led one preacher to deride Facebook as a “portal to infidelity”, though it should go without saying that the vast majority of people on Facebook are more interested in telling you about their kids, their spouse, and their latest trip to the grocery store. (Also, that particular preacher turned out to have a past far seedier than your average Facebook fancy.)TwitterTwitter gives people the ability to send short, pithy “tweets” to all the people in their online network. Each tweet only contains 140 characters or less, so brevity is key on Twitter. Submitting links to favorite online stories or re-tweeting other people’s tweets is a way to show people what it is you care about, as well as show what you’re following on the computer.Since a few athletes and politicians began tweeting, and since a few of these celebrities got into trouble for posting on Twitter something they didn’t entirely think through, Twitter has become a place to follow mini-scandals. A number of celebrities have become big Twitter phenoms–Ashton Kutcher most famously.MySpaceMySpace was the first huge, mainstream social networking site. MySpace began as a portal for bands, musicians, and musical artists to find jobs, bandmates, and other career opportunities. At a point, My-Space morphed into a portal for a mainstream audience, including millions of teens and tweens. While Facebook and Twitter have surpassed MySpace in the social consciousness these days, this is still a massive web presence still impacting the culture.Linked InLinkedIn specifically caters to business professionals wanting to find job, meet business contacts, and otherwise advance and network in the career field and business world. With 85,000,000 people linked into the site, this is a place anyone with a commercial venture, business skills, or need for a job should have a page on.There are a huge number and variety of social network websites out there, and you should view LinkedIn as the type of niche sites available out there. If you have a particular hobby, interest, or venture in mind, you can probably find a web address that lets you network socially online in this field of interest.