Virtual Community

 A virtual community is a social network of individuals who interact through specific media, potentially crossing geographical and political boundaries in order to pursue mutual interests or goals. One of the most pervasive types of virtual community include social networking services, which consist of various online communities. Read more

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Mass collaboration

Mass collaboration is a form of collective action that occurs when large numbers of people work independently on a single project, often modular in its nature. Such projects typically take place on the internet using social software and computer-supported collaboration tools such as wiki technologies, which provide a potentially infinite hypertextual substrate within which the collaboration may be situated. Continue Reading

Social television

Social television is a general term for technology that supports communication and social interaction in either the context of watching television, or related to TV content. It also includes the study of television-related social behavior, devices and networks. Social television systems can for example integrate voice communication, text chat, presence and context awareness, TV recommendations, ratings, or video-conferencing with the TV content either directly on the screen or by using ancillary devices. Continue Reading

Social Software

Social software applications include communication tools and interactive tools. Communication tools typically handle the capturing, storing and presentation of communication, usually written but increasingly including audio and video as well. Interactive tools handle mediated interactions between a pair or group of users. They focus on establishing and maintaining a connection among users, facilitating the mechanics of conversation and talk. Read more

Social bookmark link generator

A social bookmark link generator (or tag generator) is software that generates a code that can be added to web pages and/or blogs to facilitate bookmarking the web content on social bookmarking websites.Among the most popular social bookmarking services utilized are Google Bookmarks, Delicious, Digg, and StumbleUpon. Read more

Social Networking in the Philippines

Social networking is one of the most active web-based activities in the Philippines, with Filipinos being declared as the most active users on a number of web-based social network sites such as Friendster, Facebook, Multiply, Friendly and Twitter. The use of social networking website has become so extensive in the Philippines that the country has been tagged as "The Social Networking Capital of the World," and has also become part of Filipino cyberculture. Read more

Social network aggregation

Social network aggregation is the process of collecting content from multiple social network services, such as MySpace or Facebook. The task is often performed by a social network aggregator, which pulls together information into a single location,or helps a user consolidate multiple social networking profiles into one profile. Read more

Geosocial networking

Geosocial Networking is a type of social networking in which geographic services and capabilities such as geocoding and geotagging are used to enable additional social dynamics.User-submitted location data or geolocation techniques can allow social networks to connect and coordinate users with local people or events that match their interests. Read more

Distributed Social Network

A distributed social network is an Internet social network service that is decentralized and distributed across different providers. The emphasis of the distribution is on portability, interoperability and federation capability. It contrasts with social network aggregation services, which are used to manage accounts and activities across multiple discrete social networks. Read more

Mobile Social Network

Mobile social networking is social networking where individuals with similar interests converse and connect with one another through their mobile phone and/or tablet. Much like web-based social networking, mobile social networking occurs in virtual communities. A current trend for social networking websites, such as Facebook, is to create mobile apps to give their users instant and real-time access from their device. In turn, native mobile social networks have been created like Foursquare and Gowalla, communities which are built around mobile functionality. Read more

Gender differences in social network service use

Men and women use social network services (SNSs) differently and in different frequencies. In general, several researchers have found that women tend to use SNSs more than men and for different and more social purposes. Read more

World Usage

According to ComScore, as of December 2011, Israel leads the world in the time spent in social networks online, followed closely by Argentina.

Open source software

There are a number of projects that aim to develop free and open source software to use for social networking services. The projects include Anahita Social Networking Engine, Diaspora, Appleseed Project, OneSocial Web and StatusNet. These technologies are often referred to as Social engine or Social networking engine software. 

Application Domains

Social networking is more recently being used by various government agencies. Social networking tools serve as a quick and easy way for the government to get the opinion of the public and to keep the public updated on their activity. The Centers for Disease Control demonstrated the importance of vaccinations on the popular children's site Whyville and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has a virtual island on Second Life where people can explore underground caves or explore the effects of global warming. Read more

Issues

Privacy concerns with social networking services have been raised growing concerns amongst users on the dangers of giving out too much personal information and the threat of sexual predators. Users of these services also need to be aware of data theft or viruses. However, large services, such as MySpace and Netlog, often work with law enforcement to try to prevent such incidents. In addition, there is a perceived privacy threat in relation to placing too much personal information in the hands of large corporations or governmental bodies, allowing a profile to be produced on an individual's behavior on which decisions, detrimental to an individual, may be taken. Read more

Investigations

Social networking services are increasingly being used in legal and criminal investigations. Information posted on sites such as MySpace and Facebook has been used by police (forensic profiling), probation, and university officials to prosecute users of said sites. In some situations, content posted on MySpace has been used in court. Facebook is increasingly being used by school administrations and law enforcement agencies as a source of evidence against student users. This site being the number one online destination for college students, allows users to create profile pages with personal details. Read more

Emerging Trends

As the increase in popularity of social networking is on a constant rise, new uses for the technology are constantly being observed. At the forefront of emerging trends in social networking sites is the concept of "real-time web" and "location-based." Real-time allows users to contribute content, which is then broadcast as it is being uploaded - the concept is analogous to live radio and television broadcasts. Twitter set the trend for "real-time" services, wherein users can broadcast to the world what they are doing, or what is on their minds within a 140-character limit. Facebook followed suit with their "Live Feed" where users' activities are streamed as soon as it happens. While Twitter focuses on words, Clixtr, another real-time service, focuses on group photo sharing wherein users can update their photo streams with photos while at an event. Facebook, however, remains easily the largest photo sharing site - Facebook application and photo aggregator Pixable estimates that Facebook will have 100 billion photos by Summer 2011. Read more

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 particularly suited to gift economy, as information is a nonrival good and can be gifted at practically no cost. Read more

Human Ecology

Human ecology is an interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary study of the relationship between humans and their natural, social, and built environments. The scientific philosophy of human ecology has a diffuse history with connections to geography, sociology, psychology, anthropology, zoology, and natural ecology.

Levels of analysis

In general, social networks are self-organizing, emergent, and complex, such that a globally coherent pattern appears from the local interaction of the elements that make up the system. These patterns become more apparent as network size increases. However, a global network analysis of, for example, all interpersonal relationships in the world—or even one global region—is not feasible and is likely to contain so much information as to be uninformative. Thus, social networks are analyzed by the number and type of relationships relevant to the researcher's theoretical question. Such analyses can be delimited according to theory such that a specific set of persons whose relationships are to be analyzed fall within a specific scale or, again according to theory, may be targeted to analyzing specific types of relationships and be scale-free. Although levels of analysis are not necessarily mutually exclusive, there are three general levels into which networks may fall: micro-level, meso-level or middle-range, and macro-level. Read more

Overview

A social network is a theoretical construct useful in the social sciences to study relationships between individuals, groups, organizations, or even entire societies (social units, see differentiation). The term is used to describe a social structure determined by such interactions. The ties (sometimes called edges, links, or connections) in the structure are called "nodes". The nodes through which any given social unit connects represent the convergence of the various social contacts of that unit. Many kinds of relationships may form the "network" between such nodes, but interpersonal "bridges" are a defining characteristic of social networks. Read more

Background

Some of the ideas of social network theory are found in writings going back to the ancient Greeks. In the late 1800s, both Émile Durkheim and Ferdinand Tönnies foreshadow the idea of social networks in their theories and research of social groups. Tönnies argued that social groups can exist as personal and direct social ties that either link individuals who share values and belief (Gemeinschaft, German, commonly translated as "community") or impersonal, formal, and instrumental social links (Gesellschaft, German, commonly translated as "society"). Durkheim gave a non-individualistic explanation of social facts arguing that social phenomena arise when interacting individuals constitute a reality that can no longer be accounted for in terms of the properties of individual actors. Georg Simmel, writing at the turn of the twentieth century, pointed to the nature of networks and the effect of network size on interaction and examined the likelihood of interaction in loosely-knit networks rather than groups. Read more

Introduction

A social network is a social structure made up of a set of actors (such as individuals or organizations) and the dyadic ties between these actors (such as relationships, connections, or interactions). A social network perspective is employed to model the structure of a social group, how this structure influences other variables, or how structures change over time. The study of these structures uses methods in social network analysis to identify influential nodes, local and global structures, and network dynamics. Social networks are distinct from information, biological, or electrical networks, but theories and methods generalizing to all of these complex networks are studied in the field of network science. Read more

list of social networking sites

This is a list of major active social networking websites and excludes dating websites (see Comparison of

dating websites). For defunct social networking websites, see List of defunct social networking websites. Read more