CHECKING OUT SOME SOCIAL NETWORKING SITES

I was able to look at a few social networking sites including Facebook, MySpace, Friendster and Hi5, these sites are purely social and are usually not related to work. Facebook appears to be the site used by most college students in the United States today and I can see why. Face book is much easier to use, easier to navigate (friend list and photos) and it is also easy to find and connect with others on the site. I personally think that the other networking sites I looked at fall short in those areas.

I’ve noticed recently that Hi5 has adopted a few of the techniques that I saw on Facebook , techniques such as posting your friend’s status on your home page, and even showing who have been added to people’s friend list. I must say that all the sites have the communication tools as a similarity; they all allow their users to connect with old friends, make new friends, share photos and even e-mail each other. Facebook is the only one that I have used for instant messaging; I didn’t see that in the others.

MySpace and Friendster both appear to be very commercial; it’s almost as if there is more selling going on than social networking. All of these networking sites find ways to keep their members to be engaged, I think that face book is very innovative in that way. What is great about these sites is that they all allow members to create communities within a community. This is done by having members create groups based on specific interests and invite friends who might be interested to join.

The major problem with social networking sites is the issue of privacy, which has been affecting a lot of people lately. Also people usually end up having a large number of friends with whom they do not even communicate. On a good note, the characteristics of new media are definitely easy to identify on these sites.