Social Networking Services- A New Global Connect Web2.0 Revolution

Wikipedia defines "Social Networking Service" :- A social network service focuses on building online communities of people who share interests and/or activities, or who are interested in exploring the interests and activities of others. Most social network services are web based and provide a variety of ways for users to interact, such as e-mail and instant messaging services.


Social Networking is all about sharing and discovering the myriad ideas and interests in this information universe (Okay...I'm starting to sound like Carl Sagan) It is not about staying in one place rather being able to pick the best one that meets your specific needs at any given time. The trick is you have to invest the time in order to get any true value.

This opens up a lot of options/avenues to information exposure to friends, communities based on interest, professions/activities etc. I would say “Reducing Degrees of Separation” Its wasn’t too long ago when we said that if on an average everyone know 42 people around them, then the entire 6 billion population of this world is just 6 degrees away (6th root of 6,000,000,000 = 42.628)

Use this formula: (average number of friends per person) ^ (degrees of separation) = total population


The success of Orkut, Linkedin, FaceBook, MySpace etc has shaken the entire internet industry. This has announced that these platforms and technologies are here to stay. They define Web2.0 technologies. Web 2.0 websites typically include some of the following features/techniques. Referring to Andrew McAfee's defined acronym SLATES to refer to them:

1. “Search: the ease of finding information through keyword search which makes the platform valuable.
2. Links: guides to important pieces of information. The best pages are the most frequently linked to.
3. Authoring: the ability to create constantly updating content over a platform that is shifted from being the creation of a few to being the constantly updated, interlinked work. In wikis, the content is iterative in the sense that the people undo and redo each other's work. In blogs, content is cumulative in that posts and comments of individuals are accumulated over time.
4. Tags: categorization of content by creating tags that are simple, one-word descriptions to facilitate searching and avoid rigid, pre-made categories.
5. Extensions: automation of some of the work and pattern matching by using algorithms e.g. amazon.com recommendations.
6. Signals: the use of RSS (Really Simple Syndication) technology to notify users with any changes of the content by sending e-mails to them.

More and more internet savvy people are opening to idea of such social networks to connect with friends, family, groups of common interests and this is bringing a social information revolution across the world wide web with so much of information pertaining to consumer activities, interests being shared across the WWW. Going forward how could this information be normalised, categorised & analysed for social intelligence purposes......am I hinting at Web3.0.