Social Networking The Current Trends Media Essay

Social Networking The Current Trends Media Essay Nowadays social networking sites are gaining a lot of popularity among youth. These have played a crucial role in bridging boundaries and enabling them to communicate on a same platform. It has become a popular and a potential mean for them to stay friends with the existing ones and to grow up their social circle at least in terms of  acquaintances. Communication   has   become   effective   thanks to the existence of the internet. A social network is defined as a set of individuals who establish with each other in friendship manner. The individuals and their activities in the social network are interrelated and the bond are channels for transfer the immaterial resources. According to Boyd and Ellison definition of Social Network Sites, Social Network Sites is a web-based services that allow individuals to construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system, to articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection, and view their list of connections and those made by others within the system. All social networking sites have almost the same features. Their backbone consists of visible profiles that display the details or the presentation of oneself. The basic level of entry in most social network sites is the setting up of a profile which is a personalized page developed by the user in which he/she presents him/herself to the friends through text, photos music and videos among others. The individual is asked to fill out forms containing a series of questions. The profile is generated using the answers to these questions, which basically include description such as age, location, interests, and an about me section. Social network sites also allow users to mobilize and organize their social contacts and profiles in the way they want other members to see them. Social network sites also give the externalization of data characteristics. The externalization of networks is possibly one of the first times online users have been able to view their own online social networks, and share them with friends and the general public. Some social network sites also support applications which allow users to describe the relation between themselves and other members. The label for these relationships differs depending on the site popular terms include Friends, Contacts, and Fans.Most social networking sites required confirmation from both party for the relationships term, but some do not. These one-way confirmation ties are sometimes called as Fans or Followers, but many sites call these as Friends as well. The term Friends can be misleading to others because the connection sometimes do not necessarily mean friendship in the common way, and the reasons people connected with others are varied. Social network sites also introduced new ways for community formation. although the virtual communications have existed since the beginning of online applications, social network sites support new ways for people to connect between themselves. Users of these sites may choose to communicate through various digital objects, such as tagging and in-built applications within the social network sites. Social network sites are also not just a collection of chat rooms and forums. The users can play games, take fun quizzes, share photos and ideas with friends. Social network sites nowadays also become simpler and easy to use. Anyone with basic internet skills can create and manage an online social network sites presence. Furthermore, social network sites are free of charge and open for anyone to join. Most of them just require registration, while others limit membership through an invitation from members who are already members of the site. Simultaneous posting across different channels also available today. Weve already seen how Twitter has this magical power of posting your tweets to your Facebook wall, and how LinkedIn can import your content from Twitter. And weve seen how this is taken to an extreme by sites like HootSuite which can publish to hundreds of different networks and groups from one click of a button. The HootSuite service is commonly used to manage online brands and to submit messages to a variety of social media services, including Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and Mixi. HootSuite also provides a browser-based dashboard that enable the users to keep updated on their Twitter account. We should get ready to see more of this seamless integration between different platforms. Today current trends in social networking sites also really focusing more on internet privacy. With social networking websites like Facebook.com and MySpace.com, it is too easy to obtain personal information about someone and use it to harm them. In a case with MySpace.com, the  availability  of  being  able to  customize ones own  site has allowed people to use phishing html code to create phishing profiles that allows that   person   to   access  anyones  profile  who  have  visited  the  phishing  profile. Phishing can often lead to the loss of personal information such as usernames, credit card numbers, and passwords. This in turn causes great privacy issues since that person can now  access personal information and then sell it off to marketing companies for a profit. This selling of  information to companies has bring to the rise in spam emails that we all  received. Another issue of concern with social networking web sites is the of copyright infringement. The original owner of the selected file were not mentioned during the sharing of thousands n thousands amount of files shared through social networking web sites. Also, commercial products are also being reproduced by individuals and uploaded to these social networking web sites. YouTube is a great example of how copyright infringement can happened using a social networking website, because the members can pretty much upload everything on YouTube. This show us that people are doing copyright infringement and uploading files and video clips that do not belong to  them. The only real way that copyright infringement is reported is through the self-policing of the YouTube   community . YouTube has been sued many times in the past and is now being sued for over one billion dollars by Viacom because of above cases. The trend at the moment is that whenever you search for content you are presented with content relevant to your interests, that is chosen in relation to your past searches, your likes, and so on. . Users of a social network can be associated with one or more interest categories. Posts or updates made in the social network by friends of a first user are associated with one or more interest categories. A social feed can be filtered based on the interested categories or the first user of the social feed or the interests associated with the posts or updates made by the first users friends. The danger here is that this process channelled us in one particular direction meaning that we can only see what the robots think we want to see. So we need to make another effort to find new and different content, since it is increasingly unlikely that this will pop up in the search engines. Today, we now can access social networking sites using smartphones and tablets. Smartphones and tablets are obviously the latest technology products right now. Meeker forecasts the worldwide number of smartphone and tablet users should overtake the worldwide number of computer users next year. That means around the world, more peoples experience of computing and Internet technology will come from mobile devices than via traditional desktop or notebook. If forecasts bear out, this shift will not only continue, but accelerate. Furthermore, business can use social networking websites for their  advantages. Social networking website can be used for hiring the employees. Such sites as jobstreet actually help many people searching for jobs and many companies looking for employees to find each other. It is as simple as creating your  own resume and upload it there. Another aspect of business affected by social networking websites is marketing.Not only is online advertising more effective than commercial advertising such as TV ads and magazines, it is also  more cheaper and reaches far more  people than  other forms of   advertising. In conclusion, there is no doubt that social networking sites has great impact on the society it has lot of challenges which we have to face .So, we should focus on the ethical use of these social networking sites so that it serves our society in a right way and the society can play an important role because it is a time bomb for the society. In one hand it provides a way to connect to our dear ones, and on the other side it gives a platform that become danger to others.