Social Networking - Research Paper Example

For instance, about 75% of teenagers in the United States of America visit the Internet daily and social networking forms the biggest part of what they do (Boyd and Ellison ). Social networking sites are widely used by most people to build and maintain relationships; personal or business, and to express their personal ideas and interests concerning the world. Changes in Social Networking Social networks are social structures comprising of persons or organizations that are connected by a single or more different types of interdependency, for instance friendship, common interest, relationships or kinship (Boyd and Ellison).

The networks allow people to create public or partial public profiles within a given system, articulate a list of different user that they share connection with and view and traverse the list of connections created by themselves and other users within the system. Social networking sites are very unique in that, apart from allowing users to meet strangers, they also allow them to articulate and make their social networks visible. They provide individuals with an opportunity to maintain their relationships with old friends and to meet new ones as well.

The first recognizable social networking site was SixDegrees.com which was started in 1997 (Boyd and Ellison 13). It allowed people to create profiles, list friends they had and in the early 1998s it allowed them to surf their list of friends. These features also existed in some dating and community sites. For instance, AIM and ICQ buddy lists supported lists of friends but the friends were not visible to others. Classmate.com was also another social network which provided people with the opportunity to affiliate with their institutions and surf the networks of other people who were also affiliated to the same institution.

However, until recently, it did not provide them with the opportunity to create profiles or list friends (Boyd and Ellison, 13). SixDegree became the first to incorporate these features and promoted itself as a tool to assist people in connecting with others and send messages to them. However, in 2000, SixDegree was incapable of becoming a sustainable business hence failed and its services were closed (Boyd and Ellison, 14). Although by this time the number of people using the Internet was huge, most of them lacked extended networks of friends who were online.

They complained that there was nothing much to do after accepting a friend request and most of them were not interested in meeting strangers. From 1997 to 2001, most community tools started to support different types of combinations of profiles and publicly articulated friends. For instance, AsianAvenue and MiGente allowed people to make personal, dating and business profiles in which they could identify friends without seeking permission for the connections (Boyd and Ellison 15). Most of these social network sites were mainly developed for business and dating.

For instance, Ryze.com was created in 2001 to assist people leverage their business networks while Match.com was a profitable dating site (Boyd and Ellison, 16). However, with the creation of Friendster, MySpace and Facebook, the purpose of social networking sites took a new dimension. Social networking sites are today used for business, passing information, education, making friends and dating among others applications. While the Internet has made the world become a global village,