ONLINE SOCIAL NETWORKS

Opportunities for Organizations in Online Social Networks

Opportunities for Organizations in Online Social Networks

Introduction

The 21st-century landscape is characterized by increasing globalization and a very accelerating change. As systems become more complex and interconnected, social networking is undergoing a transformation. One of the more recent trends in the study and practice of social networking is the focus on how individuals and businesses in networks shape the environment, unleash innovation, create access to resources, and increase their performance.

Social Network Concepts and Development

In the simplest terms, a social network is a set of people with a set of connections representing the existence of a relationship, or lack of relationship, between each pair of people. In the 1990s, when consumer World Wide Web technologies were still being developed, analysts spoke of the web's potential as a social connector, creating communities and bringing people together in ways never before thought possible.

Dynamics of Social Networks

As social beings, humans are bound to one another by various interdependencies that include common cause, values or kinship. They form social networks which are inter- connections of nodes that come together and communicate through various channels. There are online social networks formed by various means like email, newsletters and instant messaging. A social network graph maps the interconnections between individuals or 'actors'. The nodes in the graph represent the actors and the edges represent the communication, friendship, relation or 'ties' between actors. In recent years there has been immense growth of online social networks worldwide some of which are Facebook, MySpace and Orkut. Along with popular online social networks such as Facebook, Friendster, MySpace etc there are others that are not well known which serve graphs with more limited intents.

Social Network Platforms

The social network platforms are web applications that allow people connect with their friends and create new friendships.The social networking web sites have a number of features that makes in a very important tool in this new stage of Web 2.0. They have great number of users and ability to attract many others, giving rise to content generated by the user, at an increasing rate, both in quality and quantity.

The model of growth of these platforms is based fundamentally on the technique known as mouth-to-ear or viral marketing, in which initial participants invite their friends to join the network, usually through e-mail. 

They offer a variety of applications and features such as automatic update address book email accounts, public profiles to control about what can show different types of users, the ability to create new contacts, both internal and external to the network, and a number of features to promote the creation and sharing of resources and expertise.

Types of Social Networks

There are many types of social networks which provide different types of services to their users. We can distinguish the social networks into two different types:

Analogue or Off-Line Social Networks

These networks are formed by groups of people with a common ratio, which develop without electronic or computer systems connected to the ...