Social Networking Analysis

Social Networking Analysis

Social Networking Analysis

Introduction

Innovation sells! That is especially true in the Internet world. Since its inception, there have been lots of innovations and new applications in the Internet. Those innovations have caused major changes in our everyday lives, which can be easily felt across a myriad of applications, including education, shopping, entertainment, learning, banking, investing, etc. To see how web-based applications and services have evolved, we only need to compare the web sites that existed 6 or 7 years ago to the ones that exist today. One of the recent innovations in web-based applications is the online social networking services. In Table 1, we examine the progress of some representative web-based services, from the earliest static web pages (1995) to today's online services, including e-commerce sites and online social networks. Also shown in Table 1 are the respective years of inception, example sites, and supporting tools, for each of the representative services. (Osterwalder 2005)

In general, a social network can be defined as a social structure made of nodes, which are usually individuals or organizations tied by one or more specific types of relations, such as financial exchange, friendship, passion, trade, web links, airline routes, hobbies, etc. Social networks connect people with all different types of interests, and one area that is expanding in the use of these networks is the corporate environment. Businesses are beginning to use social networks as a means to help employees to connect, or customers to obtain information or help. Business companies using social networking services to support their products or customer services may be becoming a new trend.

In addition to social networks used by companies to provide employee or customer services, popular online social network sites, such as MySpace.com and Ning.com, also attract online ads from retailers and corporations, which place online ads on the social network sites to take advantage of the large volume of visits by potential customers at the sites. (Rayport 2001)Placing online ads on websites has been around since the beginning of the Web. Websites such as Yahoo and Google are capable of providing attractive (and usually free) services to the global Internet community, and by doing so generating large volume of visits from web surfers all around the world. The large volume of traffic in turn attracts business companies to place their online ads on the site.

In 2005, Intermix Media, the company that owned MySpace.com, was acquired by News Corp. for the price of $580 million. At that time MySpace.com was ranked as the fifth most frequently visited website in terms of page views5. One and a half year later (in July 2006), MySpace reached the top spot as the most visited site in the U.S. It is certainly reasonable to anticipate that such large volume of online traffic will help to generate large online ads revenue. People have been wondering whether the success of Google and other online search sites would be duplicated in online social network ...