Social Networking Sites (SNS): The new trend on the Internet.

Social networking sites are sites which helps connecting people with there friends and meet people with common interest. Social networking sites are also used for business networking and dating. These sites lack hierarchical structure. They are random and unpredictable.

They are individual centric. They are made up of individuals each connected with other individual on the bases of a definite relation.
Relation may be of best friend, good friends, friend, acquaintances, partner etc. Each individual can be connected with any number of individuals. This process takes place with every individual or community. This forms a web structure.

These website help in managing contact very easily. Advent of these sites has help people to remain in constant touch with each other. These sites are very interactive. They connect people at low cost. They are free services. This is because they are still new services.

General in these sites one makes a profile. This is connect with there email account. In this profile he/she puts information like age, date of birth, hobbies, status, and profession. Then you can also upload your pictures. Some provide with facility of uploading video songs. They use various interactive communication medium like chats, email, messages, and community. Birthday reminders are other popular feature on the site. Bogging has also become an important part of these sites. These networking sites are general in content and usage.

Anybody can join them. Other important things on them are testimonial writings for other people, becoming there ‘fans’ etc. There are around 102 major social networking sites on the net. First site came up in 1995 and in12 years they have grown many folds. Young are more attracted towards them because they want to connect to there friends. Most popular are Orkut, MySpace, Facebook, Hi5, Friendster.

Orkut is most popular social networking websites in India . It’s a google service. It was creator Orkut Buyukkökten. It was launched in January 2004. As of August 2007, the number of members is over 67,000,000.Its unique features are scrapbooks and communities.
Scrap is a novel feature which has made orkut popular. It’s a kind of offline chatting. Here one can go scrap something in other person’s profile. When other person comes online to visit his/her Orkut profile he can read the scrap and reply. Now facility of HTML has been added to scrap. This helps in posting pictures, video files etc.
60.23 percent people on Orkut are between the age 18-25.26-30 age group people account for 10.56 percent. Minority population is of age group 50+ which accounts for 2.41 percent. Brazilians are present in highest numbers 53.60 percent followed by Americans and Indians. Who are 19.04% and 15.91% respectively.
63.45 percent people on Orkut are for friendship. Orkut is available in international 12 languages. Orkut now also available in 5 Indian languages: Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Tamil, and Telugu. It was chosen as 2007 Pepsi and MTV Youth Icon. Orkut also won PC World India Award for the ‘Best Social Networking Website.’

Now more and more India based social networking sites are coming up like bigadda.com backed by reliance, indyarocks.com, bharatstudent.com.
Globally MySpace and Facebook are popular. Facebook has an interesting feature of Polls. It let you ask 18-24 year olds what’s hip. Just in 30 minutes. Its distinguishing feature is ‘poke’. Its gaining popularity in India fast.Hi5 is another popular social website. Its USP is its gives your http link like http://xyz.hi5.com. It was founded by Ramu Yalamanchi. It has been steadily losing ground to Orkut in India.

MySpace is most popular social networking website in the west. MySpace is currently the world’s sixth most popular English-language website .Third most popular website in the United States. Site reportedly attracted new registrations at a rate of 230,000 per day.

On July 19, 2006 , Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp paid $580 million for the site. Bebo a popular SNS was the most visited website in the year 2006 according to google.
Social Networking Sites for specific purposes are gaining foothold in this business.

Travel is a key area for social network. TripConnect, a SNS on Travel. It provides review on destinations and hotels by its members. Network of travel friends can be built in it and asked travel advice.

NetworkCityTherapy is the new online platform & social planning tool for European city life and city travel.
WAYN (standing for Where Are You Now?) also fall in this category. The service is thus intended to be used for its members to keep friends informed of where they are whilst travelling.TravBuddy.com and Travellerspoint are other travel related social networking sites.
Ryze.com, XING and LinkedIn is a social networking site for business. WebBiographies and Geni.com focuses on Genealogy & Biography. For sports there are different Social Networking sites like Joga Bonito for football. Last.fm for music freaks. Fotki , Fotolog , Zooomr and Flickr are for Photo sharing and Photoblogging.

These sites are popular region wise like Hi5 is popular in Central America, Cyworld in South Korea, Mixi in Japan, Nexopia in Canada, Skyblog in France Belgium, French Polynesia, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Amina - Chechen Republic Online in Chechenia and iWiW in Hungary.

These sites are a part of PR services. Celebrities like Justin Timberlake and Jay Sean are present on these sites. Many political organization have also opened there account. This is to increase membership base. Like Greenpeace on MySpace.

Privacy and security is important part on these sites. Username, password and personal information should be kept secret .Password should be changed regularly. URLs or script should not be pasted into the browser while logged into these sites. Never check ‘remember me’ when logging on a shared computer.

Fake profiles are common in these sites. Profiles of leaders like as of U.P. CM Mayawatis’ which has been recently removed are also found. Profiles on innate things like sun, moon can also be found.

Children have easy access to these sites. Hate communities and groups have sparked controversies. Like ‘I hate India’ communities. Also these sites got bad name after they were found to be part of murder mysteries.
Adnan Patrawala murder case where the 16 year old was abducted and later murdered by his own friends involved Orkut SNS in it. Several secrets which can be a threat to national security have been alleged to have been leaked on the social sites.

These websites have face censorship in many countries like Iran, Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates because of there contents.

Social networking sites are the in thing rite now according to analysts and are making good business sense.