Social Networking Websites

With help of new technology, the world that we live in today is constantly growing and expanding at the same time as it is reducing distances within it. We get closer to the world in general but at the same time there is a common fear that we also get more and more isolated from our friends and family and from people in general. I would like to argue that it is there within that the need for social softwares is to be find.

Social networking sites such as Friendster, Classmates.com, WAYNE and iWiW are only a few out of hundreds of similar sites all with the main purpose to help people to sustain their exsisting networks and to create new networks.The user connects via the site to people they already know (for nourishing their relationships) and for regaining friendship with people they might have lost contact to. The ways of doing this vary slightly between the different sites but the idea remains the same, find your friends, find old friends and maybe also find new ones via for example a common interest.

The group of people to whom the site is targeting varies of course between the different theme connected to the otherwise quite similar sites. WAYNE (WhereAreYouNow?) have a travel focus and therefore target people who have the possibility to travel. Classmates.com targets of course adults who has graduated (and after that lost contact to their classmates). Friendster is more general and seems at first to be open to everyone but functions such as searching old friends via former school or company are only avaible for a few countries and is therefore mostly geared towards citizens of these countries. Surely, people that do not live in those country can still enjoy using Friendster but it will probably never get as successful and widespread in the countries where many of the functions are not avaible.

It seems to be quite even gender divided on all of the sites but all of them except iWiW and Classmates.com seem to have a majority of members born in the 70’s and 80’s.

The main common interest for people using these sites is networking but within several of these sites, discussion groups are also formed around common interests. WAYNE features a function that display where people have or will travel and connect people in that way.
There are three main categories of groups to be found within social networking sites. The first group is friends who already have a good contact in real life and only want to sustain their network by an easier or alternative mode of communication. The second group consists of people rebuilding old relationship, trying to get in contact with old friends (rebuilding a broken chain in a network). The third group is people networking and creating relationships with people they do not know from the beginning. This third group is more common within other type of social sites and not as much at this friend-finding sites but they exist there to some extent as well. My Space for example, is one that probably has a rather equal share of group one and group three.

In some of the sites, popularity of a person is shown in one way or another and some users might find the site turning into a contest to achieve as many friends or clicks on their name as possible, leaving those with only a couple to feel outside and not as successful user, hence the original meaning of the site might get lost.

The most revolutionary aspect of this type of social networking sites are those where one can find old friends with an easy click, friends you would never have been able to find again without the help of online resources. When the social networking sites works like that it completely changes the rules that we were used to play by before online networking became part of our lives.

Networking is the key to our society, this is how we evolve and develop as person and our society in general. Social networking is as important in business-, tolerance-, community- as it is in a personal aspect. Today are social networks differs widely from how they looked 20 years ago, they spread across the world and between people who might never had met. At the same time, we seem to have a growing need of keeping online address books, RSS blogs, join different communities that one get invited to, all to sustain the relationships we already have. When did it get this hard to uphold our networks? We have been fine sustaining our social networks long time before the social sites and internet came into use, so why this need? Maybe it is internet itself that created this need, in a time of constant information overload we might get afraid to loose our contacts within the constant information flood we receive every day. Suddenly it is easier to meet or neighbours online than at your doorstep and when the need to physically move between places decreases (and with that also the person to person interaction possibility of it) the need to stay in contact online increases.