THE RISE OF SOCIAL NETWORK

Historically, it used to be enough to have an online presence on the Internet for the one-way broadcasting and dissemination of information. Today, social networks such as Facebook and Twitter are driving new forms of social interaction, dialogue, exchange and collaboration. Social networking sites (referred to more broadly as social media) enable users to swap ideas, to post updates and comments, or to participate in activities and events, while sharing their wider interests. From general chit-chat to propagating breaking news, from scheduling a date to following election results or coordinating disaster response, from gentle humour to serious research, social networks are now used for a host of different reasons by various user communities.

Social networking services are not just bringing Internet users into fast-flowing online conversations — social media are helping people to follow breaking news, keep up with friends or colleagues, contribute to online debates or learn from others. They are transforming online user behaviour in terms of users’ initial entry point, search, browsing and purchasing behaviour. Some experts suggest that social media will become the Internet’s new search function — predicting that people will spend less time navigating the Internet independently and instead search for information or make decisions based on “word-of-mouth” recommendations from their friends, the so-called “friend-casting”. In the process, social media are changing users’ expectations of privacy, acceptable online behaviour and etiquette — fast.

Morgan Stanley estimates that there were about 830 million “unique” users of social networks worldwide at the end of 2009. Based on a total Internet user population of 1.7 billion at the end of 2009, according to ITU’s World Telecommunication/ICT Development Report 2010, this suggests that around half of all Internet users could currently be using social media applications. Current estimates of the number of social media users vary significantly, partly due to difficulties defining and categorizing sites and applications as “social networks”, but also due to margins of error in estimating the number of “unique” users (since users of one social network are more likely to use several other social networking services as well).

Many social network users access these services over their mobile phones. According to ITU’s report Measuring the Information Society 2010, mobile broadband subscriptions reached an estimated 640 million at the end of 2009, driven by growing demand for smartphones, new applications and social networking services, and are set to exceed 1 billion this year. The market research firm eMarketer projects that just over 600 million people will use their phones to tap into social networks by 2013, compared with 140 million in 2009. Facebook passed the historic milestone of 500 million users on 21 July 2010 — if Facebook were a country, it would be the third most populous nation in the world after China and India.

Twitter enables its members to post or send short (140-character) messages called “tweets”, whereby users can broadcast what they are doing or thinking to the world, to closed “list” groups or to other individual Twitterers. Its original question (“What are you doing?”) has been reinterpreted as: “What do you find interesting or funny?”, “What do you think?” or “Please help spread the word!” (or sometimes all three together). MySpace concentrates on music and entertainment, while LinkedIn targets career-minded professionals. Orkut, a service owned by Google, is used mainly in India and Brazil, while in China, Qzone is reportedly one of the largest social networking sites with over 380 million registered accounts now. Other community sites include Skyrock in France, VKontakte in the Russian Federation, and Cyworld in the Republic of Korea. There are also numerous smaller social networks that appeal to specific interests, such as ResearchGATE, which connects scientists and researchers, or to languages or nationalities (for example, the Polish Nasza-klasa.pl service with 11 million users or Tuenti in Spain, with 4.5 million users).


                                            BY  PHILIP TAMBA