Social Networking
Definition:
The term “social networking” does not exclusively belong to digital technology on the
Web. On the contrary, social networks had been studied from the beginning of 20th century with the aim to comprehend how the members of a certain community interact and which mechanism can determine the interaction itself.
In shorter terms it’s the use of dedicated websites and applications to interact with other users, or to find people with similar interests to oneself.
In today’s social networking refers to all activities that are carried out with-in specific online services that provides free space and software tools which allows you to create networks of people. In other words social networking is a Web site that allows individuals to construct a public or semi-public profile.
The mechanism following: social networking services enable users to create a profile for themselves, by inserting their personal data.
Users’ data are not only constituted by vital statistics, but they include a lot of other information which pertains to user hobbies, passions, interests, professional background and so on. This kind of personal data, all spontaneously provided by the user her/himself, permit to create interconnected networks of people who decide to put in common their interests and to have an online identity which fully describes them.
The great strength of social networking are the multiple ways the users have to interact. Below is a list of the main communication resources used to build social networks: chat; messaging; wiki; email; video; voice; chat; All the technologies listed above are not new to the Web users who had been surfing the Web during the last ten years, but today we label “social networking sites” those which
“reinvented” these technologies in commercial and non-commercial ways. Social networking constitutes