Social Network Services

Shailendra Pal

student

A social network service focuses on building and reflecting social network or social relationship among people, e.g., who share interests and/or activities. A social network service essentially consists of a representation of each user (often a profile), his/her social links, and a variety of additional services. Most social network services are web based and provide various ways for users to interact over the internet, such as e-mail and instant messaging services.

The main types of social networking services are those which contain category divisions (such as former school-year or classmates), means to connect with friends (usually with self-description pages) and a recommendation system linked to trust. Popular methods now combine many of these, with Facebook, Bebo and Twitter widely used worldwide; MySpace LinkedIn being the most widely used in North America;Nexopia (mostly in Canada); Bebo, Hi5, StudiVZ (mostly in Germany), iWiW (mostly in Hungary), Tuenti (mostly in Spain), Decayenne, Tagged, XING; Badoo and Skyrock in parts of Europe; Orkut and Hi5 in South America and Central America;and Friendster, Mixi, Multiply, Orkut, Wretch, Xiaonei Cyworld in Asia and the Pacific Islands and Orkut, Facebook , SiliconIndia in India.

There have been some attempts to standardize these services to avoid the need to duplicate entries of friends and interests (see the FOAF standard and the Open Source Initiative), but this has led to some concerns about privacy.