SOCIAL NETWORKING INTRODUCTION A social networking is an online service, platform, or site that focuses on building and reflecting of social networks or social relations among people, who, for example, 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 means for users to interact over the Internet, such as e-mail and instant messaging. Online community services are sometimes considered as a social network service, though in a broader sense, social network service usually means an individual-centered service whereas online community services are group-centered. Social networking sites allow users to share ideas, activities, events, and interests within their individual networks. Social networking venues have taken root in this generation and have revolutionized the way that personal interactions take shape. These websites allow people to easily post photographs, videos, and other information online to share with others, usually at little or no cost. The extreme ease with which anyone can obtain an online profile begs the question as to what types of materials are being laid out for the world to see. It is important for students, in particular students who will likely be working in a health care field, to understand that their actions online have the very real possibility of causing problems in their everyday lives. The main types of social networking services are those which contain category places (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 and Twitter widely used worldwide, Nexopia (mostly in Canada); Bebo, VKontakte, Hi5, Hyves (mostly in The Netherlands), Draugiem.lv (mostly in Latvia), StudiVZ (mostly in Germany), iWiW (mostly in Hungary), Tuenti (mostly in Spain), Nasza- Klasa (mostly in Poland), Decayenne, Tagged, XING, Badoo and Skyrock in parts of Europe; Orkut and Hi5 in South America and Central America; and Mixi, Multiply, Orkut, Wretch, Renren and Cyworld in Asia and the Pacific Islands and LinkedIn and Orkut are very popular in India. Past research has been conducted on the types of people who frequent social networking sites and found that the majority of users are college students who live at home. Other work found that the types of materials on a personal profile and the level of activity by the user could be factors that indicate a high level of narcissism. Narcissistic tendencies may increase the level of personal disclosure and unprofessional content. Another group of researchers examined how the number of friends a user has accumulated on their social networking site affects whether an outside visitor to their public profile perceives them negatively or positively. They found a negative relationship between number of “friends” on Facebook and positive views of that individual. Prior research examining the types of content that is being shared by medical students and residents and students at a small Midwestern university found high levels of unprofessional content and personal information being disclosed. The current study examined how undergraduate psychology majors utilize Facebook by gathering data on their level of publicly accessible information and the rate of unprofessional content. As popular as Facebook is, and as easy as it is to access personal profiles, specifically on the same network, it would be easy for a potential employer or admissions administrator to gain access to information that could be seen as unprofessional and inappropriate. Therefore, it is important for students to maintain their privacy and only allow certain types of information that they feel to be of no threat to their reputation to be accessible to the public. This is a new and relatively unstudied phenomenon, as in no other time during history has it been so easy to share information with so many people in such a remarkably sophisticated way. HISTORY The potential for computer networking to facilitate new forms of computer-mediated social interaction was suggested early on. Efforts to support social networks via computer-mediated communication were made in many early online services, including Usenet, ARPANET, LISTSERV, and bulletin board services (BBS). Many prototypical features of social networking sites were also present in online services such as America Online, Prodigy, and CompuServe. Early social networking on the World Wide Web began in the form of generalized online communities such as Theglobe.com (1995), Geocities (1994) and Tripod.com (1995). Many of these early communities focused on bringing people together to interact with each other through chat rooms, and encouraged users to share personal information and ideas via personal webpages by providing easy-to-use publishing tools and free or inexpensive webspace. Some communities - such as Classmates.com - took a different approach by simply having people link to each other via email addresses. In the late 1990s, user profiles became a central feature of social networking sites, allowing users to compile lists of "friends" and search for other users with similar interests. New social networking methods were developed by the end of the 1990s, and many sites began to develop more advanced features for users to find and manage friends. This newer generation of social networking sites began to flourish with the emergence of SixDegrees.com in 1997, followed by Makeoutclub in 2000, Friendster in 2002, and soon became part of the Internet mainstream. Friendster was followed by MySpace and LinkedIn a year later, and finally, Bebo. Attesting to the rapid increase in social networking sites' popularity, by 2005, MySpace was reportedly getting more page views than Google. Facebook, launched in 2004, has since become the largest social networking site in the world. Today, it is estimated that there are now over 200 active sites using a wide variety of social networking models. May 2011: Based on TNS research, the global average of which access daily the social networking sites accounts is 46 percent. GROWTH RATE OF THE SOCIAL NETWORKING INDUSTRY The data doesn’t deny that Facebook has come to dominate social networking in the US, and overtook MySpace in 2009. But MySpace’s 57 million US unique users are nothing to sneeze at – it’s still a top web property with users who are highly engaged. The second tier networks, such as Tagged, Hi5, MyYearbook and Bebo, still receive an impressive 3- 6 million uniques per month, and users spend a fair amount of time on those sites. BlackPlanet users spent 3.6 minutes longer interacting with the site than the average Facebook visitor. MyYearbook and Tagged users were on these sites more than 3 minutes longer than the average MySpace visitor. There is definitely addictive behavior occuring on these other sites. Nielsen published stats showing that “three of the world’s most popular brands online are social-media related (Facebook, YouTube and Wikipedia) and the world now spends over 110 billion minutes on social networks and blog sites. This equates to 22 percent of all time online or one in every four and half minutes. For the first time ever, social network or blog sites are visited by three quarters of global consumers who go online, after the numbers of people visiting these sites increased by 24% over last year. The average visitor spends 66% more time on these sites than a year ago, almost 6 hours in April 2010 versus 3 hours, 31 minutes last year. Facebook Facebook keeps its stats page updated, and boasts over 350 million users. Facebook has announced 400 million users on February, 2010. Facebook demonstrates growth in total number of visitors (now over Yahoo, for second place) and a high degree of attention (time on site). Facebook has surged past Yahoo as the number two most popular site in the U.S., drawing nearly 134 million unique visitors in January, 2010. LinkedIn It has 60 million users worldwide. Over the past year, network has seen a significant amount of growth, especially internationally. As of last December, the network had 55 million members, so it’s grown by 5 million in less than two months. In October, LinkedIn’s network’s CEO, Jeff Weiner, said in the post that half of LinkedIn’s membership is international. Tagged Total registered users are 100 million. Global monthly unique visitors are 16 million. Daily users are 3.5 million. Average of 75,000 – 100,000 people daily register on Tagged. Twitter Sysmos launched a report about global usage of Twitter, with most adoption in US. Interesting fact is the number of U.S. unique users was 50.8%, a sharp drop from 62.1%. This suggests the use of Twitter outside the U.S. has experienced significant growth over the past six months. Data indicates that many Twitter users are not active. The number of Twitter users has climbed to a lofty 75 million, but the growth rate of new users is slowing and a lot of current Twitterers are inactive. Twitter themselves finally publish numbers indicating there are 50 million tweets created each day. People were tweeting 5,000 times a day in 2007. By 2008, that number was 300,000, and by 2009 it had grown to 2.5 million per day. Tweets grew 1,400% last year to 35 million per day. Today, we are seeing 50 million tweets per day, that’s an average of 600 tweets per second. Twitter co-owner Biz Stone has revealed that the site now has 105 million registered users. He revealed the startling number at a Twitter developer conference, aptly title Chirp, and also mentioned that 30,000 people a day are signing up to tweet.