SOCIAL NETWORKING SITES—Its time to move on

Time flies quickly; a few years ago people started communicating by using the social networking methods. It was developed by the end of the 1990s, using wired gadgets such as telephones or ham radios. Today, the internet has reshaped our world beyond our imagination.

 

Even before the Internet, social networking existed. In a nutshell, social networking is when a person uses already existing contacts to meet new people as potential social or business links. Such links, in turn, will help expand future connections. It saves time. In our busy lives, making time to schedule face to face meetings doesn't fit into our schedules. We can "catch up with one another" as time permits.  

Basically, about one to two million accounts sign on everyday. There are about a hundred thousand users. It also has become a very good source of information. These websites help us interact with people from remote places.
People born after 1990, who were just five-years-old or younger when the use of Internet became mainstream in 1995, have grown up in a world dominated by online social networks such as Facebook and MySpace. Many people today cannot remember a world without the Internet, it may be “quite different for teens and children who cannot imagine a world where you can't go online to talk and apply the same principles to real-world interpersonal communications, mostly to a dysfunctional outcome.

In current position, there are literally thousands of social networking sites available on Internet. 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. The most important reason is to get in contact with new people (31%). The second most valued was to keep in touch with their friends (21%), whereas the third was general socializing (14%). A total of 11 different reasons and several sub-reasons were identified. 

The interesting element is that most of the social networking activities happen between 6 pm and 10 pm. In other words, Indian online users aren’t using social media during work hours (which is usually an assumed fact). 50.8 percent of the total online population in the Asia-Pacific region visited a social networking site in February 2010, reaching a total of 240.3 million visitors..

The study found Russia to have the world’s most engaged social networking audience, with visitors spending 6.6 hours and viewing 1,307 pages per visitor per month. Brazil is also topping the charts with the highest percentage (86%) of Internet consumers visiting a social network. The popularity of social networking in Brazil is due to the Orkut phenomenon. According to Greenlight Wireless, MySpace is the first social networking site to appear among the top five most highly visited sites by Skweezer's mobile users.

 

The National School Boards Association reports, that almost 60 percent of students who use social networking, talk about education topics online.  

Users of social networking site:

MySpace - 345,130,806
Facebook - 722,434,829
Hi5 -8,491,287
Friendster - 6,896,127
Orkut - 9,396,000
Bebo - 14,368,423
Tagged - 5,100,000

Most of the social networks we included are dominated by the age group 35-44.It’s a bit surprising that not one single site had the age group 18 – 24.Bebo appeals to a much younger audience than the other sites with 44% of its users being aged 17 or less. For MySpace, this number is also large; 33%.

Classmates.com has the largest share of users being aged 65 or more, 8%, and 78% are 35 or older. 64% of Twitter’s users are aged 35 or older. 61% of Facebook’s users are aged 35 or older.

Future in social networking sites as something that depends on technology. If the technology used for the networks changes and becomes even more powerful and full featured, more young people will want to use the networks. This will increase the amount of people on the social sites, and increase revenue for those who own them.

MOHUYA ROY