Social network service
From Saferpedia
A social network is a social structure with people and organizations called nodes connected to each other by one or more types of specific inter-dependencies like friendships, family, financial exchange, faith, etc. Examples of social networks: Hi5, Facebook, Faceparty, Flixter, Twitter, etc.
A social network service is focused on building and reflecting over human relationships, like people sharing interests and common activities.
History
Still early there was suggested the idea that individual computers, connected to each other, could form the base of social networks.
Early social network websites started as communities like The WELL (1985), Theglobe.com (1994) and Tripod (1995). These early communities were focused on making people to interact in chat rooms and share personal idea and information. Some communities had a different approach: interconnect people using e-mail. Examples of such sites: Classmates.com (1995) and SixDegrees.com (1997). Between 2002 and 2004 three social networks sites appeared to be the most popular in the world: Friendster (2002), MySpace and LinkedIn.
Social impact
Social science researchers started to investigate social network sites' impact over the society. There have been published several articles where were investigated identity, privacy, e-learning and use by teens. A special attention of the Journal for Computer Mediated Communications was dedicated to the study of social network sites.
Social networks are more and more used in legal and criminal investigations. Information published on sites like MySpace and Facebook were used by police and university officials to follow and send to trial users. In some cases, published content was used in court.
Facebook is more and more used by school administrations and law enforcements bodies as a source of evidence against students who are users. For example a policeman in Great Britain arrested a few people who took pictures in public of them selves holding weapons and posted them on Facebook.
This term is in development.
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