Social networking

A social network service focuses on building online communities of people who share interests and/or activities, or who are interested in exploring the interests and activities of others. Most social network services are web based and provide a variety of ways for users to interact, such as e-mail and instant messaging services.
Social networking has created new ways to communicate and share information. Social networking websites are being used regularly by millions of people, and it now seems that social networking will be an enduring part of everyday life. The main types of social networking services are those which contain directories of some categories (such as former classmates), means to connect with friends (usually with self-description pages), and recommender systems linked to trust.


Facebook.com

Facebook is a free-access social networking website that is operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc.[1] Users can join networks organized by city, workplace, school, and region to connect and interact with other people. People can also add friends and send them messages, and update their personal profiles to notify friends about themselves. The website's name refers to the paper facebooks depicting members of a campus community that some US colleges and preparatory schools give to incoming students, faculty, and staff as a way to get to know other people on campus.
Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook with fellow computer science major students and his roommates Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes while he was a student at Harvard University.[4] Website membership was initially limited to Harvard students, but was expanded to other colleges in the Boston area, the Ivy League, and Stanford University. It later expanded further to include any university student, then high school students, and, finally, to anyone aged 13 and over. The website currently has more than 175 million active users worldwide.[5] Facebook recently surpassed Myspace in amount of visitors, making Facebook the most popular social network, followed by MySpace .

hi5.com

hi5 is a social networking website, which, throughout 2008, was one of the top 20 most visited sites on the Internet (among people who have the Alexa toolbar installed on their browser.[1]) The company was founded in 2003 by Ramu Yalamanchi who is also the current CEO.[2][3] As of January 2009, hi5 claims to have over 60 million active members.[4]
In hi5, users create an online profile in order to show information such as interests, age and hometown and upload user pictures where users can post comments. hi5 also allows the user to create personal photo albums and set up a music player in the profile. Users can also send friend requests via e-mail to other users. When a person receives a friend request, he or she may accept or decline it, or block the user altogether. If the user accepts another user as a friend, the two will be connected directly or in the 1st degree. The user will then appear on the person's friend list and vice-versa.
Some users opt to make their profiles available for everyone on hi5 to view. Other users exercise the option to make their profile viewable only to those people who are in their network. The network of friends consists of a user's direct friends (1st degree), the friends of those direct friends (2nd degree) and the friends of the friends of direct friends (3rd degree).

Tagged.com

Tagged.com is a social networking site. It was co-founded by Harvard graduates and entrepreneurs Greg Tseng and Johann Schleier-Smith.[1] Tagged.com was launched in October 2004 by Tagged Inc. and is privately owned. Tagged Inc. has raised $7 million in funding from Silicon Valley venture capital firm Mayfield Fund.[2][3][4] The site initially targeted US high school students[5] but has since opened to all users worldwide age 13 and older. The company reached profitability in early 2007.[6] The site allows its users to build and customize profiles, send messages, leave comments, post bulletins, customize status, browse photos, watch videos, play games, give gifts, give tags, chat and make friends.[7] Early innovations include the use of third-party widgets and YouTube as a part of the site’s graphical interface. Other partnerships include Slide, RockYou, PhotoBucket, Meebo[8], Razz[9] and Jangl[10]. As of July 2008, the site claims to have 70 million registered users.[11] In late 2008, Tagged raised $5 million venture debt from Horizon Technology Finance and Leader Ventures.