Social Network (Essay Sample)

The Social Network
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The Social Network
The popularity and emergence of the social networks in the recent years have greatly impacted on the web ecosystem, leading to a more collaborative and conducive environment. Today, hundreds of millions of people are active participants of the social networks and communities. It’s through this that they successfully produce and consume the various media contents in a very revolutionary way. The social network provides the best platform for sharing multimedia information between two or more person (CSA, 2010). Additionally, it provides a powerful reflection of the dynamics and structure of the 21st century society and the way they interact both technologically and with other people. The tremendous growth of the social networks has day after day revolutionized the almost all the phases of the content value chain such as production, manufacturing, distribution and end consumption. The importance of this rapidly evolving field can be evidenced in many content sharing services such as entertainment, over-the- internet multimedia communication, social multimedia search, and security and healthcare applications (CSA, 2010).
Social networking can be termed as one of the primary reasons why many people become frequent internet users. Until the immergence of the social networks, most people wouldn’t any value of visiting a web. This is, therefore, a very indicator of the robust happenings and transformations that are happening in the cyberspace. Nowadays, the internet users both produce and consume large amounts of multimedia content through the various available social sites. Personal behavior, when combined with social networking has brought forth a new era where sharing of multimedia content in social networking sites has become a day to day practice (CSA, 2010). In fact, the number is overwhelmingly growing every day. To offer and promote these social networking capabilities, a number of social sites are operating as either pure social sites such as Facebook or; partially offering the social networking abilities such as the Google plus.
Except for the renowned "first tier" social networks that host hundreds of millions of users all over the world, there are also smaller and regional networking sites that act equally to supplement on social networking. The scope of such sites, however, are limited within a specific profession, city, membership, city or a continent (CSA, 2010). In addition, there are a number of vertically oriented communities that socially gather the members around a given topic and thus, have quite a number of users. Facebook has been ranked as the most visited site globally, with over 500 million users. In Asia, the dominating site is the Friendster while Orkut and Vkontakte.ru dominate Brazil and Russia respectively. Additionally, there are some sites such as the Vznet that has been made purely for purposes of social networking. However, not all the social networks are meant to serve nonprofessional users. LinkedIn, Viadeo and Xing are among some of the most established professional- oriented sites that enable professional connections worldwide. They have millions of professional users who interact to initiate professions discussions, as well as initiating potential business collaborations (CSA, 2010)....