With the advent of completely database-driven websites and dynamic content came the ability to serve each user a fully customized experience based on his or her personal preferences and selectable options. This capability opened up an entirely new “corner” of the internet that is now known as the social networking “genre,” if you will. Online social networking now encompasses quite a large variety of different types of websites and functionality, but at its core, social networking sites are based almost solely on user-generated content. The realm includes everything from the social bookmarking sites that have seemed to crop up out of nowhere in the thousands, all the way to the gargantuan and rapidly expanding “profile-based” sites where users can find long-lost friends and keep up with their seldom-contacted acquaintances alike at a mere glance. These powerful websites have become commonplace now that high speed internet service is so prevalent and widespread throughout the world.
Social Bookmarking Sites
These sites rely on users to post links to locations on the web that they’ve found useful, interesting, or funny. When other users find them similarly useful, they may also make their voice heard by adding what essentially amounts to a ‘vote,’ thereby increasing that link’s popularity. The most popular or most commonly ‘voted’ links appear on the home page of that particular social bookmarking site, where they have the potential to receive high volumes of traffic from social users looking for the coolest and most current content on the web. Major social bookmarking sites include Digg, StumbleUpon, and Del.icio.us.
Social Profile Sites
I’m calling these sites by this name for lack of a better one; they include MySpace, Facebook, and the more recently popular Twitter. Each of these sites has a feature that allows users to post their current ’status’ for others within their network of friends to read in a news feed style format. This enables users to see what dozens or hundreds of their friends / acquaintances / role models / idols /stalkees are doing at a moment’s notice, without having to actually pick up a phone to call them and ask how they’re doing. It’s taken the rate at which we absorb information about others and thrusted it into lightspeed territory. It seems that the next step would have to be having the information downloaded to our brains for us to receive it any faster.
