Social Networking, a Phenomenon?

Welcome to my Second Blog, let's start with a video on a brief story about social networks. Please pay attention to the first 1 minute and 2 second of the video :)



Social Networking can definitely be considered a phenomenon, rather a social phenomenon. You might question yourself "why is this so"? Well...the answer is really simple...Just a mere decade ago, the concept of online social networking was not given much attention; however, as of today, there are a total of 65 or more social networking sites with over 1 million users and out of all these sites, 5 sites have at least a whooping one hundred million registered users.

Basically, the bottom line is that societies all over the world have survived without the services provided by such social networks for a very long long time (centuries and centuries), so how on earth did these networks which was mainly formed in college dormitories to cater to a small population of students turn out to become a billion dollar industry?

A Little History

-After its development in 2002, Friendster became the first online social network to get the attention of a worldwide audience.

-As compared to face-to-face interaction in our daily lives, Friendster had helped to accelerate this process of meeting new friends and connecting with your old ones.

Friendster went live in 2003 and celebrated 2 years of dominance and success as a media outlet before losing out to MySpace in 2005 and Facebook years later.

Now in the 21st century, technological advancements have indeed impacted many aspects of our lives one way or another; its main focus is to be effective and efficient and most importantly, being easy to use.

Although humans are equipped with the natural basic skill to interact with other human beings, Social Networking, the Interaction 2.0, has impacted us to create, acquire, and maintain relationships effectively, efficiently, and with ease.

Since social networking is linked to this fundamental necessity, it proves its status as a phenomenon.

To add on, Social Network sites have provided us with numerous applications that we fully utilized. Lets take the two top social networking sites to illustrate this-Facebook & MySpace. While Facebook provided games, other aps, and other motivating factors to encourage people to join them, MySpace provided a huge music network which allowed bands to gain worldwide recognition and fans. Facebook even allows a user to customize and change and update his or her profile, as well as upload his or her latest pictures or videos.

However, such applications are not the only reasons for people constantly signing up and registering account(s) with Facebook or any other social network sites.

The most important reason is that social interaction is a human need and it is inevitable. Humans desire and wish to attain the latest information, gossips, etc., as fast as possible have been made possible with the incorporation of the Social Networking Sites.