Social networking sites have gained huge popularity among Indian audiences. Particularly applications that have a social and business angle to them. Incidentally, after Brazil and the US, India has the highest number of registered users of Orkut. Some other major Indian players in the social networking segment include Linkedin, Bigadda, Orkut, Fropper, and Ibibo.

The concept of social networking is loosely based on the theory of six degrees of separation. Social networking sites provide utility, community, entertainment, recognition, and enterprise. So, to simplify it all, any networking site will be built around these. There could also be a professional networking site like Linkedin.com, a music networking site like Last.fm, or a general social networking site that works around communities like Orkut, Bigadda, etc.

There is an underlying difference between general social networking sites and professional networking sites. For instance, Linkedin is purely focused on business professionals to enable maximum productivity in minimum time. Also, people can be members of different networks simultaneously, depending on their preference of the USPs offered by each siteLinkedin (for professionals), Orkut (communities, networking), YouTube (videos), MySpace (music), etc.

How they Work
Social networks are built on user-generated content including text, photos, videos, etc. As the amount of data storage can be huge; latency issues with rich content need to be addressed right from the beginning. It is essential that networks are built with scalability and performance. User interface design, privacy features, and the ability to build an open extensible platform are essential. One of the challenges for social networking sites as opposed to any other website is that these have to maintain relationships among people, not just their information. Therefore, each new member brings not just himself but a constantly evolving set of new relationships, thereby adding to data load exponentially.

Todays Trends
Increasing Internet penetration coupled with a growing awareness of what the Internet can do has driven the huge popularity for social networking. Today, a much higher percentage of people are going online, have easy access to computers, understand that the Internet indeed adds value, and has reached a mature level of usage. Social networks have also increasingly become specialized, targeting specific areas such as marriage, dating, travel, music, gaming, etc.

According to Joe Kraus, Googles director of product management, There are three big trends in the social Web. Discovery is becoming social, that is, instead of searching on Google, most users ideally like to seek help from friends for searching something.

How these users share information is also undergoing a change, as most people in a social network want to know what is happening in their friends life.

The concept of a site built around the user content is pass. Today, users expect all sites to be social. They expect that if they are using a commerce site and they know that their friends are also on the same, they should be able to see what the friends have bought and whether they liked it, says Kraus. Social is a feature, not a destination, he adds.

Users of social networks generally are in the age group of 18-35. However, there is no dearth of members from older age groups logging onto social networking sites. Though, one needs to keep in mind that unlike other networks social networks lose value once they go beyond a certain size. As says Paul Saffo, a Silicon Valley forecaster in The Economist: The value of a social network is defined not only by whos on it, but by whos excluded.. This means that even though people do log onto social networks for building communities, most do not intend to receive requests from unknown users.

Stuti Das
stutid@cybermedia.co.in

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