On social Web sites
Introduction
During the past 10 years, hundreds of millions of Internet users all over the world have visited thousands of social networking sites and social media sites. They have taken advantage of the free services of such sites in order to stay connected online with their offline friends and new online acquaintances, or to share user-created contents, such as photos, videos, bookmarks, blogs, etc.
There are so many social networking sites and social media sites that there is even a search engine for them [30]. Further, there are Web sites, such as Ning and KickApps, which make it possible for users to create social networking sites, and host those Web sites. Such US-based sites as MySpace and Facebook each claim over 250 million registered users [83]. YouTube, the video-sharing site, is the third most visited site among all Web sites, right behind Yahoo and Google. Barack Obama's election campaign for Presidency of the United States extensively used the Internet and social networking sites to get his message out, drum up donations, organize campaign volunteers, and get people to vote [95], [44]. Paul Potts and Susan Boyle, contestants on the “Britain's Got Talent” talent-search television program, became overnight international singing mega-stars when their auditions posted on YouTube drew over 10–20 million views in a matter of weeks. Even a course on “Facebook” is offered in Stanford University, in which students are to build Facebook applications and find ways to attract users [14]. Twitter, the social networking site that features 140-character messages, called microblogs, are so popular in the US that it has spawned such words as twitter, tweed, and twitterati [64]. Someone even created an interactive book, for digital reading devices, that includes text, online video, and Twitter update stream [84]. Kind-hearted people now use Facebook and Twitter to locate the owners of lost items they find, such as wallets, mobile phones, digital cameras, etc. [85].
Refs. [33], [100] highlight some of the social networking sites popular outside the US. Orkut is wildly popular in Brazil; half the Internet users in Brazil are registered members of Orkut. It even inspired a popular song “I’m going to delete you from my Orkut.” The 87% of the Internet users in the Philippines are members of Friendster. Orkut and Friendster originated in the US, but have been overshadowed by other sites and instead enjoy popularity elsewhere. Skyrock Blog was the communication vehicle among the youth during the 2005 riots in France. A significant portion of the traffic for Facebook comes from Arab countries. In particular, Egypt has the highest number of users, after the US, Canada, and UK. Facebook has become an organizing tool of choice for people in Arab countries attempting to promote freedom of speech, human rights, and democracy.
Social networking sites and social media sites have had both positive and negative impact. Many users spend excessive amounts of time creating and/or viewing self-aggrandizing or totally trivial updates on tiny details of their and their so-called online friends’ activities. Many of them lose sense of what is appropriate, and end up losing employment or college entrance opportunities because of their having posted inappropriate remarks or photos on social networking sites or social media sites. Many pedophiles join popular social networking sites to hunt for preys. Recently, MySpace removed, under pressure from the US government, 90,000 members who are known sex offenders [106]. Many users post copyrighted materials without authorization, or pornographic or other illegal contents, forcing site operators to hire staff to remove them or risk getting sued by copyright holders or even have their sites banned by governments.
We set out to create a knowledge-sharing Web site. As part of the work, we wanted to understand what social Web sites are, what their essential features are and will be, how they benefit people, what problems they have posed, and how social Web sites are likely to evolve in the foreseeable future. We realized quickly that there is a dearth of academic papers dealing with social networking sites and social media sites, but there are lots of press articles, Wikipedia articles, and blogs about them. However, we found that many of them focus only one a small number of popular sites (Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr), and most articles also get rapidly outdated, as the sites evolve fast. Further, most articles do not provide adequate explanations about how things work, such as the Facebook Platform and the Google Open Social. Even worse, many articles report what are only plans and hypes released by the sites’ marketing departments. We had to study many press articles, blogs and Wikipedia articles. We had to cross reference them to understand what they say and also ensure accuracy of the information. Further, we joined a few dozen sites and experimented with most of their many features.
In this paper, we organize and summarize the four aspects of social Web sites that we believe would serve as a comprehensive framework for understanding the status and future of social Web sites. We believe such a framework would be useful to people who use, study, or build such sites. The four aspects are taxonomy of social Web sites, taxonomy of their essential features, taxonomy of the uses and benefits of social Web sites, taxonomy of the issues and challenges facing the sites, and a prognosis of how the sites are likely to evolve in the near future. To the best of our knowledge, there are very few papers or articles that attempt to bring together all these aspects of social Web sites. Papers or articles that do attempt to cover all these aspects of social Web sites, however, run the risk of giving a rather skewed view of the social Web sites, and also of quickly becoming obsolete. The sheer number of social Web sites makes it a challenge to classify them. Further, most of the social Web sites are moving targets, in terms the number of users, user demographics, features provided, business strategies, etc. In order to overcome these challenges, we have attempted to cast the discussions of each of the four aspects of social Web sites in terms of taxonomy that is simultaneously general enough and specific enough so as not to be highly susceptible to changes to social Web sites in the near future, say, the next 4–5 years. In other words, we feel that the taxonomies we use to cover the four key aspects of social Web sites should serve as a framework for discussing, studying, using, and even building social Web sites for the foreseeable future.
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. In Section 2, we provide our definition and taxonomy of social Web sites. In Section 3, we review and provide taxonomy of essential features found in many of the social Web sites. In Section 4, we discuss how some of the social Web sites make their data and some of the features available to outside programs. In Section 5, we provide technical insights into the implementation and prototypical architecture of the social Web sites. In 6 Uses of social web sites, 7 Issues and challenges, we provide taxonomy of the benefits and uses of social Web sites, and taxonomy of the problems facing social Web sites, respectively. In Section 8, we provide a prognosis of social Web sites based on today's trends. We conclude the paper in Section 9.
Section snippets
Taxonomy of social web sites
We define social Web sites as those Web sites that make it possible for people to form online communities, and share user-created contents (UCCs). The people may be the users of the open Internet or may be restricted to those who belong to a particular organization (e.g., corporation, university, professional society, etc.). The community may be a network of offline friends (whose friendship is extended to online), online acquaintances, or one or more interest groups (based on school attended,
Essential features of social web sites
There are thousands of social Web sites, and the sites differ in details and layouts of the features they provide. Further, they continue to add new features and make changes to existing features. It is not feasible, or even meaningful, to describe full details of all the features of all the sites. However, if we start from the primary objectives of social Web sites, we are able to extract essential features of the sites. The objectives of the sites are to enable the formation of online
Opening social web sites to external programs
Many application developers wanted to be able to develop applications that can make use of the enormous amounts of data stored on social Web sites, and make those applications available to the members of those sites. Many users of sites have found it bothersome to go through similar procedures and provide a similar set of data to establish online connections on a site with connections they have already established on other sites, because the sites do not allow the users to directly export their
Implementation and architecture of social web sites
Most social Web sites, including such gigantic ones as Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and Flickr, have been developed, at least initially, by a surprisingly small group of engineers. Typically, the group included a few architecture designers, a few feature developers, a few network engineers, a few system administrators, and one database administrator. The engineers who created the sites had evidently no idea that the sites would grow, in terms of traffic, number of users, and amount of data posted
Uses of social web sites
Social Web sites have managed to attract hundreds of millions of people and mountains of UCCs from all over the world. Now many users can derive benefits from the availability of the enormous number of people and the enormous amounts of UCCs on social Web sites.
In this section, we provide taxonomy of the uses of social Web sites. We group the users of social Web sites into three types: namely, individual users, businesses, and government. We examine the uses and benefits of social Web sites for
Issues and challenges
Social Web sites as we know them today have only a 5–6 year history. The growth of some of the sites, in terms of the number of users, the level of daily traffic, and the amount of UCCs stored, has been absolutely incredible. The general sense is that even the founders of those sites did not envision such growth. As social Web sites have evolved, various unforeseen issues and challenges have surfaced. We can group them into two types. As social Web sites have been new experiences to both the
Trends and prognosis
On the basis of the recent trends reported in press articles, we feel that we can fairly safely predict how social Web sites will evolve. Below we summarize our predictions.
Concluding remarks
Social Web sites have rapidly become an integral part of daily lives of hundreds of millions of Internet users all over the world. This is nothing short of a major phenomenon. Since there are very few academic papers on social Web sites, and many of the press articles, Wikipedia articles, and blogs deal with limited subjects related to social Web sites, and many of the press articles and blogs are difficult to comprehend or outdated or inaccurate, we tried to provide a comprehensive paper that
Acknowledgments
Several graduate students at Sungkyunkwan University did an initial feature analysis of various representative social Web sites. They are Seungwoo Choo, Hyeong-Joon Kim, Gang-Nyeon Kim, Sung-Up Moon, Byung-Woo Nam, Eu-Teum Park, and Ki-Tae Yoon.
We thank the Editor-in-Chief for suggesting the inclusion of discussions of architectures of the social Web sites. His suggestions led to our adding Section 5, and expanding Section 8.
This research was supported by the Ministry of Knowledge Economy
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