Friendship in the Online World: How People Are Growing Their Communities

Written by: Leah Maclean
November 1, 2007

Hands Typing on KeyboardDo you remember back when you were a teenager? If your life was anything like mine friendships were restricted to your local community. If you were lucky you might have also befriended the people where you had holidays or a pen-pal.

Little more than 10 or 15 years ago your community and your friendships were restricted by your location (unless you were a geek using bulletin boards). BUT things have changed! The rapid expansion of internet technologies and personal computer hardware has provided true global communications to anyone able to access it (not just the geeks).

Built on the back of easily accessible internet technologies many friendships were being sustained online through the growing popularity of email since the early 90s. In the past 5 years a more recent phenomenon has been the growth of web-based services that are collectively called social networking.

A social network service focuses on the building and verifying of online social networks for communities of people who share interests and activities, or who are interested in exploring the interests and activities of others, and which necessitates the use of software.

Most social network services are primarily web based and provide a collection of various ways for users to interact, such as chat, messaging, email, video, voice chat, file sharing, blogging, discussion groups, and so on.

From Wikipedia

Here is a quick overview of some of the more popular services (it would be impossible to document them all here) that you might have heard of.

LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com)

  • A business-oriented social networking site primarily as an alternative to traditional business networking
  • Populated by professionals, business owners and corporate employees
  • As of October 2007 it had more than 15 million registered users in 150 industries
  • Known to be used by recruiters in sourcing candidates for roles
  • An interesting tool to be aware of who your contacts know
  • Based on the principle that everyone in the world is connected by no more than six degrees of separation

Myspace (www.myspace.com)

  • Launched in August 2003 (and purchased in July 2005 by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation)
  • Primarily the domain of teenagers and performing artists
  • It has become an increasingly influential part of contemporary popular culture, especially in English speaking countries
  • As of early September 2007 there are over 200 million accounts
  • It includes tools to share writing/thoughts, music, photos and other interactive media (very attractive to performing artists looking to grow a following)
  • Has the ability to restrict who is able to read your profile and comment on your site (one of the reasons that it is loved by teenagers and worries “blocked” parents)

Facebook (www.facebook.com)

  • Launched on February, 2004, it is a recent entrant to this space and generally considered the mature sibiling of MySpace
  • Initially the membership was restricted to students of Harvard College and then was subsequently expanded to other Boston area schools but in September 2006 it was released to the general public
  • Primarily used by people across the mid 20s to late 40s age groups
  • As of early October it had over 42 million active members worldwide and expects to pass 60 million users by the end of the year
  • Allows users to share what they are up to with people in their group of contacts, including quick notes on “walls”, sharing photos, ideas and opinions
  • Provides the ability for people to setup or join common interest groups of other members as a way of growing their community

Twitter (www.twitter.com)

  • What do you call a person that uses Twitter?
  • Launched in March 2006 it is a service that allows users to send “updates” (text-based posts, up to 140 characters long) to the Twitter website, via SMS, instant messaging, email, or an application such as Twitterrific
  • Updates are displayed on the user’s profile page and instantly delivered to other users who have signed up to receive them
  • It can be compared to applications like web chat or instant messaging (IM) but instead of it being one-to-one it is one-to-many communication

So do these tools increase your community and your ability to connect with friends?

Well just like any form of communication with friends, the more you are actively communicating the more you will get out of it. There are many, many people who now have a community of like-minded people around the world thanks to some of these (and other online tools). The contributors and readers of this online magazine are living proof that online networking works.

A few words of warning :

  • Be careful with the information that you share - social networking sites have become a great source for identity theft and cyber-stalking.
  • Don’t give your real birth date to a site where you don’t know how it will be stored and used (this is a very important piece of personal information)
  • Don’t post pictures that contain other people unless you have their permission (wouldn’t you just love some of those embarassing shots of you loaded on the web somewhere)
  • Be careful about the requests to connect/be friends that you might receive - be ruthless in saying no to people you don’t know.
  • These sites are known to distort time and suck away a whole afternoon ;-)

So why not give some form of social networking a try …. if you are careful with your details all you have to loose is your time.

Leah Maclean - demystifying design and technology for small business women | http://www.thecalmspace.com/about#leah

Comments

Got something to say?