Social network

A social network is a social structure made up of a set of actors (such as individuals or organizations) and the dyadic ties between these actors (such as relationships, connections, or interactions). A social network perspective is employed to model the structure of a social group, how this structure influences other variables, or how structures change over time.[1] The study of these structures uses methods in social network analysis to identify influential nodes, local and global structures, and network dynamics. Social networks are distinct from information, biological, or electrical networks, but theories and methods generalizing to all of these complex networks are studied in the field of network science.[2][3] Social networks and the analysis of them is an inherently interdisciplinary academic field which emerged from social psychology, sociology, statistics, and graph theory. Jacob Moreno is credited with developing the first sociograms in the 1930s to study interpersonal relationships as structures in which people were points and the relationships between them were drawn as connecting lines. These approaches were mathematically formalized in the 1950s and theories and methods of social networks became pervasive in the social and behavioral sciences by the 1980s.[1][4]

Facebook
Facebook is a social networking service and website launched in February 2004, operated and privately owned by Facebook Inc.[1] As of February 2012, Facebook has more than 845 million active users.[5] Users must register before using the site, after which they may create a personal profile, add other users as friends, and exchange messages, including automatic notifications when they update their profile. Additionally, users may join common-interest user groups, organized by workplace, school or college, or other characteristics, and categorize their friends into lists such as "People From Work" or "Close Friends". The name of the service stems from the colloquial name for the book given to students at the start of the academic year by some university administrations in the United States to help students get to know each other. Facebook allows any users who declare themselves to be at least 13 years old to become registered users of the site.[6] Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg with his college roommates and fellow students Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes.[7] The Web site's membership was initially limited by the founders to Harvard students, but was expanded to other colleges in the Boston area, the Ivy League, and Stanford University. It gradually added support for students at various other universities before opening to high school students, and eventually to anyone aged 13 and over. However, based on ConsumerReports.org in May 2011, there are 7.5 million children under 13 with accounts and 5 million under 10, violating the site's terms of service.[8]

A January 2009 Compete.com study ranked Facebook as the most used social networking service by worldwide monthly active users.[9] Entertainment Weekly included the site on its end-of-the-decade "best-of" list, saying, "How on earth did we stalk our exes, remember our co-workers' birthdays, bug our friends, and play a rousing game of Scrabulous before Facebook?"[10] Quantcast estimates Facebook has 138.9 million monthly unique U.S. visitors in May 2011.[11] According to Social Media Today, in April 2010 an estimated 41.6% of the U.S. population had a Facebook account. [12] Nevertheless, Facebook's market growth started to stall in some regions, with the site losing 7 million active users in the United States and Canada in May 2011.[13] Facebook filed for an initial public offering on February 1, 2012.[14]
Users can create profiles with photos, lists of personal interests, contact information, and other personal information. Users can communicate with friends and other users through private or public messages and a chat feature. They can also create and join interest groups and "like pages" (called "fan pages" until April 19, 2010), some of which are maintained by organizations as a means of advertising.[54] A 2012 Pew Internet and American Life study identified that between 20-30% of Facebook users are "power users" who frequently link, poke, post and tag themselves and others.

[55]
TWITTER Twitter is an online social networking service and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based posts of up to 140 characters, known as "tweets". It was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and launched that July. The service rapidly gained worldwide popularity, with over 300 million users as of 2011,[6] generating over 300 million tweets and handling over 1.6 billion search queries per day.[3][8][9] It has been described as "the SMS of the Internet."[10] Twitter Inc. is based in San Francisco, with additional servers and offices in New York City.

Tweets are publicly visible by default; however, senders can restrict message delivery to just their followers. Users can tweet via the Twitter website, compatible external applications (such as for smartphones), or by Short Message Service (SMS) available in certain countries.[51] While the service is free, accessing it through SMS may incur phone service provider fees. Users may subscribe to other users' tweets this is known as following and subscribers are known as followers[52] or tweeps (Twitter + peeps).[53] The users can also check the people who are unsubscribing them on Twitter better known as unfollowing via various services.[54] Twitter allows users the ability to update their profile by using their mobile phone either by text messaging or by apps released for certain smartphones / tablets.[55]