Social Media Categories Essay

ASSIGNMENT – 1

The two Social Media Categories I have chosen are:

1. Social Friendship Networks –

The social friendship networks can be called as a subset of social media networks. The primary focus of these networks are to allow their users to connect with their friends and family. The primary features and most common features are instant private messaging, sharing pictures, sharing opinions/thoughts (status updates). Users profiles are created where they share their personal information of their choice.

Early Social Friendship Networking started in late 90’s with SixDegrees.com and later by Friendster in 2002. Friendster was followed by Myspace and LinkedIn in the following year. Orkut was a big hit in Brazil and India which was later

Catching convicted criminals – Photos and videos of people doing illegal activities are usually shared in social media which creates awareness among people and helps find the convicted people.

Disadvantages

(1) Addictive – Since its ubiquitous now, Social media is really addictive and people lose track of time and don’t do their important work.

(2) Privacy – People put out their information publically in these websites who use that data to sell it to companies and make money using ads.

(3) Spread of Terrorism – Social media has been playing a big role currently in spreading the terror and attracting many people to join in terrorist activities. The Islamic State has been using Twitter, Facebook and other social media sites to spread their propaganda through these sites. And many times it has reached to the wrong people.

(4) Depression – The more a person spends time in social media, the more he is consuming information about others. The life of others might seem more interesting and fun than of our own. And constantly comparing their lives with our own might stir up sad emotions leading to to depression.

(5) Unreliable Information – As stated above, many topics and news are spread like wildfire in social media. This can also lead to spread of false

Facebook – is the biggest and the most famous social networking site used by about 1.7 billion active users worldwide. They also own Instagram, a social media sharing site.

2.Google Plus – After the fall of Orkut, Google started its own social networking site embedded to google and various other google applications. Named as Google Plus. This service was a serious competitor in the eyes of Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg. Currently Google Plus just has 111 million active users. 2. Collaborative Answers (Q&A) –

Collaborative Answers or also called as Question and Answer sites are sites which help in knowledge exchange between users. One of the earliest websites to start this kind of community was Answers.com. From 2005 to 2009, the google used to show definitions linked from this website. Many websites are focused on multiple topics and all kinds of interests (Quora, Answers.com, Yahoo Answers etc.) But there are some websites which are focused only on some sets of topics such as Chegg (for academic help and question/answers) and Fixya (for products and its consumer related question answers).

As for now the most known Q&A website is Quora. Some of its competitors are ChaCha.com and