Communication technology advances at a speed so fast that learning to master the updates made to any software or application, again would leave us behind because surely open new technologies to learn. An example of this aggressive growth process can be seen in the article by Top Ten Economics magazine, which reflects the top ten industries in the world, with the two main technologies and communications.
In the same way you can see in the same magazine that the ten fastest growing companies in the world reflect the company Tencent and Facebook, both belonging to the branch of technology and BT in the branch of communications.
A social network is a social structure composed of a set of actors (such as individuals or organizations) that are connected by dyads called interpersonal ties, which can be interpreted as relations of friendship, kinship, among others.
Multidisciplinary research has shown that social networks operate on many levels, from kinship relationships to the relationships of organizations at the state level (this is the case of political networks), playing a critical role in determining the political agenda and the degree to which individuals or organizations achieve their goals or receive influences.
Social network analysis studies this social structure by applying graph theory and identifying entities as "nodes" or "vertices" and relationships as "links" or "edges". The structure of the resulting graph is often very complex. As has been said, in its simplest form, a social network is a map of all the relevant links between all the nodes studied. In this case, we speak of "socio-centric" or "complete" networks. Another option is to identify the network that surrounds a person (in the different social contexts in which it interacts); in this case we speak of "personal network"
Background
From its origins, the Web was conceived as a social tool. Since its inventor, Tim Berners-Lee, created the World Wide Web in the early 1990s, his motivation was to improve communication with his research colleagues. In its beginnings, the first phase of the Web was characterized mainly by personal and business web pages with static content, using the programming language known as HTML (HyperText Markup language, for its acronym in English). In this stage the owners of the websites had total control of the content and the users were simply observers. Subsequently the development of new languages such as PHP, Javascript, Java, XML, Ajax, among others, allowed the creation of new platforms that allow the user to adopt, not only the role of observer, but also creator of content. This is how the so-called social networks (facebook), the blogs (blogs), the wikis (wikipedia), and other applications are born.
!Definition of social networks¡
Red is a term that comes from the Latin rete, makes mention of the structure that has a characteristic pattern. This definition allows the concept to be applied in various areas, such as computing (where a network is a set of interconnected computers that share information).
Social, on the other hand, is that which belongs to or relates to society (the set of individuals that interact with each other to form a community). The social usually implies a sense of belonging.
The notion of social network, therefore, is linked to the structure where a group of people maintain some kind of link. Such relationships may be friendly, sexual, commercial or otherwise. For example: "The village social network worked perfectly to channel solidarity with the victims of the flood", "The family is the basis of any social network."
The concept, however, has been updated in recent years to point to a type of Internet site that favors the creation of virtual communities, in which it is possible to access services that allow groups to be assembled according to the interests of users, Sharing photos, videos and information in general.
The most popular social network of today is Facebook, which has more than 1300 million users, who exchange messages and computer files. Other social networks are MySpace and Hi5.
It is possible to find social networks on the Internet that specialize in certain sectors or that aim to attract a specific group of users. LinkedIn, for example, gathers professionals and tries to promote business and labor mobility.
Let's see below a summary of some of the most used social networks worldwide, along with a brief description of their characteristics and their objectives:
- Facebook: it is a social network that seeks to connect people from all over the planet, and that many use to reconnect with old childhood friends, with people they have not seen for a long time. As mentioned in previous paragraphs, has reached the position of undisputed leader. Among the options it offers are creating groups with different criteria, sharing photographs and all kinds of multimedia files, participating in surveys and sending messages to famous people whom we might not be able to contact in any other way;
- Youtube: many people do not know that YouTube is, in effect, a social network, since it began as a service of free publication of videos. However, today, thanks to the apparent simplicity of its interface, the fact of being able to leave comments on a large part of the content and the possibility of transmitting live and live video, this powerful tool allows people from everywhere to communicate. of the world and is very beneficial for unknown artists who want to make a place in the industry;
- Twitter: this microblogging application has been a true revelation, since it has conquered the entire planet despite its seemingly exaggerated limit of characters per message, which, in turn, has awakened in many users the challenge of taking advantage of the best possible way every time. Twitter allows us to share our activities with a group of people at any time, with the possibility of including multimedia content. Its already well-known hashtag has become part of popular language and is widely used by large companies to promote their products;
- Myspace: it is a portal especially used by singers who seek to achieve fame. In Myspace it is possible to share music files, videos and photos, meet other artists and keep in touch with them and even create blogs.
Instagram is a social network and application to upload photos and videos. Its users can also apply photographic effects such as filters, frames, thermal similarities, underlying areas in the concave bases, retro and vintage colors (vintage), and then share the photographs in the same social network or in others.
Impact of social networks
Due to the great potential offered by social networks, numerous companies around the world have started to widely use applications based on it. Important companies started acquiring Internet companies with success and popularity among users, such as the purchase of YouTube by Google in the amount of 1,650 million dollars, the purchase of Skype by Ebay for 2,600 million dollars. In July 2005, businessman Rupert Murdoch, a traditional media mogul (News Corp.), paid $ 580 million for MySpace. In October 2007, Microsoft acquired $ 240 million in Facebook shares; this deal valued Facebook at $ 15 billion dollars. In March 2008 American Online (AOL) paid $ 850 million dollars for the Bebo.com social network. These are just some examples of the acquisitions that have been made around this topic.
the social networks dangers
he dangers of social networks can be several, which parents imagine and fear more than that a child can be seduced by a supposed friendship offered by a pedophile, a teenage girl who decides to meet a boy, and it turns out that Teen was twenty years older than her! These, and other dangers are what parents try to avoid in their children, but, there are other views about it. Piscitelli Murphy takes a deeper look and says "I think the dangers are different depending on the type of social network and according to the condition and age of the person who uses them." Overall, I think the most common danger is that of overexposure. of privacy, without denying all the positive contributions that networks make.With regard to the self there is a user profile more susceptible to these dangers than others, the sociologist Murphy says that "As in so many things, obviously yes. Just as people who have greater identity problems are more victims of fashion, in these cases I believe that those who have personality and / or identity deficiencies are more vulnerable because they will start to search the networks for things that networks can not. give. And if you already have deficiencies of origin, the issue gets complicated "
Among the most common safety recommendations is not to disclose personal and sensitive information within the profile, such as postal addresses, telephone, economic and financial information, revealing photographs, publish where you are at that moment, etc. Many will ask, if I do not publish this information about me, then what is interesting about social networks? As a recommendation to solve this question is to allow only the access to the profile to known people. But nothing guarantees that a friend will give access to another person or other people to your profile. Therefore, we return to the beginning, we must be discreet with what we publish in Social Network.
!THANKS FRIENDS STEEMIANS¡ REEGARDS.