Social Networks
Some websites intend to build
social networks. After subscribing, you can be
connected to other people based on a topic: friendship,
professional experience, picture sharing, music tastes...
Cyworld
These new websites are taking off everywhere. In Korea, for
example, in Cyworld you can create a Minime (sort
of avatar) that represents you: you can choose its face,
its clothing... After describing yourself, you can write a
journal of your life, post pictures you have taken... Then
you have a Minhompy which is a room. At the
beginning it is empty. You can put a background and the
fournitures you want in order to personalize it. To do so,
you need to buy these items. You start with some credits to
begin filling your Minihompy. The main purpose is still
that you check your friend pages and leave them comments
and remarks. You can check mine I have created to test Cyworld (I
used the one recently launched in the U.S. because I
could not understand the original site in Korean).
Who is willing to pay to furnish a virtual room, you will
ask? Well, plenty of Korean did so! You have services
accessible from a cell phone that allow you not to be
connected all the time. You can also give some items to
your friends and set a wish list.
In the United States, MySpace took the first place of the more
visited website to Yahoo! This company like other major
Internet players try to develop communities as well:
Microsoft with Live Spaces, Google with Orkut, Yahoo! with Yahoo! 360... One site where a lot of
UCSB students were suscribed is Facebook. It is mainly for students going
to U.S. colleges.
To share
pictures, I use Flickr from Yahoo!. You can browse
pictures from people you do not know and leave comments as
well. You can organize your photos using tags. These will
be used to create sets and for search. You have the
possibility to have private pictures you only show to
relatives.
Professional networks
Another tendency as well is to subscribe to professional
networks. You first put your resume in the site. Then you
will browse it to find people you worked with or you know.
The aim is to build a network. The more people you know the
bigger your network is (because you can access the network
of your friends as well). This is for professional purpose:
these sites should work like a real network to find a job
or a better position. It is also possible to find customers
for web designers, lawyers, accountants... To connect to
more persons you need either to invite them to subscribe or
to browse your contacts for people you already know. Like
for social networks you can meet new guys, in this case for
a career purpose.
I am personally registered to LinkedIn, Xing, Doostang and a French network,
Viadeo.
As you can see, there are a lot of social networks, some
for the same purpose. Currently, people have subscribed to
several sites, but how can we centralize all these
relationships and not lose time repeating information? An
answer may be Ziki...
Here are some buttons matching the different websites I
have dealt with.
If you want to leave comments
about this article, please go to the blog
post. Thank
you!