SOCIAL NETWORKING

Facebook

is a free-access social networking website that is operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc.Users can join networks organized by city, workplace, school, and region to connect and interact with other people. People can also add friends and send them messages, and update their personal profiles to notify friends about themselves. The website's name refers to the paper facebooks depicting members of a campus community that some US colleges and preparatory schools give to incoming students, faculty, and staff as a way to get to know other people on campus. Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook with fellow computer science major students and his roommates Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes while he was a student at Harvard University.Website membership was initially limited to Harvard students, but was expanded to other colleges in the Boston area, the Ivy League, and Stanford University. It later expanded further to include any university student, then high school students, and, finally, to anyone aged 13 and over. The website currently has more than 175 million active users worldwide. Facebook recently surpassed Myspace in amount of visitors, making Facebook the most popular social network, followed by MySpace and Twitter. Facebook has met with some controversy over the past few years. It has been bloAcked intermittently in several countries including Syriaand Iran. It has also been banned at many places of work to discourage employees from wasting time using the service. Privacy has also been an issue, and it has been compromised several times. It is also facing several lawsuits from a number of Zuckerberg's former classmates, who claim that Facebook had stolen their source code and other intellectual property.

HI5

In hi5, users create an online profile in order to show information such as interests, age and hometown and upload user pictures where users can post comments. hi5 also allows the user to create personal photo albums and set up a music player in the profile. Users can also send friend requests via e-mail to other users. When a person receives a friend request, he or she may accept or decline it, or block the user altogether. If the user accepts another user as a friend, the two will be connected directly or in the 1st degree. The user will then appear on the person's friend list and vice-versa.Some users opt to make their profiles available for everyone on hi5 to view. Other users exercise the option to make their profile viewable only to those people who are in their network. The network of friends consists of a user's direct friends (1st degree), the friends of those direct friends (2nd degree) and the friends of the friends of direct friends (3rd degree)

Cyworld (Hangul: 싸이월드)

is a social networking website launched on Sep 1, 1999. Cyworld is a South Korean web community site operated by SK Communications (Hangul: SK커뮤니케이션즈), a subsidiary of SK Telecom (Hangul: SK텔레콤). Literally translated, "Cy" can mean "cyber", but is also a play on the Korean word for relationship (Hangul: 사이 'between'), so it could also mean "relationship." Cyworld, much like an virtual space in the internet, which users can decorate their "home" and invite friends. Members cultivate on- and off-line relationships by forming Ilchon (Hangul: 일촌, Hanja: 一寸) buddy relationships with each other through a service called "minihompy" (mini-homepage), which encompasses a photo gallery, video, message board, guestbook, friend list, and personal bulletin board. A user can link his/her minihompy to another user's minihompy to form a buddy relationship. It is similar to U.S. based Facebook and MySpace websites. Reports show that as much as 90 percent of South Koreans in their 20s and 25 percent of the total population of South Korea are registered users of Cyworld , and as of September 2005, monthly unique visitors are about 20 million Korean Celebrities are also known to have their own Cyworld. Today, cyworld has extended its operation to the United States, China, Japan, Taiwan, and Vietnam. In 2007 Cyworld launched an international social & photosharing youth community called thephotodiary - http://www.thephotodiary.com/ The Swedish version of the site called bilddagboken.se has already gained nearly six million users.