Tech Sizzlers: The Virtual Common Room

NEW DELHI, INDIA: Social networking sites incidentally have gained huge popularity among the Indian audiences particularly applications that have a social and communication angle.

Incidentally after Brazil and US, India has the highest number of registered users of Orkut. Some of the major Indian players in the social networking segment include Linkedin, Bigadda, Orkut, Fropper and Ibibo.   

The concept of social networking is loosely based on the theory of ‘six degrees of separation’. Social networking sites provide utility, community, entertainment, recognition and enterprise.

So any of the networking site will be built around to fulfill one of these needs; there could be a professional networking site like linkedin.com, music- last.fm or general social networking that works around communities – orkut, bigadda etc.

There is an underlying difference between general social networking sites and professional networking sites. For instance Linkedin is purely focused on the business professional to enable a professional gain maximum productivity in minimum time.

One can be a member of different networks simultaneously depending on their preference of different USPs of each site – Linkedin (for professionals), orkut (communities, networking), YouTube (videos) and MySpace (music) etc.   

Social Networking runs on …

Social networks are built on user-generated content - including text, photos, videos etc. As the amount of data storage can be huge; latency issues with rich content need to be addressed right from the beginning. It is essential that the networks are build with scalability and performance.

User interface design, privacy features and the ability to build an open extensible platform are of essence since users spend so much time on these sites.

One of the challenges for social networking site as opposed to any other website is that these have to maintain relationship among people and not just their information.

Therefore each new member brings not just himself but a constantly evolving set of new relationships thereby adding to data load exponentially and not just linearly.  

Trends in social networking

Increasing Internet penetration coupled with the growing awareness of what Internet can do for you, the graph of social networking is headed northwards.

Today a much higher percentage of people are going online, have easy access to computers, understand that Internet indeed adds value and has reached a mature level of usage.

Significantly social networks are getting increasingly specialized, targeting specific purposes such as marriage, dating, travel, music, gaming etc.

According to Joe Kraus, Google's director of product management there are three big trends in the social Web. Discovery is becoming social that is instead of searching on Google, most users ideally like to seek the help of their friends for searching something.

How the users share is also undergoing a change that is most of the friends in one’s social network do want to know what is happening in one’s life.

The concept of a site built around the user content is passé. Today the users expect all sites to be social. The users expect that if they are using a commerce site and they know that their friends are also on the same site, one should be able to see what the friends bought there and whether they liked it. Social is a feature, Kraus says, not a destination.

Usually users of social networks range between the age group of 18-35 however there is no dearth of a sizeable number of members from older age groups logging onto social networking sites as well.

However one needs to keep in mind that unlike other networks, social networks lose value once they go beyond a certain size.

“The value of a social network is defined not only by who's on it, but by who's excluded,” says Paul Saffo, a Silicon Valley forecaster in The Economist.

This means that even though people do log onto the social networks for building communities yet most users do not intend to receive friend requests from unknown users.

Saffo believes that the future of social networking will not be one big social graph but instead myriad small communities on the Internet to replicate the millions that exist offline. No single company, therefore, can capture the social graph.