By Wendy Boswell, About.com
You might already be familiar with or have heard the term “social networking” in your travels on the Web. What exactly does this mean? Are there places on the Web where people stand around with cocktails, handing out business cards, and networking? Uh, not exactly. Social networking on the Web is similar to networking in real life, but with some important differences.
Online social networking involves connecting and sharing information with other like-minded people via the Web. Social Networking is the 21st century “virtual community,” used by groups of people who use the Internet to communicate with each other about anything and everything. One can find dating sites, friendship sites, sites with a business purpose and hybrids that offer a combination of these. Globally, hundreds of millions of people have joined one or more social networking sites. It’s no surprise this new vehicle of communication has swept a phenomenon for young and old alike.
As the internet continues to evolve, so does our ability to socialize on the web. The newest opportunity is presented in the form of Social Bookmarking. Social Bookmarking refers to the practice of saving and categorizing a particular site and sharing it with others via social bookmarking communities. Users can share their own personal Web bookmarks, but they also have the quite wonderful option of discovering other people’s bookmarks and adding them to their own collection. More sites can be discovered, more treasures unearthed, if you work together as a whole instead or by yourself; it’s truly amazing what people are able to turn up together on the Web.
Social networking is related to social bookmarking: you can make as many bookmarks on the Web as you can possibly stand to do, but once you start sharing these bookmarks with other people, interacting with them, starting conversations through a variety of methodologies, you are networking.
Examples of social networking Web sites:
del.icio.us is a collection of favorites - yours and everyone else’s. You can use del.icio.us to: Keep links to your favorite articles, blogs, music, reviews, recipes, and more, and access them from any computer on the web. Share favorites with friends, family, coworkers, and the del.icio.us community.
Furl gives users the ability to save copies of any Web page, search within your own personal archive of Web pages, and share what you find. Furl was one of the very first social bookmarking tools, and continues to be one that people use to find and share good stuff on the Web.
Reddit: Instantly share your content with the Reddit social bookmarking community.
Diggit: is a user-driven social content website. Ok, so what does that mean? Well, everything on digg is submitted by the digg user community (that would be you). After you submit content, other digg users read your submission and digg what they like best. If your story is great and receives enough diggs, it is promoted to the front page for the millions of digg visitors to see.
Stumbleupon: The beauty of StumbleUpon, in my mind is you are able to take advantage of a vast network of dedicated Web searchers who are finding utterly brilliant sites and sharing them with you. One of my favorite ways to explore the Web.
June 24th, 2009 at 9:01 am
Some additional notes:
Social Bookmarking is growing at a tremendous pace, because web surfers are understanding how much easier it is to gather data and information on any topic or niche from one source, be able to access all their favorite bookmarks from any computer that has internet access and more importantly using bookmarking to promote and draw more traffic to their website from the bookmarking community.
Social bookmarking sites give us a glimpse of how the World Wide Web will be structured in the future. Bookmarking has brought a certain type of ‘order’ to the web in a way where surfers can locate a specific topic that has already been favored by others before them, and cuts down on the amount of time used to search through thousands of websites.
My personal feelings are we have only seen the tip of the iceberg in regard to social bookmarking, in the future I believe these type of websites will be fully integrated into our online way of life.