SOCIAL NETWORKING WEBSITE

 Article by: Zurashida      Posted By: Munirah

Wikipedia states that a social network is “…a social structure made of nodes (which are generally individuals or organizations) that are tied by one or more specific types of relations…” Nowadays; the social networking sites are gaining a lot of popularity with almost all of the educated youth using one or the other such site. These have played a crucial role in bridging boundaries and crossing the seas and enabling them to communicate on a common platform. It has become a popular and a potential mean for them to stay friends with the existing ones and to grow up their social circle at least in terms of social contact.

The first official social networking web site was Classmates.com which was founded in 1995. Now, they are many site often that are designed to fit a certain type of community such as the college community being mirrored by Facebook.com or a music/party community mirrored by MySpace.com. 

The most popular social networking site today is Facebook.com that is developed by Zuckerberg. The site was originally developed for college and university students as a way to connect with each other. Hosting the most members for a college based social networking site, Facebook.com is also the number one site for uploading pictures, boasting several million uploads daily. 

 Since its inception, Facebook.com has now been opened to anyone with a valid email address and offers its members options of joining the millions of networks of people with similar interests. It is said that 80% of Facebook.com users check their account daily and that 93% of Facebook.com users check their account at least monthly.

Although many people don’t think of it, social networking web sites harbor many dangerous elements and many people are concerned about some major problems that they contain. One such problem is privacy issues. With social networking web sites like Orkut.com, Facebook.com and MySpace.com, it is almost too easy to retrieve personal information about someone and use it to harm them. 

 In a case with MySpace.com, the availability of being able to customize one’s own site has allowed people to use phishing html code to create phishing profiles that allows that person to access anyone’s profile who have visited the phishing profile. Phishing can often lead to the loss of personal information such as usernames, credit card numbers, and passwords. 

Social networking site do influence people life. For example is in using word. Some people tend to use shortened words like “d” for “the” and likewise. Some people use offensive words to vent out their feeling. Meanwhile certain people often use the communities to dishonor others. 

Another great issue of concern with social networking web sites is that of child safety. Research has shown that almost three out of every four teenagers who use social networking web sites are at risk due to their lack of using online safety. 

A lot of the web sites do have an age requirement but it is easily bypassed by the lying about of one’s age. Even if they don’t lie about their age the average age requirement is around fifteen years old. 

Myspace.com has been specifically targeted for these child safety issues after a sixteen year old girl flew to Tel Aviv, Israel to meet and engage in sexual relations with a twenty year old male whom she had met through MySpace.com.

As a conclusion, a social networking web site is an online community in which people can connect to others with similar interests. Although there are many valuable assets to social networking web sites, there are also major issues that the sites must address such as the protection of private information, the protection of children, and the protection of copyrighted material. Although they have issues, social networking web sites are still one of the best inventions of the modern era because they connect so many people. People need to remind themselves not to misuse the social networking site.