Review and Various aspects of Social Networking Sites
Tuesday, August 29, 2006
Now, lets talk about the positives of these social networking sites first, due to which people tend to join these sites :
1. Connectivity : This has to be the biggest reason and this is one reason which makes people to sign up for these services. People do'nt want to loose contacts (as they are the most valuable for any person) and these sites help people in getting in touch with each other. Many people find their old friends and colleagues, with whom they lost the contact and these sites make easy for people to keep in touch with the people they know. Not only that people can create communities and groups due to which they can meet new people who share similar kind of tastes, ideas, interests.
2. Integration of Chat and Messaging : These social networking sites also integrate chat and messaging technologies. Due to which people get three things in one site only. They get to chat with fellows and they can even send a message and that will land up in their Profile's inbox. And connectivity is already there. So, people find it easy to do their things in one place and that too easily.
3. Blog, Photos, Videos etc. : Many sites like Myspace, Hi5 and many others allow people to blog (hottest things these days on the internet) and let people upload their photos, videos in their profile only. This way the people do'nt need to sign up to different services like blogger, youtube, flickr etc. Yes, social networking sites have targeted this particular option very well and that is providing most of the services in one site only.
So, due to these factors people tend to join these networking sites, however it is to be noted that major share of the people joining these sites are from the age group of teens or who are in 20's as the elder group of internet find the following reasons of not joining these sites :
1. Privacy : A big group finds the main feature of these sites as the negative part. They think that due to the connectivity of various people, people will be able to see their contacts which they may not want to reveal to others and thus these sites create holes in their privacy.
2. Internet Security and Worms : There have been many cases where people found out that their computer were hit with viruses, trojans and worms after they signed up with certain networking sites. There have been many cases in the example of Myspace.
3. Time & Bandwidth Waster : Many people think that these networking sites are big time waster as people tend to get addicted to these sites and try to be online on these sites as much as possible. Thus it tends to decrease the productivity. There have been many cases where my friends joined one of the social network and after sometime the site was banned in their companies as company found out that employees are using it exceedingly and are not concentrating on work. Because the pageviews and profiles views include images and videos so they take lot of bandwidth as well.
4. Fake & Sexual profiles : Another reason of people hating these sites is that you'll find many profiles on these sites which contain the objectional content and thus it fears lots of parents as their children get to see all that objectional content. There have been cases where people started abusing others and have gone so far that they took the photos uploaded and made changes in them using photo editing softwares and made them look nude and other sutff.
Now, these are some of the reasons due to which people tend to keep themselves away from these kind of social networking sites. However, I'll post another article which will have the steps and precautions one must take before and after joining these social networking sites. I was thinking of reviewing the major social networking sites like Myspace, Linkedin, Orkut, Bebo etc. in this article only but I think I'll continue with the review in the next post. Feel free to comment on some of the positives and negatives of the social networking sites which you use and in case you are against then what are the reason of that.
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