Week 3

Our group have decided the following five topics and we chose 1 each to research about:

A. Synchronous Messaging
B. Collaborative Document Editing
C. Shared Repositories
D. Social Networks
E. Virtual Worlds
F. Asynchronous Messaging

We are now in stage of finalising our choice for the un-built buildings on our assignment. We have assigned each topics to research on from the above five topics and mine was:
D. Social Networks; Facebook, MySpace

Definition:
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 interdependency, such as values, visions, idea, financial exchange, friends, kinship, dislike, conflict, trade, web links, sexual relations, disease transmission (epidemiology), or airline routes. The resulting structures are often very complex.
In its simplest form, a social network is a map of all of the relevant ties between the nodes being studied. The network can also be used to determine the social capital of individual actors. These concepts are often displayed in a social network diagram, where nodes are the points and ties are the lines.

Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_network

Facebook:
Facebook is a social utility that connects you with the people around you.
It is a social networking website that was launched on February 4, 2004. The website is owned and operated by Facebook, Inc., the parent company of the website and a privately held company. The free-access website allows users to join one or more networks, such as a school, place of employment, or geographic region to easily connect and interact with other people.
The name of the website refers to the paper facebooks depicting members of a campus community that some American 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 while still a student at Harvard University. Website membership was initially limited to only Harvard students, but was later expanded to include any university student, then high school students, and finally to anyone aged 13 and over.
The website has more than 64 million active users worldwide. It is also the most popular website for uploading photos, with 14 million uploaded daily. Due to the website's popularity, Facebook has met with some criticism and controversy in its short lifespan because of privacy concerns, the political views of its founders, and censorship issues.

Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook

MySpace:
MySpace is also a social networking website offering an interactive, user-submitted network of friends, personal profiles, blogs, groups, photos, music and videos for teenagers and adults internationally. Its headquarters are in Beverly Hills, California, USA, where it shares an office building with its immediate owner, Fox Interactive Media; which is owned by News Corporation, which has its headquarters in New York City.
According to Alexa Internet, MySpace is currently the world's fifth most popular website, and the third most popular website in the United States, though it has topped the chart on various weeks.
The service gradually gained more popularity than similar websites to achieve nearly 80% of visits to online social networking websites in 2006. Today its traffic is similar to that of Facebook, a competing social network.

Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myspace