Index

Social Networking sites (My Space and now Facebook)

It is perhaps the increasing social interaction noted above in chat rooms, message boards and MUDs etc that indicated a growing desire for social tools developed. The potential for interactivity in the medium is also likely to play a role here. The growing number of people who used the Internet became aware of the potential for social participation, rather than the information consumption of traditional media.

“Web 2.0” is a term coined in 2004 by Tim O’Reilly. Despite the surrounding debate on what exactly this term means, it certainly involves collaboration and social interaction between people (Madden and Fox, 2006). Thus the communication flow altered from one-to-many (e.g. a corporate site providing information to the audience) to many-to-many communication (many people reviewing or commenting on a blog or article). The emphasis here is on the social and community aspect of content creation, with particular development of tools, which facilitated increased interaction from the audience.

Sites like Amazon and Classmates.com, the first social network, (both launched in 1995) had already introduced “user generated content” and social functionality, before the term Web 2.0 appeared. It is almost impossible to pin point when this shift occurred and is evolutionary in nature. The mid 1990’s certainly saw the first applications of this trend however.

MySpace entered the social networking market in late 2003 and has since dominated (E-Marketer, 2006). MySpace facilitates an easier way for people to publish their own profile pages, in a way that was not possible before social networks. Members today do not need to know how to code HTML. MySpace is an open community and accessible to all who use the Internet and have a web browser. This low barrier to entry ensures that it appeals to the general Internet population, rather than specific sub-groups witnessed in early online communities. Along with its massive global reach of over 54 million (Rosenbush, 2006), this is why MySpace is considered the most competitive player in the market. It provides a massive amount of its members a diverse range of social interaction and community development tools.

Social networks, particularly MySpace, take emoticons one step further by allowing access to larger image libraries and different graphical expressions. Outlets for expression have also gone beyond chat based expression e.g. the “I’m online” text in MySpace can be replaced by any number of different animated signs. This level of customisation- everything from the page background, to colour scheme and mouse pointer- leaves plenty of opportunity for a member to personalise their profile page....