What Is Social Networking?

Social networking is a focus on facilitating the building of social relationships among people who share opinions, discover information, or even get real-life connections. Sometimes social networking is in person, especially in schools and workplace, but it is most popular as an online service.

Social networking started off as a service to help to get to know those members in your community, to help business grow and open different horizons for personal use. It has become one of the biggest ways to communicate in your line of business or personal life. Most social networks are now based on web, and provide a means for people to interact over the internet. Social networking sites help users share events, activities and interests within there individual networks.

Before taking the course of Social Networking, my understanding of this concept is some kind of network application which enables people to share information with the others. During my undergraduate study, I was in charge of an innovation project named as "Group Purchase Navigation Software based on Mobile Internet".  It mainly focuses on "MSNS"(Mobile Social Networking Services) ,a new idea brought up by a professor in my university. So after discussing how to reflect the characteristics of social network with my team members, we decided that the function of the software should not only include provision of goods' information, but also sharing in social networking sites and recommendation to friends via SMS.    I                

                                     
                  

After taking the lectures for the last two weeks, I began to realize that there are way more things in addition to our design. Maybe we can add function such as getting people together to buy things at a lower prize; Maybe by using our software, you are able to know and contact people who have a similar taste. Social Networking is a process of connecting people. Social platforms like facebook build up social environments and provide social experiences to participants. It helps people to form closed communities or groups so they can collaborate on information and ideas.

During the courses, I have learnt the definition of social media and social networking, together with related aspects. I also get to know that a social task is a larger view of collaborative work in a social network, and study the examples of social tasks: "idea generation", "codevelopment", "finding people". In the further lectures, I want to learn more about the social behaviors and how to do a comprehensive social network analysis. 

In lecture 2, Professor raised a question about the difference between user-based filtering and item-based filtering methods for derived social recommendations. So let's make a brief description. As we know, some social systems can process the behavior of a social group over time and generate recommendations based on this data. However, the derived social recommendation relies on complex software analysis to generate the recommendation using the index such as "most read", "most commented", "most emailed" and so on. Unlike the direct recommendation approach, the visibility of other users or their choices is not an important factor to newly arrived users. In my opinion, user-based filtering method means that if something is in your friends' preference, then you would most probably like it; As for item-based filtering method, it means that if an item has similar characteristics as those you have liked before, then you may also like this one. For these two methods, the first one is about a research on your friends, predicting how much you would like an item by studying their taste; the second one is about a research on those items that you have liked, defining to what extent you would like the target item. It's hard to say which one is better. In most companies, the item-based filtering method is used, such as Amazon. But in Digg and some other company, user-based filtering method is used and effect is good.So we'd better to say: different situation, different recommendation.