Social Networking: Current Trends And Its Future

Its not a rare thing to people around the world nowadays, the social network. Social network becomes trends not only in certain country but worldwide. People in this era make the social network something that you must participate nowadays. Also, it’s an odd matter if you don’t participating in any social network. Not only that, participating in social network are important as people can know you better and also important for communicating and keep in touch with friends and family.

Many different definitions are made for social networks. According to dictionary social network is an online community of people with a common interest who use a website or other technologies to communicate with each other and share information, resources, etc. There are some that define social network as a group of individual who share a commonality. In business perspective, social network is the practice of expending the number of one’s business and social contacts by making connections through individuals. As for me, social network is a centre to communicate with someone especially friends and family and know their latest activity. Therefore, there are many more definitions that people make from their different perspective.

Do you know that social network start from 1997 with the first social site, SixDegrees.com? It operates from 1997 and stop operated in 2001 but has been restarted to the previous members only. In 2002, Friendster is created and a year later followed by Myspace. After that, in 2004 Facebook make it appearance and targeting college students. Then, 2 years later new social network is launched with different approach, Twitter. New social network keep coming until this days.

The 21st century has made the social network more interesting and evolves. There are many social networks nowadays. There are many currents trends of social networking. Everyone knows that the Mark Luckerberg’s website is the most popular social network, which is Facebook. Facebook’s users are more than 900 million users. While, Twitter is one of popular social network but different than Facebook. Its allow users to create messages and post it known as ‘Tweets’. Another popular social network is Youtube. Although, it’s not considered as a social network but it has some social network features. It’s a place that allowed you to upload your video to share with others.

There also a business social network that is LinkedIn. LinkedIn allowing you to publish your CV, post your business references and search for any business contact. This social network helps many human resources in some companies to search for employees. But, it has limited function and there’s a monthly user fee if you want more option. One of the social network that allowed you to take photos and shared them in Instagram. You also can apply various digital filters to a photo before post it. This application usually used by people that have smartphones. These are few examples of social network. There are many more social networks such as LinkedIn, Google+, Instagram, Pinterest, Flicker, Myspace, Foursquare and etc.

Around the world, people that spent time online are increasing with the evolution of smart phones. According to Strategy Analytics, the numbers of people using handphones to online have increase four times in the last four years. Also, most time that they spend online is for social networking.

Universal Mccann International Social Media Research indicates that much latest news available in internet is from Asia region and the largest community bloggers are located in China and Japan. Not only that, much new information and news can be obtained in the network. Nowadays, social network has become one of the main materials to obtain latest news and information that occur in the country or around the world.

Next, social network in employees prospective has become important. They can search information about any company for search job. Also, they can learn about the company for interview or to know what the companies do. Not only that, the human resource department in some companies can obtain information about someone before they employed through social network. This will allow them to know if the person qualified to join the company. It’s easy to know about someone nowadays as there are many social networks that can allowed you to know more about them.

After social networking are created with different features such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. With this new function are created that most people like to use this days. The function is that it can be simultaneously posting across different social networking. For example, if you want to post a picture in Instagram you can also post it on Facebook or Twitter or both. This will make one’s life easy that you don’t have to repost it many times.

As we know, social network is free and everyone allowed using it but there must be something that must be control. This is for one’s safety to use the social networks. For individual, internet privacy is a must. Also, if you want to share something it is up to you but don’t share something that is too private. This will be dangerous and there will be negative impact. For example, don’t share your personal information such as your identity card, your credit card and etc. Also, in 2012 the European Parliament has proposed about the ‘right to be forgotten’. This was a request to removed personal data from internet and from company data base. This action is a precaution to all employers and users.

In social network, we can’t control what people want to comment or post. But, one’s must remember that there is also some etiquette. For example, don’t use poor grammar or spelling as it will lead to disastrous consequences. Using harsh words also will make you look bad and people will take action to remove you as their friends. One more thing is that don’t constantly asking for followers or friends. This will make people become annoyed.

Not only that, filter the content that you want to post and don’t post sensitive issues. As mentioned earlier we can’t control what people want to post but you must be alert not to post something that are sensitive such as religion issues. For example, there are ones someone posted about religion. She said that some religion is bad and she hates the religion that she mentioned. This kind of things shouldn’t happen as we are now in 21st century. In my opinion, she only does it for fun but in reality it hurts many people and it has become big issues.

Video call also one of the famous social networking such as Skype. Skype is very useful for many people. It is used to call family and friends and also can see them through video call. Not only that, there are also business people or employees that using Skype for meeting. It’s easy as they can have meeting at home or where ever place that they preferred.

Nowadays, there are social networkings that are increasing its popularity. WhatsApp is the application used by many smarts phones user, it can send message but through the internet. With this, many people preferred to use internet rather than phones lines. But, there are also applications that are new and its popularity keep increasing that is WeChat. WeChat allowed you to send text message as well as voice message. Although WhatsApp also has the function of sending voice message but WeChat become more popular as you don’t have to type out the message.

According to a survey, the time that many people spend on Facebook has decreasing compare to several years back. But, this doesn’t means that time that people spend in social networking is also decreasing. Nielson Media stated that the time spent in social networking is rising over the previous years. Many will think are people abandoning social network in future?

With this the best answer obtained comes from Social Media Analyst and Entrepreneur Bob Zukis. They said that people’s expectations are changing. The social network must have some purpose. At first it is fun to play around with social network without any purpose but at some point it becomes board. Also, do we really want to know what everyone is doing everyday and every time?

So, it has to have some obvious purpose. This is because of the absent of this purpose the behavior will cease. At first, the social network has good purpose that is to share with friends and also to keep in touch with friends that are not meet in long time. But, in reality how many people we can keep in touch with?

Therefore, we need an application that can directly recruits and times to connect with others will make it more effective. So, what should we do? That is somewhat random approach we take today. This is the idea of future social network. Also, social network will continue to be used but using which social network is not the question but what we want to accomplish is the main point.