A social networking site is an online platform that facilitates the building of social networks or social relation among people who share similar interests, activities, backgrounds, or real-life connection. Social networking can be done for social purposes, business purposes, or both.
Social, networking sites are also called social media. In a social networking website, users create profiles, which contain information about them, create a list of users with whom to share connections, and organise their social networks. Some popular social networking sites are:
- You Tube
Features Available on Social Media
- Media Galleries
- Conversations
- Activity Record
- Simple Interface
- Communities
- Real Time Updates
- Build Profile
- Free Web Address
- Chat Facility
- Photo Albums
- Tags
- E-mail Alert
Merits of Social Media
- Easy to connect
- Free business promotions
- Spreads information incredibly fast
- Create new connections
- Aids in criminal cases
Demerits of Social Media
- Cyber bullying
- Addiction
- Misuse of information
- Peer pressure
- Less real life interaction
- Misleading information
- Fake profiles
Blog
A blog is an easy-to-create website that allows users to share their thoughts with the world. The topic of the blog can be anything from personal to professional. A blogger is someone who blogs or writes content for a blog. A blogger can provide links to other websites that he/ she considers might interest the audience. Blogging can be an interactive activity. Readers can add comments to a blogger’s postings, other persons can respond, and a conversation ensues.
Types of Blogs
There are various types of blogs available on the web. We can categorize them into the following categories:
- Personal blog
- Non-profit blog
- Micro-blog
- News and Views blog
- Company blog
- Politics blog
Twitter is a free social networking and microblogging service. Twitter offers a platform to share the brief information or the links for interesting news or topics that can benefit people. It is the 13th most visited websites worldwide. It has been termed as the ‘SMS of the internet.
Salient features of Twitter include:
Twitter Handle:- A Twitter handle is the term for a user’s account name on Twitter. It is listed by putting an ‘@’ symbol before the username.
Tweets:- Subscribers use Twitter to communicate and broadcast short messages called Tweets. Tweets were initially restricted to 140 characters, which has now changed to 280 characters. Posting the messages is called ‘Tweeting’ and reposting someone else’s tweet is called ‘Retweeting’ Tweets are instantaneous, within seconds they can spread news or announcement worldwide.
Hashtags:- People use the hashtag symbol (#) before a relevant keyword or phrase in their Tweet to highlight the keywords or topics.
Follow:- The users can search and connect with other people by ‘following’ them on Twitter and tweet in them. You can also ‘unfollow’ people if you do not wish to include their tweets in your twitter feed.
Twitter feed (or Timeline):- It is an ongoing stream of tweets from the users that you follow.
It is another popular social networking website which is used to connect with people online It also provides free registration and a user-friendly platform. Initially, it was only PC based, but now it is also available as a pre-installed app on most of the mobile phones and tablets.
Following are a few of its most popular offerings:
Friends List:- It allows registered users to create their profiles and create a list of their contacts, called ‘Friend’ in the Facebook language.
Walls:- It is essentially a virtual bulletin board where members can post messages, pictures, or videos and share links with their Facebook friends.
Virtual Photo Album:- This feature allows members to upload an unlimited number of photos The members, ‘friends’, may comment and identify or ‘tag’ people in the photos.
Status Update:- It is a microblogging tool that helps the users to broadcast short announcements about themselves.
Facebook Pages:- This feature was initially designed for business use It allows businesses to publish content on a public page and receive comments.
News Feed:- This feature constantly updates list of stories in the middle of your home page News feed includes status updates, photos, videos, links, app activity and likes from people, pages, and groups that you follow on Facebook.
Privacy Controls:- Facebook provides a customisable set of privacy controls, so users can protect their information from getting exposed to third-party individuals.
YouTube
YouTube is a free video sharing website You can find all kinds of user generated videos on YouTube, such as tutorials, cooking lessons, exercise tips, music, comedy, and a lot more It allows you to:
- Select videos from a grid of recommended and trending videos. You can watch, like, share, and comment on the videos.
- Manage subscriptions, replay from history, manage playlists, or choose videos from various categories.
- Download and upload videos from your computer or mobile phones.
- Choose the privacy settings of your channel.
- Edit your videos to give them a professional look using various editing tools like Combine and Trim (cut or Snip).
- Employ Parental Control and Safety Mode features to restrict the types of videos your children can watch.
WhatsApp is a free to download messenger app for smartphones Some interesting facts about WhatsApp are as follows:
- WhatsApp is one of the most popular instant messaging apps worldwide.
- WhatsApp now offers high-quality voice as well as video calling.’
- The cost of using WhatsApp is significantly less than texting.
- It has a simple interface and many useful features, such as group chatting, video calling, location sharing, etc.
- WhatsApp allows you to format the selected text of your message in Italic, Bold, Strikethrough, underscore, asterisk (*), tilde (~), and Monospace.
Digital India
Digital India is a campaign launched by the Government of India in 2015 to ensure that the Government’s services are made available to citizens electronically by improved online infrastructure. It also aims at increasing the internet connectivity and making the country digitally empowered in the field of technology.
Cybercrime
Cybercrime refers to any crime done using computer or any electronic device with internet connection.
Some of the cyber crimes are:
Cyberbullying:- Cyberbullying is an act of harming, harassing, or targeting a person by another person using the internet, in a deliberate manner.
Cyberstalking:- Cyberstalking is the term for online harrassment of a person or group of people. Defamation, false accusations, threats, the dissemination of damaging information, etc., are examples of this.
Hacking:- Hacking refers to an illegal intrusion into a computer system or network
Phishing:- Phishing is an act of sending an email to a user, misleading him to believe that it is from a trusted person or organisation.
Spamming:- In spamming, millions of copies of the same message are sent to the email users worldwide.