Communication: Social Networking

Social Networking is the use of dedicated websites and applications to communicate informally with other users, or to find people with similar interests to oneself. The first social netwrok website has established in 1995. Social network has grown with the development of Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and more.

Facebook now has a billion of active users every month. Mark Zuckerberg is the founder of this big social network site. This is the biggest social network site in the world. Latestt statistics shows 600 million users access Facebook through mobile phone. VKontakte which has 300 million users is a rival of facebook in Russia. On the other hand, China has RenRen to beat with 30 million members. Twitter like Sina Weibo are also big social network websites which have 300 million users.

Facebook is now used as media, political, business and religious tool to reach people. As a result, facebook is now also seen as a surveilance gadget. For example, police can use facebook to track people who are involved in crimes. In business term, many big and small businesses use facebook as an online marketing tool.

Twitter has also grown, it enables users to post or send and read text-based messages with only maximum of 140 characters. This service rapidly gained popularity worldwide, with over 500 million active users as of 2012 and over 340 million daily tweets. Like facebook, twitter also acts as a business, political, media and religious tool to reach people.

The big problem for these social netwroking sites is the fake accounts or fake users. These are internet users who pretend to be someone or something they are not. It was revealed that 83 million of facebook users do not actually exist. Most of these fake facebook accounts generate 'likes' using malware to falsely boost a brand's figures. Some of the face accounts are also used for passing spam messages and fooling other users.