Social networking sites (SNS) have gained immense popularity, allowing users to create profiles, connect based on interests, and share personal data, but they pose significant privacy risks. Although these platforms facilitate connections and communication, users often remain unaware of privacy threats such as identity theft. The document also discusses the evolution of various SNS from early examples like SixDegrees to major players like Facebook and MySpace, emphasizing the diverse uses, advantages, and potential downsides of these platforms.

1. Abstract—Social networking sites (SNS) have become very
popular during the past few years, as they allow users to both
express their individuality and meet people with similar
interests. A social networking service is a Web site that allows
individuals/organistions to construct a public or semi-public
profile. Users’ data are not only constituted by vital statistics,
but they include a lot of other information which pertains to
user hobbies, passions, interests, professional background and
so on. This kind of personal data permit to create
interconnected networks of people who decide to put in common
their interests and to have an online identity which fully
describes them. Nonetheless, there are also many potential
threats to privacy associated with these SNS such as identity
theft and disclosure of sensitive information. However, many
users still are not aware of these threats and the privacy settings
provided by SNS are not flexible enough to protect user data
IndexTerms-Interconnected Networks, Profile, SNS, userdata,
Website.
I.INTRODUCTION
ince their introduction, social network sites (SNSs) such
as MySpace, Facebook, Cyworld, and Bebo have attracted
millions of users, many of whom have integrated these sites
into their daily practices. As of this writing, there are
hundreds of SNSs, with various technological affordances,
supporting a wide range of interests and practices. While
their key technological features are fairly consistent, the
cultures that emerge around SNSs are varied. Most sites
support the maintenance of pre-existing social networks, but
others help strangers connect based on shared interests,
political views, or activities. Some sites cater to diverse
audiences, while others attract people based on common
language or shared racial, sexual, religious, or nationality-
based identities. Sites also vary in the extent to which they
incorporate new information and communication tools, such
as mobile connectivity, blogging, and photo/video-sharing.
S
Social networking sites can be defined as web-based
services that allow individuals to i.construct a public or semi-
public profile within a bounded system, ii. articulate a list of
other users with whom they share a connection, and iii. view
and traverse their list of connections and those made by
others within the system. The nature and nomenclature of
these connections may vary from site to site.
With the rapid growth of social networking web sites and
their global scale usage, whatever one feels concerning social
networking web sites is irrelevant because social networking
web sites are on a popularity rise and are here to stay.
II.HISTORY OF SNS
A. In Early Years
The first recognizable social network site is
sixdegrees.com and was launched in 1997.Sixdegrees.com
allowed users to create profiles, list their Friends and,
beginning in 1998, surf the Friends lists. Each of these
features existed in some form before SixDegrees, of course.
Profiles existed on most major dating sites and many
community sites. AIM and ICQ buddy lists supported lists of
Friends, although those Friends were not visible to others.
Classmates.com allowed people to affiliate with their high
school or college and surf the network for others who were
also affiliated, but users could not create profiles or list
Friends until years later. SixDegrees was the first to combine
these features. SixDegrees promoted itself as a tool to help
people connect with and send messages to others. While
SixDegrees attracted millions of users, it failed to become a
sustainable business and, in 2000, the service closed. Looking
back, its founder believes that SixDegrees was simply ahead
of its time (A. Weinreich, personal communication, July 11,
2007). While people were already flocking to the Internet,
most did not have extended networks of friends who were
online and most users were not interested in meeting
strangers. From 1997 to 2001, a number of community tools
began supporting various combinations of profiles and
publicly articulated Friends. AsianAvenue, BlackPlanet, and
MiGente allowed users to create personal, professional, and
dating profiles—users could identify Friends on their
personal profiles without seeking approval for those
connections (O. Wasow, personal communication, August 16,
2007). Likewise, shortly after its launch in 1999, LiveJournal
listed one-directional connections on user pages. Friendster
launched in 2002 as a social complement to Ryze. It was
designed to compete with Mathch.com ,a profitable online
dating site.While most dating sites focused on introducing
people to strangers with similar interests, Friendster was
designed to help friends-of-friends meet, based on the
assumption that friends-of-friends would make better
romantic partners than would strangers (J. Abrams, personal
communication, March 27, 2003).
Social Networking SitesG Rajesh,S2-ECE-B,Amrita College Of Engineering,Amritapuri
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2. Figure 1:The Origin of Various Social Networking Sites
B. SNS Hit The Main Stream
From 2003 onward, many new SNSs were launched,
prompting social software analyst Clay Shriky to coin the
term YASNS: “Yet Another Social Networking Service.”
Most took the form of profile-centric sites, trying to replicate
the early success of Friendster or target specific
demographics. While socially-organized SNSs solicit broad
audiences, professional sites such as LinkedIn, Visible Path,
and Xing (formerly openBC) focus on business people.
Furthermore, as the social media and user-generated content
phenomena grew, websites focused on media sharing began
implementing SNS features and becoming SNSs themselves.
Examples include Flickr (photo sharing), Last.FM (music
listening habits), and YouTube (video sharing).
With the plethora of venture-backed startups launching
in Silicon Valley, few people paid attention to SNSs that
gained popularity elsewhere, even those built by major
corporations. For example, Google’s Orkut failed to build a
sustainable U.S. user base, but a “Brazilian invasion”
(Fragoso, 2006) made Orkut the national SNS of Brazil.
Microsoft’s Windows Live Spaces (a.k.a. MSN Spaces) also
launched to lukewarm U.S. reception but became extremely
popular elsewhere.
As of now thousands of Social Networking Sites have evolved
but a very few of them like Facebook.com,Myspace.com and
Twitter.com have been consistent in their usage or popularity.
III. WORKING OF SNS
While SNSs have implemented a wide variety of
technical features, their backbone consists of visible profiles
that display an articulated list of Friends who are also users of
the system. Profiles are unique pages where one can type
oneself into being. After joining an SNS, an individual is
asked to fill out forms containing a series of questions. The
profile is generated using the answers to these questions,
which typically include descriptors such as age, location,
interests, and an "about me" section. Most sites also
encourage users to upload a profile photo. Some sites allow
users to enhance their profiles by adding multimedia content
or modifying their profile's look and feel. Others, such as
Facebook, allow users to add modules ("Applications") that
enhance their profile.
The visibility of a profile varies by site and according
to user discretion. By default, profiles on Orkut or hi5.com
are crawled by search engines, making them visible to
anyone, regardless of whether or not the viewer has an
account. Alternatively, sites like MySpace allow users to
choose whether they want their profile to be public or
"Friends only." Facebook takes a different approach—by
default, users who are part of the same "network" can view
each other's profiles, unless a profile owner has decided to
deny permission to those in their network. Structural
variations around visibility and access are one of the primary
ways that SNSs differentiate themselves from each other.
After joining a social network site, users are prompted
to identify others in the system with whom they have a
relationship. The label for these relationships differs
depending on the site popular terms include "Friends,"
"Contacts," and "Fans." Most SNSs require bi-directional
confirmation for Friendship, but some do not. These one-
directional ties are sometimes labelled as "Fans" or
"Followers," but many sites call these Friends as well. The
term "Friends" can be misleading, because the connection
does not necessarily mean friendship in the everyday
vernacular sense, and the reasons people connect are varied
(Boyd, 2006).
The public display of connections is a crucial
component of SNSs. The Friends list contains links to each
Friend's profile, enabling viewers to traverse the network
graph by clicking through the Friends lists. On most sites, the
list of Friends is visible to anyone who is permitted to view
the profile, although there are exceptions.
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3. SNSs also provide a mechanism for users to leave
messages on their Friends' profiles. This feature typically
involves leaving "comments," although sites employ various
labels for this feature. In addition, SNSs often have a private
messaging feature similar to webmail. While both private
messages and comments are popular on most of the major
SNSs, they are not universally available.
Beyond profiles, Friends, comments, and private
messaging, SNSs vary greatly in their features and user base.
Some have photo-sharing or video-sharing capabilities; others
have built-in blogging and instant messaging technology.
There are mobile-specific SNSs (e.g., Dodgeball), but some
web-based SNSs also support limited mobile interactions
(e.g., Facebook, MySpace, and Cyworld). Many SNSs target
people from specific geographical regions or linguistic
groups, although this does not always determine the site's
constituency. Orkut, for example, was launched in the United
States with an English-only interface, but Portuguese-
speaking Brazilians quickly became the dominant user group.
Some sites are designed with specific ethnic, religious, sexual
orientation, political, or other identity-driven categories in
mind. There are even SNSs for dogs (Dogster) and cats
(Catster), although their owners must manage their profiles.
While SNSs are often designed to be widely accessible,
many attract homogeneous populations initially, so it is not
uncommon to find groups using sites to segregate themselves
by nationality, age, educational level, or other factors that
typically segment society, even if that was not the intention of
the designers.
IV. EXAMPLES OF SOCIAL NETWORKING SITES
A. ORKUT.COM
Orkut is an Internet social network service run by
Google and named after its creator, Google employee Orkut
Büyükkökten. It claims to be designed to help users meet new
friends and maintain existing relationships. Similar to
Facebook, Friendster and MySpace, Orkut goes a step further
by permitting the creation of easy-to-set-up simple forums
(called "communities") of users. Since October 2006, Orkut
has permitted users to create accounts without an invitation.
Orkut is the most visited website in Brazil, being more
visited than Google Brazil, number 2 on the list. In total
visits, Google is probably still more popular since it appears
as the second (the Brazilian version) and seventh most visited
site (the international version).
The initial target market for orkut was the United States,
but the majority of its users are in Brazil. In fact, as of
November 2007, 62.9% of the traffic come from Brazil,
followed by 19.2% from India. In December 2007, Google
dropped orkut from the drop-down menu of its international
homepage.
B. FACEBOOK.COM
Facebook is another example of social networking site.
Developed by sophomore Mark Zuckerberg of Harvard
University in 2004, Facebook.com was originally
TheFacebook.com (Facebook, 2007). Purchasing the domain
name of Facebook.com in August of 2005 for $200,000 the
site was originally developed for college and university
students as a way to connect with each other (Facebook,
2007). Hosting the most members for a college based social
networking site, Facebook.com is also the number one site for
uploading pictures, boasting several million uploads daily.
Since its inception, Facebook.com has now been opened to
anyone with a valid email address and offers its members
options of joining the millions of networks of people with
similar interests. It is said that 80% of Facebook.com users
check their account daily and that 93% of Facebook.com
users check their account at least monthly (Facebook, 2007)
Facebook.com generates its revenue from advertisement since
it boasts a huge number of registered users.
C. MYSPACE.COM
MySpace is a social networking website offering an
interactive, user-submitted network of friends, personal
profiles, blogs, groups, photos, music and videos
internationally. It is headquartered in Beverly Hills,
California, USA, where it shares an office building with its
immediate owner, Fox Interactive Media; in turn, the owner
of Fox Interactive and therefore MySpace, News Corporation,
is headquartered in New York City.
According to Alexa Internet, MySpace is currently the
world's sixth most popular English-language website and the
sixth most popular website in any language, and the third
most popular website in the United States, though it has
topped the chart on various weeks. The service has gradually
gained more popularity than similar websites to achieve
nearly 80 percent of visits to online social networking
websites.
The company employs 300 staff and does not disclose
revenues or profits separately from News Corporation. With
the 100 millionth account being created on August 9, 2006, in
the Netherlands and a news story claiming 106 million
accounts on September 8, 2006, the site reportedly attracts
new registrations at a rate of 230,000 per day. As of
December 18, 2007, there are over 300 million accounts.
D. HI5.COM
hi5 is a social networking website, which, throughout
2007, was one of the 25 most visited sites on the web. The
company was founded in 2002 by Ramu Yalamanchi who is
also the current CEO. As of December 2007, hi5 had over 98
million members. In hi5, users create an online profile in
order to show information such as interests, age and
hometown and upload user pictures where users can post
comments. hi5 also allows the user to create personal photo
albums and set up a music player in the profile. Users can
also send friend requests via e-mail to other users. When a
person receives a friend request, he or she may accept or
decline it, or block the user altogether. If the user accepts
another user as a friend, the two will be connected directly or
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4. in the 1st degree. The user will then appear on the person's
friend list and vice-versa. Some users opt to make their
profiles available for everyone on hi5 to view. Other users
exercise the option to make their profile viewable only to
those people who are in their network. The network of friends
consists of a user's direct friends (1st degree), the friends of
those direct friends (2nd degree) and the friends of the friends
of direct friends (3rd degree).
V. COMPARISION OF VARIOUS SNS’S
A. Number Of Users
Facebook ranks the 1st
among others websites in terms of
the number of users with 901 million users.Twitter and
google plus are on 2nd
and 3rd
positions with 555million and
170 million users respectively .Linkedin have 150million
users while pin interest has only 11.7 million users.
B. Male-Female ratio
When comparing the male-female user ratio,facebook
has a 40:60 ratio,while for twitter it is 43:57.Males are more
in google plus as its ratio is 63:37.While linkedin have 55:45
ratio,pin interest has a male-female ratio of 31:69.
C. Time Spent Monthly
While a monthly activity of only 3 minutes is found on
google plus,it is 89 minutes for twitter. Both pin interest and
facebook have a monthly activity time of 403 minutes.For
Linkedin it is 83 minutes.
D. Estimated User Worth
Facebook leads with an impressive Estimated User Worth of
118dollars.The Estimated User Worth for twitter and pin
interest is 71dollars while for linkedin it is just 28 dollars.
Figure 2 Comapring Social networking sites based on
user age groups
VI. USES OF SNS’S
A. Purely personal reasons
Easily the most common use of Social Networking
sites, and the main reason for them existing in the first place,
is for personal reasons. The majority of people using
Facebook or Myspace keep to the “social” label. It is used for
its original purpose – to keep in touch with friends.One great
way of taking advantage of the personal side of social
networking sites is keeping in touch with people hundreds of
miles away, maybe somebody who has gone travelling or
moved to the other side of the world.
B. Business – Connecting with customers
With the rise of Internet Marketing, social media is
being embraced by businesses more and more. Innovative
ways of utilising these tools by connecting directly with
customers are being found.Companies are seeing that the best
way to conduct themselves online is to speak to their
customers directly using these social networking sites, Twitter
being especially useful for this. It increases the reputation of
the company, gets them positive reviews and shows that they
really care about the customer. It also gives a human face to
the large corporation, meaning that customers or potential
customers will feel much more comfortable coming back.
Figure 3:Percentage of people who said they use SNS for
various purposes
C. Business – Networking
There is also the opportunity for business types to network
and expand their business on the social networking platform.
This can take many forms, and take bits of each of points A
and B. Social networking sites like LinkedIn exist for this
purpose; for people to network within a business
environment. It does for businesses what Facebook does for
students and teenagers, it lets people connect. It could find
you a new business deal or could even find you a new job!
D. Entertainment
Going hand in hand with the ‘social’ element of Social
Networking, people sometimes go on purely for entertainment
purposes. Myspace is a prime example of this, as many
famous artists have been discovered through these sites.
Music is a big part but also videos, such as Youtube viral
offerings, are easily spread on social networking sites.The
newest craze is on Facebook, with all the game applications
that have appeared over the last couple of years.
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5. VII. DISADVANTAGES/RISKS OF SNS
A. Face to Face Connections are Endangered
A huge advantage of these social communities has a
reverse side effect that is also a big disadvantage of social
networking: they reduce or eliminate face-to-face
socialization. Because of the autonomy afforded by the virtual
world, individuals are free to create a fantasy persona and can
pretend to be someone else.It is hard to say no, be rude, or
ignore someone when you are looking them in the eye. It's
incredibly easy and quick to unfriend or unfollow someone or
simply block their efforts to make a connection. Just one click
of the mouse and your problems are over. Unfortunately, this
feature of online socialization cheats people of the
opportunity to learn how to resolve conflicts in the world
outside the Internet and it could retard or cripple one's social
skills developments.
B. Cyberbullying and Crimes Against Children
Use of social networks can expose individuals to
harassment or inappropriate contact from others. Unless
parents are diligent to filter the Internet content to which
their families are exposed, children could be exposed to
pornography or other inappropriate content. The Pew Center,
in their Cyberbullying 2010 report, states that 93 percent of
teens aged 12 to 17 use the Internet. Of that 93 percent, 63
percent of them use the Internet daily. Such high usage
increases the risk of their being victims of cyberbullying or
other cyber crimes.
C. Time Waster
A Nielsen report explains that social networking can be a
big waste of time that sucks 17 percent of our Internet time
down the non-productivity drain. While it is true that some of
that time is likely spent in making and maintaining important
business, social or professional connections, it is also true that
it is easy to become distracted and end up spending valuable
time on games, chats or other non-related activities. Dorie
Clark of the Huffington Post reports Facebook users spend
about six hours each month on the site, while social
networkers spend three times as much time on those
communities as they do on other online activities like email.
D. Corporate Invasion of Privacy
Social networking invites major corporations to invade
your privacy and sell your personal information.On social
networking sites, the website isn't the product, its users are.
These sites run algorithms that search for keywords, web
browsing habits, and other data stored on your computer or
social networking profile and provide you with
advertisements targeted specifically to you. At the same time,
you may be giving the site permission to share your
information with outside sources unless you specifically
generate settings that disallow them to do so.
E. Risks of Fraud or Identity Theft
The information you post on the Internet is available to
almost anyone who is clever enough to access it. Most thieves
need just a few vital pieces of personal information to make
your life a nightmare and if they successfully steal your
identity, it could cost you dearly. A report on CNET reveals
over 24 million Americans put their personal information at
risk by posting it on public sites such as social communities.
There is a wide probability that a social networking site is
hacked with the increase in technology.
VIII.CONCLUSION
Social Networking site is a revolutionary idea with a
very bright future with further scope for advancements. The
opportunities provided from this medium are immense and
many organisations are making use of this medium to better
their practices.Social networking sites are a part of everyday
life and they have brought revolutionary changes in
communication between people. These sites provide different
resources such as email and instant messages in one place.
Availability of these resources makes the communication easy
and faster. When we look at the social impact of social
networking sites, we find that these sites have both positive
and negative effects. Because of this fact, it is necessary to
analyze both advantage and drawbacks of social networking
sites.Undoubtedly, social networking sites are advantageous
to young generation. With the help of these sites, people can
communicate and express themselves by exchanging
messages and comments.After all the advantages, the
problem that arises is of information overload and security.
Social networks, unlike the common media, do not have a
pattern as to how much information has to be conveyed and
where to draw the line. Too much of information may confuse
users. Security might be another area of concern where people
can get illegal access to a user’s information. The future of
social networking looks very promising but still it has to deal
with the problems associated with it.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
I would like to express my special thanks of gratitude to my
friends in helping me to finish this paper(Social Networking
Site), which also helped me in doing a lot of Research and i
came to know about so many new things I am really thankful
to them.
Secondly i would also like to thank my parents who helped
me a lot in finalizing this project within the limited time
frame
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7. 