The main social networking sites include Facebook, Bebo, Twitter, MySpace, LinkedIn, Orkut, and Hi5. The main similarity among these sites is to bring people from all over the world together, to enhance the relationships between people. Ironically, they have also brought people apart as they reduce the amount of face-to-face interaction between individuals. They are very popular because they fulfil Maslow’s third level of hierarchy of needs that is social, the need to feel loved and a sense of belonging. To me, these social networking sites are certainly beneficial for individuals living away from their friends and family and they want to feel connected to them. However, for people who have their close ones around them, these social networking sites might do more harm than good as they bring these people further apart.
Social networking sites can also be dangerous because you are exposing your most private life to people all around the world. Some people might argue that as long as I limit my content to only my friends and people I know, I will be safe. The question is how sure are you that you would not be sold out? If friends decide to share your photos, or worse, edit and share them with strangers, what can you do? And what if the person who claimed to be your friend and even had a picture of your friend as his or her profile picture turns out to be someone else?
Commercial companies can benefit from social networking services via advertisements. However, how beneficial is this idea? People go on Facebook because it is FREE! Who would continue if they have to pay for it? Thus, why would people respond to advertisements on Facebook when they are there to find friends or play games?
Therefore, social networking sites are definitely not useful for business unless you are pushing your goods to individuals whom you know and you have the time to explain the products and services to them.
The social networking website, Bebo, founded in 2005, is an acronym for "Blog early, blog often". Its founders are husband and wife Michael and Xochi Birch. It is available in several languages, such as English, Polish, German, French, Dutch, Spanish, and Italian. Like Facebook, Bebo also has profiles that contain a comment section where other users can leave a message, and a list of the user's friends. Basically, the applications in Bebo are somewhat similar to that of Facebook, however, when it comes to games, which I believe is what makes Facebook so popular, Bebo is far away from being successful. Games such as Gangster War and Knight of Honor are not user-friendly, at least to me. Compared to Facebook, Bebo is too BORING!!! And what you can do here is just too limited. Most importantly, I have no friends, using this social networking site.
Bebo does have this application which I kind of like, that is the Bebo’s social inbox. It is a way for us to organize all your messages in one easy-to-use inbox. The Social Inbox features updates from Gmail, Yahoo! Mail and AOL Mail, and media recommendations that deliver us the most relevant online entertainment. However, what is it that Bebo can do that Facebook cannot? Nothing that I can think of.
Also, Facebook allows one to find friends who are not in their email address book, an application that Bebo does not feature, as it only allows one to add friends whom they are ALREADY connected to via mail.
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