Social Networking closer look

What is Social Networking:

Wiki says - A social network is a social structure made of nodes (which are generally individuals or organizations) that are tied by one or more specific types of interdependency, such as values, visions, idea, financial exchange, friends, kinship, dislike, conflict, trade, web links, sexual relations, disease transmission (epidemiology), or airline routes. The resulting structures are often very complex.

In the recent years, there is an exponential growth in the usage of "social networking" sites. The trend is like, more and more people have started using these social networking sites to be in touch with their friends and family. Also this is a great place to find people with similar interests and people like the idea of going to one place - to communicate with friends, share photos, share videos, thoughts, forums, blogs and any interests. So this is really multi demensional than comparing the mail systems. Every social networking site is very unique and has lot of cool features. Some of the famous sites are myspace.com, facebook, orkut, hi5 etc...

The growth is so rapid that almost everyweek there is one new social networking site and it opens up doors for marketers, because whereever there are people, that is where marketers would be. So lot of industry leading brands are redesigning their site to include this "Social networking" Concept to reach more people in a very short time.

The power of social networking is widely accepted and being quickly adopted by industries.
Lot of potential growth for creative people who can come up with great concepts and ideas to work on some of these new sites.

Also these days, if you want to build your own community sites, there are great products available on market which are "ready to use" products at a very economical cost. You may want to check out "Community server 2007" which is really a cool product. Also there are hundreds of frameworks available in the market. Microsoft had a beta product with the code named "Athens" which they are calling now as "Microsoft.community" (Guess it is a trend to keep changing code names) - But looks like this is still in beta version.

I know that most of you are already a member of one or more of these sites...But if you own a business or want to have your own community site...it will be really cool and send me an invite too.-;)