Social Networking Review of “How to Make 80million Friends and Influence people”

Social Networking
Review of “How to Make 80million Friends and Influence people”
In the article “How to make 80 million Friends and influence people”, the writer, Simon Garfield is reporting on the cultural phenomena that is social networking. Social networking was originally set up in the late 1990s in order for friends to stay in touch with each other over long distances. Michael Birch is the founder of Bebo, one of the fastest growing social networking sites today. He set up the site in January 2005 when he and his family moved from London to California, as a way to keep in touch with friends in the UK.
When the article was written, Bebo was “the sixth most popular site in the UK, bigger than AOL, Amazon and bbc.co.uk.”
According to the Sunday Independent, Bebo is now the “most popular site in Ireland”
Social networking is a success due to the profile of its users. Members are generally secondary school students or young adults between the ages of 18 and 30. The attraction of social networking sites is simple, according to Duncan Watts, a sociologist at Columbia University, “people like to express themselves, and they are curious about other people”.
On sites such as Bebo, MySpace, Facebook, Friendster, Classmates, Xanga, MSN Spaces, Yahoo 360, hi5, LinkedIn, LiveJournal, Sconex, CrushSpot, Multiply, Orkut, Tagworld, Tagged, Piczo, Mooble, WAYN, ASmallWorld, MyYearBook, Cyworld, ProfileHeaven, Fropper and EveryonesConnected, people can link their pages to their friends’ pages, to their friends’ friend’s pages and so on. In this way, a person’s ability to be “popular” has increased exponentially, and the amount of “hits” or “views” their profile receives is proof of this.
On a simpler level, social networking sites allow friends to share their photos with each other, leave comments and messages and to update their social groups, however big or small, on events in their lives. Setting up a page is easily mastered, “there is no tricky programming to learn, no software to load. You click on a template and receive instant gratification” and the rewards are enormous; cheap, easy communication with a wide circle of friends and peers from the comfort of your own home.