Seminary work Miloš Nedeljković

Introduction: ABOUT SOCIAL NETWORKING SITES

Since their introduction, social network sites such as MySpace, Facebook,

Google+ have attracted millions of users, many of whom have integrated these
sites into their daily practices. Today, there are hundreds of social network sites.
While their key technological features are fairly consistent, the cultures that
emerge around social networks 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. Scholars from disparate fields
have examined networks in order to understand the practices, implications, culture,
and meaning of the sites, as well as users' engagement with them. While MySpace
attracted the majority of media attention in the U.S. and abroad, social networks
were proliferating and growing in popularity worldwide. Friendster gained traction
in the Pacific Islands, Orkut became the premier network in Brazil before growing
rapidly in India, Mixi attained widespread adoption in Japan, LunarStorm took off
in Sweden, Dutch users embraced Hyves, Grono captured Poland, Hi5 was adopted
in smaller countries in Latin America, South America, and Europe, and Bebo
became very popular in the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and Australia.
Additionally, previously popular communication and community services began
implementing social networks features. The Chinese QQ instant messaging service

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instantly became the largest network worldwide when it added profiles and made
friends visible, while the forum tool Cyworld cornered the Korean market by
introducing homepages and buddies. Blogging services with complete social
network features also became popular. In the U.S., blogging tools with these
features, such as Xanga, LiveJournal, and Vox, attracted broad audiences. Skyrock
reigns in France, and Windows Live Spaces dominates numerous markets
worldwide, including in Mexico, Italy, and Spain.

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FACEBOOK

Facebook is social networking service, launched in February 2004. and

created by Mark Zuckerberg and his friends Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum,
Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes. In September 2012. this social network reach
one billion users. Users must register before using the site, after which they may
create a personal profile add other users as friends, and exchange messages,
including automatic notifications when they update their profile. Users may join
common-interest user groups, organized by workplace, school or college, or other
characteristics, and categorize their friends into lists such as "People From Work"
or "Close Friends". This network was founded by Mark Zuckerberg and his
roommates, from Harvard university. In the beginning Facebook was used only for
students from that college, but later site has become very popular and expand to
other universities in Boston area. Facebook is forbidden for children younger than
thirteen years, but there is violating site’s terms of service. In 2009. Facebook was
ranked as the most used social networking service by worldwide monthly active
users. Mark Zuckerberg wrote Facemash, the predecessor to Facebook, on October
28, 2003. The site was comparable toHot or Not, and "used photos compiled from
the online facebooks of nine houses, placing two next to each other at a time and
asking users to choose the 'hotter' person”. To accomplish this, Zuckerberg hacked
into the protected areas of Harvard's computer network and copied the houses'
private dormitory identification images. Facemash attracted 450 visitors and
22,000 photo-views in its first four hours online. The site was quickly forwarded to

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several campus group list-servers, but was shut down a few days later by the
Harvard administration. Zuckerberg was charged by the administration with breach
of security, violatin copyrights, and violating individual privacy. The charges were
dropped. Zuckerberg began writing code for a new website in January 2004. He
was inspired, he said, by the Facemash incident. On February 4, 2004, Zuckerberg
launched "Thefacebook", originally located at thefacebook.com. Six days after the
site launched, three Harvard seniors, accused Zuckerberg of intentionally
misleading them into believing he would help them build a social network for
Harvard university, while he was instead using their ideas to build Thefacebook.
Membership was initially restricted to students of Harvard, and within the first
month, more than half the population at Harvard was registered on the service.
Roommates soon joined Zuckerberg to help promote the website. In March 2004,
Facebook expanded to Stanford, Columbia, and Yale. Facebook was incorporated
in mid-2004, and Sean Parker who had been informally advising Zuckerberg,
became the company's president. In June 2004, Facebook moved its base of
operations at Palo Alto in California. The company dropped “The” from its name
after purchasing the domain name “facebook.com” in 2005 for $200,000.
Facebook launched a high-school version in September 2005. Facebook later
expanded membership eligibility to employees of several companies, including
Apple and Microsoft. Facebook was then opened on September 26, 2006, to
everyone of age 13 and older with a valid email address.
Users can create profiles with photos, lists of personal interests, contact
information, and other personal information. Users can communicate with friends
and other users through private or public messages and a chat feature. To allay
concerns about privacy, Facebook enables users to choose their own privacy
settings and choose who can see specific parts of their profile.Users can control
who sees other information they have shared, as well as who can find them in

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searches, through their privacy settings. Messaging system allows users to directly
communicate with each other via Facebook using several different methods (email
adress, text messaging, or through website or mobile app) no matter what method
is used to deliver a message, they are contained within single threads in inbox. As
with other Facebook features, users can adjust from whom they can receive
messages from. There is also “Like”, which is a social networking feature, very
important for some users, allowing them to express their appreciation of content
such as status updates, comments, photos. Facebook has affected the social life and
activity of people in various ways. With its availability on many mobile devices,
Facebook allows users to continuously stay in touch with friends, relatives and
other wherever they are in the world, as long as there is access to the Internet. It
can also unite people with common interests or beliefs through groups and other
pages, and has been known to reunite lost family members and friends because of
the widespread reach of its network. Some argue that Facebook is beneficial to
one's social life because they can continuously stay in contact with their friends
and relatives, while others say that it can cause increased antisocial tendencies
because people are not directly communicating with each other.

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Some studies have named Facebook as a source of problems in relationships. In

my opinion, Facebook is very useful site. We can communicate with our dear
persons from some other town. It’s excellent for us, students, who are very far
away from homes, families and friends. In some aspect “face” is not to good,
because many people are spending too much time on computer. There is many
other social networks. I had tried them all, but “face” is compatible to everybody,
it’s very easy to navigate through the site, and privacy setting is at very high level,
and because all of that I am using only Facebook, best social network in the world
with over one billion users.

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TWITTER

Twitter is an online social networking service and microblogging service

that enables its users to send and read text-based messages of up to 140 characters,
known as "tweets". It was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and launched in
July. The service rapidly gained worldwide popularity, with over 500 million
active users in 2012, generating over 340 million tweets. Since its launch, Twitter
has become one of the ten most visited websites on the Internet, and has been
described as "the SMS of the Internet”. Unregistered users can read tweets, while
registered users can post tweets through the website interface or SMS. Dorsey,
then an undergraduate student at New York University, introduced the idea of an
individual using an SMS service to communicate with a small group in a company
Odeo. The original project code for the service was “twttr”, an idea that Williams
later ascribed to Noah Glass. The developers initially considered "10958" as a
short code, but later changed it to "40404" for "ease of use and memorability.”
Work on the project started on March 21, 2006, when Dorsey published the first
Twitter message at 9:50 PM:"just setting up my twttr". "...we came across the word
'twitter', and it was just perfect. The definition was 'a short burst of inconsequential
information,' and 'chirps from birds'. And that's exactly what the product was."
– Jack Dorsey. The first Twitter prototype was used as an internal service for Odeo
employees and the full version was introduced publicly on July 15, 2006. In
October 2006, Dorsey, and other members of Odeo formed Obvious Corporation

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and acquired Odeo and all of its assets – including Odeo.com and Twitter.com –
from the investors and shareholders. Twitter spun off into its own company in
April 2007.

Twitter is very innovative and interesting social network, but it is not so much
popular in our country like Facebook. Twitter doesn’t have so many options. In
this network you can only post tweets, share some photos, and follow somebody.
It’s very good for sharing information, and say what is happening around, in your
place. This network is very popular with star people, because they like to sharing
their lives with their fans, and fans are closer to their idols. I also tried Twitter with
one my girlfriend. It was interesting and funny in beginning but after some time, I
was bored, and go back to Facebook.

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MYSPACE

Myspace is a social networking service owned by Specific Media LLC and

pop music singer and actor Justin Timberlake. Myspace was launched in August
2003 and is headquartered in Beverly Hills, California. in June 2012, Myspace had
25 million unique U.S. visitors. From 2005 until early 2008, Myspace was the most
visited social networking site in the world. In 2008, Myspace was overtaken
by Facebook in the number of unique worldwide visitors. Since then, the number
of Myspace users has declined steadily in spite of several redesigns. In 2012,
Myspace was ranked 233rd by total web traffic. MySpace had a significant
influence in pop culture and music and created a gaming platform that launched the
successes of Zynga and Rock You, among others. The site also started the trend of
creating unique URLS for companies and artists. In 2009Myspace employed
approximately 1,600 workers. Since then the company has undergone several
rounds of layoffs and in 2011, Myspace had reduced its staff to around 200. In
2011, Specific Media Group and Justin Timberlake jointly purchased the company
for approximately $35 millions. In 2003, several eUniverse employees
with Friendster accounts saw potential in its social networking features. Within 10
days, the first version of Myspace was ready for launch. A complete infrastructure
of finance, human resources, technical expertise, and server capacity was available
for the site. The project was overseen by Brad Greenspan, who managed Chris

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DeWolfe, Josh Berman, Tom Anderson, and a team of programmers and resources
provided by eUniverse.

Profiles contain two standard "blurbs": "About Me" and "Who I'd Like to Meet"
sections. Profiles also contain an "Interests" section and a "Details" section. In the
"Details" section, "Status" and "Zodiac Sign" fields will always display. However,
fields in these sections will not be displayed if members do not fill them in.
Profiles also contain a blog with standard fields for content, emotion, and media.
Myspace also supports uploading images. One of the images can be chosen to be
the "default image", the image that will be seen on the profile's main page, search
page, and as the image that will appear to the side of the user's name on comments,
messages, etc. A photo editor powered by Fotoflexer is available which can not
only crop images and adjust contrast but also convert the image to a cartoon or a
line drawing made with neon lights, or put the user's face in a photo of a $100 bill.

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Flash, such as on MySpace's video service, can be embedded. Blogging features

are also available. These features could be hidden on a profile by using the module
customizer or using HTML and CSS codes. Photos could be displayed on the
Myspace profile instead of a link that it was used in previous years. Photos can be
made into a slide show. On April 19, 2008, Facebook overtook Myspace in
the Alexa rankings.. Since then, Myspace has seen a continuing loss of
membership, and there are several suggestions for its decline. One claim is that
Myspace failed to innovate and stuck to a "portal strategy" of building an audience
around entertainment and music, whereas Facebook and Twitter continually
launched new features to improve the social-networking experience.

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GOOGLE +

Google+ is a multilingual social networking and identity service owned and

operated by Google. It was launched on June 28, 2011. As of December 2012, it
has a total of 500 million registered users of whom 235 million are active on a
monthly basis. Unlike other conventional social networks which are generally
accessed through a single website, Google has described Google+ as a "social
layer" consisting of not just a single site, but rather an overarching "layer" which
covers many of its online properties. The most followed person on Google Plus is
pop star Britney Spears. Google+ originally launched as Google Circles, a name
alluding to its emphasis on organising friendship information. Early invites were
soon suspended due to an "insane demand" for new accounts. Then Google+ was
opened to everyone 18 years of age or older without the need for an invitation. It
was opened for a younger age group on January 2012. Google+ integrates social
services such as Google Profiles, and introduces new services identified as Circles,
Hangouts and Sparks. Google+ is available as a website and on mobile devices.
Sources such as The New York Times have declared it Google's biggest attempt to
rival the social network Facebook, which has over 800 million users. In 2011,
Google+ was integrated into the account creation process for other Google
services, such as Google Mail. According to independent analysis of its growth in

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December 2011, the site was adding an estimated number of 625,000 new users a
day, which may total 400 million members by the end of 2012.

Joining the service requires mandatory real-name and gender disclosure, which at
launch was shared as public information. The gender selector has options for
"Male", "Female", and "Other". The mandatory public gender exposure led to
criticism for making older Google profiles public. In response, Google made
changes to the service that allows users to control the privacy settings of their
gender information. Google's justification for requiring gender information is that
it uses that information to inform its usage of the terms "he," "she," and "they" in
their delivery of information to users of the service. If a user decides to make the
gender portion of the profile private, the language used to convey information
becomes gender-neutral, using the singular they in place of gender-specific
pronouns. Google+ requires users to link their existing Picasa Web albums
account to their Google+ account in order to join . Because Picasa Web Albums
predates Google+, users added photos that were not necessarily intended for
sharing and social networking. The requirement to link users Google+ account to

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an existing Picasa Web account prevents many users from joining Google+.
Google+ allows its users to +1 and recommend items across the web to their
friends and contacts. However, it offers no control on who sees people's +1s. Since
anyone can add others to their circle without getting confirmed/approved, anyone
can potentially see other's +1s . Google displays +1 to a user based on his/her
social connections. If a person adds another to their circle, he/she will be added to
their social connection. However, Google allows its users to either hide or show +1
tab on their profile and all +1's are manageable from the +1 tab. Google+ is very
innovative social network, one of the youngest, and one of most successfully. This
network commute few Google’s websites in one pack. It’s very useful. I've only
recently registered on this site and I can say that I am very pleased. User’s
interface is well designed, interesting and easy to use. LinkedIn is the leading
online professional directory of individuals and companies.

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LINKEDIN

LinkedIn is the leading online professional directory of individuals and

companies. LinkedIn has over 85 million members in more than 200 countries,
including executives from every Fortune 500 company. Individuals use LinkedIn
for professional networking, connecting, and job searching. Companies use
LinkedIn for recruiting and for providing company information to prospective
employees. LinkedIn members can search for jobs, join groups, research
companies, and network with members of their network. Companies can post
information about the company and job listings on company pages. Companies can
also contact LinkedIn members for recruiting purposes. One of the most important
parts of LinkedIn is your profile. That's what you use to connect with people in
your network and your profile is how you get found on LinkedIn, because it
contains information about your skills and experience. In addition, your LinkedIn
profile can increase your visibility online and help you build your professional
brand that showcases your background to prospective employers. Here are tips for
how to make your LinkedIn profile stand out from the crowd. It's important to be
sure that your Linkedin profile is complete and detailed. In fact, you can consider
your LinkedIn profile your online resume. It should have all the same information
that is on your resume including your qualifications, your experience, and your
skills. You can add a photo (a headshot) to your LinkedIn profile. Do be sure the
photo represents the professional you and isn't too casual. Don't forget to make

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your profile public - that's how the world can find it. Also, customizing your URL
will give you a link that's easy to share. If your name is available use it.

How to Use LinkedIn to Find a Job - Or Have a Job Find You

 Create a Profile. Create a detailed profile on LinkedIn, including

employment (current and past), education, industry, and websites.
 Consider a Photo. You can add a photo to your LinkedIn profile. Note that it
must be a small photo - no larger than 80x80 pixels.
 Keywords and Skills. Include all your resume keywords and skills in your
profile, so your profile will be found.
 Build Your Network. Connect with other members and build your network.
The more connections you have, the more opportunities you have, with one caveat
from Kay Luo, "Connect to people you know and trust or have a business
relationship with, no need to go crazy and connect with everyone."
 Get Recommendations. Recommendations from people you have worked
with carry a lot of weight.

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 Search Jobs. Use the job search section to find job listings.
 Use Answers. The Answers section of LinkedIn is a good way to increase
your visibility. Respond to questions, and ask a question if you need information or
assistance.
 Stay Connected. Use LinkedIn Mobile to view profiles, invite new
connections, and access to LinkedIn Answers from your phone.

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LITERATURE:

[https://s3.amazonaws.com] - The Benefits of Social Networking Services (April

2011)

[http://www.myspace.com/Help/AboutUs] (April 2012)

[http://www.facebook.com/facebook] (October 2012)

[http://learn.linkedin.com/what-is-linkedin] (June 2011)

[http://google.com/+/learnmore] (August 2012)

[http://twitter.com/about] (October 2012)

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