What is Social Networking?
Social networking describes the process of connecting individuals via friends, relatives, and acquaintances–a person’s “personal network.” These networks can then branch out and allow friends to connect with people inside their accepted social circle, allowing for a perceived greater sense of security, compared to someone perceived as being anonymous and random.
Social networking emerged as a phenomenon in 2003, allowing the newly-populous Internet to serve as both a buffer and a safety net for introduction to friends by friends once possible only in person. This type of social interaction on the Internet is a logical extension of the blog and Instant Messaging phenomena: blogs allow for a more community of personal inquiry and thought while IM systems allow for only accepted users to chat. There are hybrids, however, such as the concept of FriendBlogs, which combines social networking with blogging.” (Wikipedia)
What is Social Bookmarking?
It is tagging a website and saving it for later. Instead of saving them to your web browser, you are saving them to the web. And, because your bookmarks are online, you can easily share them with friends.
What Can Social Bookmarking Do For Me?
Not only can you save your favorite websites and send them to your friends, but you can also look at what other people have found interesting enough to tag. Most social bookmarking sites allow you to browse through the items based on most popular, recently added, or belonging to a certain category like shopping, technology, politics, blogging, news, sports, etc.
You can even search through what people have bookmarked by typing in what you are looking for in the search tool. In fact, social bookmarking sites are being used as intelligent search engines.
How Can I Benefit From Social Bookmarking?
Social bookmarking and social news allow you to specifically target what you want to see. Instead of going into a search engine, typing something in, and then searching for that needle in a haystack, you can quickly narrow down the items to what you are looking for.
Because many social bookmarking sites display recently added lists and popular links, you can both stay current and see relevant information. For example, let’s say you are interested in learning more about social shopping. You might search for social shopping on one of these sites and come up with two articles: one with a hundred votes and one with two votes.
It’s pretty easy to tell that the article with a hundred votes might be your best choice. And this is a lot easier than putting “social shopping” into a search engine and seeing page after page after page of links that may or may not be useful.
So, what started out as a way to send bookmarks to friends has really grown into social search engines. You no longer need to page through thousands of results to find a needle in a haystack. Now, you can simply go to a social bookmarking site, choose the category or tag that matches your interest, and find the most popular websites.
