With the development and frequent use of internet, more and people are keeping in touch with one another. Not just keeping in touch with current friends but making new ones from others with common interests and views. Because of this, social networking sites like Youtube, MySpace, Hello Hello, Friendster and Facebook have increased exponentially.
Within each of those sites, there are different niches. Niches as in online communities with common passion be it business, hobbies, political views, religion, sex just to name a few. Each niche allows you to post blogs, comments, photos and videos. The same goes for your friends and anyone whom you accepted as friends.
Signing up for social networking sites is easy. Simply fill up the eapplication form and answer a few questions. Such as your name, age, gender, profile, user name and password. It is not compulsory but highly recommended that you upload your photo so that people will know they are communicating with the real person rather than someone hiding behind the PC screen.
When you are done, you get opt for your profile visibility. You can choose to let everyone or just your friends to see everything. Most social networking sites will respect your decision whichever that may be.
Once you hit the enter or submit button, your profile will be seen by people from all over the world and your list of contacts will grow. Some are people you already know while others are people you do not know but have the right whether to accept their friend request or no.
However not all social networking sites started that way. One good example is Classmates which is specially set up to help you locate your classmates from secondary school and college.
To outdo one another, each social networking site developer have to come up with new features and benefits quickly. Some of those include blogging, community niches, mobile interactions, RSS feeds, social gaming networks etc.
It is not compulsory for you to join all social networking site available. Just 1 to 3 popular ones will do. Facebook, MySpace and Twitter are great examples.
Despite all the hype and popularity, the one thing that most social networking sites cannot totally control is privacy of users. This is especially when they meet people who are not really whom they claimed to be online and ended up as victims in either money scams and rape scandals.
Lottery and Nigerian scams as well as guys luring gals out under the pretext of dating and friendship but ended up raping them are the most common incidents that emerged over the years.
These are the common traits of most social networking sites no matter how established and popular they are. What distinguishes them is their target audience and features that eventually persuaded you to sign up as their member.
Still social networking sites is the easiest and fastest way to make friends in different parts of the world. You no longer can share interesting experiences or things you like with them and they are great places to drive traffic to your sites since their accounts are usually free and more and more people signing up.
You can find out more about social networking sites via Google search and your friends who have been on some of those sites. But whichever your choice, the best way is to join them first which are usually free. That way, it will be much easier to determine which ones work best.