Checking Out Some Social Networking Sites

These Facebook, Myspace and Friendster are the social networking sites.
Also I would like to introduce the Korean Social Networking Sites which are Cyworld and Iloveschool.

Basically, these five sites provide user blog or homepage, which is easily customized. Also these sites make people easy to find their friends or school mate by providing name, email or date of birth, so that people are able to make a cyber community or connection with friends or people.

In the blog or homepage, people can publish their post, video clips and images (albums).

Compare
- These sites have function to invite friend who already know each other.
In order to invite friend, the invitor should know some of information of friends
- Facebook, Frinedster and Iloveschool have a function of inviting not only their friends but also school friends. These sites are provided to friends search based on which school people graduate from.
- With these sites, people are able to exchange

Contrast
- The business model of the US sites and Korean sites are different.
US sites are posted the ad banner or streaming ad into the page.
Korean sites are charged usage of digital contents from user
Digital contents are font, background images and Background Music
If the users want to put BGM into their blog or homepage, people have to pay for the contents.
- Friendster provides the cyber community which people able to get together with same interest. (Ex, fan of musical artist, hobbies)

While I had made the account of these sites, I thought it will be easy to make an account anonymously. When I registered, I only provided some basic information, name, email and date of birth. Since these sites are provided the people search function, it could be used for cyber stocking. To avoid these social cyber issues and to protect the privacy, the function confirms person’s identity will be needed in the future.
In addition, Korean sites are used to verify the identity by asking people put the “resident registration number”, which is similar with Social Security Number, so that the sites are able to track person when the person commit cyber crime.