Social Networks, Social Media & Web 2.0

Social Bookmarks vs Social Networks

Social Networks which have been around for a decade or so but were never hugely popular until MySpace came on the scene. A Social Network is simply a network of people, usually united by one website where they have a profile, share thoughts and feelings and maybe have their own blog, interfaces for adding photos, etc. There are a phenomenal amount of Social Networking sites and some of them are incredibly popular and wealthy. YouTube, for example, is a Social Network which revolves around sharing and rating videos. FaceBook started out as a more corporate Social Network but has now expanded to include anyone. WAYN.com circles around people who like to travel, but also accommodates everyone. These Social Network sites can be treated in much the same way as SB sites because like SB sites they generate both traffic and links. However, they are usually less revered by search engines, MySpace being a classic example whereby most of the blogs are seen as useless and trivial and have a tough time on Google. As such only a few Social Network systems may be useful for SEO purposes, though a large base of affiliate marketers use Social Network sites to market their products. MySpace provides some excellent facilities for bands and music groups to build a fan base and network with potential customers. These tactics have been exploited by a large cross section of the web from affiliate marketers to publishers to company officials.

Web 2.0

Web 2.0 is tricky to define, but generally it’s accepted to be an umbrella name for all the Social sites and technologies such as Social Bookmark sites, Social Networking sites, Blogging systems, wikis and any platform which consists of a base of interacting people. Many people assumed that this social movement and technology would take over the internet and as such labeled it as Web 2.0, the next generation of the web.

This concept isn’t entirely sensible because Web 2.0 technologies have been around since the early days of the web and have crept in over a period of time. However, there has been an enormous surge in the use of socialized technologies and just as Blogging systems virtually replaced all static HTML pages, Web 2.0 seems to have taken root and dominated certain areas of the internet.

Social Media

Social Media is another ambiguous title which encompasses a few things but is very closely related to Web 2.0. While Web 2.0 describes a set of Social technologies, trends, websites, and the users who make up and use those things, Social Media leans more towards describing just the websites themselves. Prime examples of Social Media are MySpace, Bebo, FaceBook, YouTube and Blogging systems like Blogger.com. Usually when someone talks about Social Media they talk about it for the purposes of building incoming links for free.

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