The use of dedicated websites and applications to interact with other users, or to find people with similar interests to oneself. The use of internet-based social media programs to make connections with friends, family, classmates, customers and clients. Social networking can be done for social purposes, business purposes or both. The programs show the associations between individuals and facilitate the acquisition of new contacts. Examples of social networking have included Facebook, LinkedIn, Classmates.com and Yelp. Social networking programs group individuals by interests, hometowns, employers, schools and other commonalities. Social networking is also a significant target area for marketers seeking to engage users.
A social network is a social structure made up of a set of social actors (such as individuals or organizations) and a set of the dyadic ties between these actors. The social network perspective provides a set of methods for analyzing the structure of whole social entities as well as a variety of theories explaining the patterns observed in these structures. The study of these structures uses social network analysis to identify local and global patterns, locate influential entities, and examine network dynamics.
Social networks and the analysis of them is an inherently interdisciplinary academic field which emerged from social psychology, sociology, statistics, and graph theory. Georg Simmel authored early structural theories in sociology emphasizing the dynamics of triads and “web of group affiliations.”Jacob Moreno is credited with developing the first sociograms in the 1930s to study interpersonal relationships.
These approaches were mathematically formalized in the 1950s and theories and methods of social networks became pervasive in the social and behavioral sciences by the 1980s. Social network analysis is now one of the major paradigms in contemporary sociology, and is also employed in a number of other social and formal sciences. Together with other complex networks, it forms part of the nascent field of network science.