Social Networking Is Online Order of Day

This is Cyworld's page for a Korean actor. Cyworld, Facebook and other online social networking sites are popular, inducing netizens to network with each other and encouraging them to be active parties on the Internet.

Online networking is the fastest-growing sector of modern technology. If you are not on board the social networking bus already, brace yourself for transactions that take place in dotori and a barrage of superpokes. ― ED.

By Tim Alper
Technology Writer

The world of technology has got itself in a hot lather again. This season's hot potato: social networking.

From the potty news that dogs now have an online networking space (www.mydogspace.com, believe it or not) to the bitter cyber one-upmanship of companies racing each other to provide mobile social networking content, the next big thing in technology is undoubtedly social networks.

Whereas once upon a time, email used to be the normal way to keep in touch, and instant messaging (a la Nate On and MSN) used to be all the rage, the Internet has quickly moved on. Now everyone has themselves in a bother about social networking sites ― sites like Cyworld, Facebook and MySpace ― which are jostling for position in the race to monopolize web-based personal and business relationships.

If you have never been poked or superpoked, or you have no idea what a dotori is, you are probably living under a rock in a truck stop off the Internet superhighway. Social networking is all the rage to the extent that, according to a recent Synovate survey, in some countries, almost 45% of adults have signed up for a social network site of some kind or another.

But social networking is not just about teenagers making smutty remarks about photos they have posted of themselves on the net and people getting in touch with former classmates they have not heard from for twenty or so years. It actually represents big business.

A recent report from digital researcher firm comScore states that almost 57 million hits per month have been logged from advertisements on MySpace-related pages. Popular search engines like Yahoo have registered around four million less hits. Across the world, mobile phone carriers, handset producers and social networking (SN) sites are busy spending vast amounts of money on the newest SN craze, mobile social networking.

SN's sudden rise to the mainstream is astounding. Four years ago, Facebook did not even exist. Nowadays, it has a membership of an estimated 80 million people. MySpace was snapped up for $580 million earlier this decade by Rupert Murdoch's News International group, the biggest media organization in the world.

MySpace, who not long ago set up MySpace Korea, are now effectively going head-to-head with US rivals Facebook on the mobile front, as a response to Facebook's popular "Facebook mobile" applications. Companies from all walks of IT life, from handset makers to mobile carriers are getting involved in the SN mobile movement.

Although SN's initial popularity may have owed a lot to the novelty value of being able to put people in touch with people they had not seen since they were at school, SN sites are starting to become so popular that they are changing the way we use the Internet.

Lars Hinrichs, the CEO of Xing, a social networking site for professionals that has already accrued some 6 millions users, says, "Social networks now play a point-of-entry role for millions of Internet users. People seem to be more interested in what their online contacts are doing than in finding out about the latest world news."

However, although most of the world is utterly unaware of this fact, the SN story did not begin in some American geek's garage, as is the way for most of the Internet's overnight sensations. It began right here in Korea, with a site that almost every Korean knows about ― Cyworld.

Korea's Cyworld was the original SN site, and in many ways, it remains a complex riddle for foreign companies that wish to break into the Korean SN market. It has weaved itself so tightly into the consciousness of Korea's youth that it almost seems impossible to image a modern Korean without Cyworld.

However, SN sites are now beginning to diversify, and people all over the world are starting to see the potential benefits of using them. Some bosses are now requiring that all employees use a particular SN site as a means to keep in touch with their staff. But the uses go beyond simply being able to just send messages to people. Many SN sites enable instant online chat services, and also allow networking to become less arduous than it has been in the past.

Instead of actually having to introduce people who you would like to meet in person now, you can get business contacts together through tools on SN sites.

SN sites aimed at professionals have also sprung up on the net. Sites like Xing, which allow users to post job descriptions and search for business contacts rather than just new friends and old classmates, are starting to become popular with more mature web users.

Such sites do away with applications that allow users to buy virtual drinks for each other, compare movie tastes or write witty comments on other users' photos. Here, users' pages display something more similar to an online resume. Users of sites like these are starting to see SN sites as more than just a trendy way to keep in touch. Instead, they see them as a new way to facilitate networking, in a way that can transcend national barriers and time differences.

When applying for a job, many Koreans can now expect that Human Resources managers will have a look at applicants' SN sites beforehand. If you are applying for work at a company, expect web-savvy employers to have had a look at your "Cy" site before you turn up to an interview.

Indeed, over 32% of Korean companies admit that they have looked at applicants' SN site pages in order to try to understand more information about the kind of people they are employing.

Although many users may be filled with dread at the idea that their potential bosses may have perused the intimate details of their "miniblogs", which may contain anything from intimate thoughts to embarrassing photos, Cyworld believe that users can take total control if they take advantage of the various privacy settings that sites like theirs offer.

A spokeswoman for Cyworld said, "Smart users can control what they allow other people to see by putting different people on different privacy settings. That means they can use SN sites to promote themselves, while still allowing closer friends to see all their personal news and thoughts."

However, many Internet users are clearly uneasy about the trend towards "open social networking" that is seeing users to post a lot of personal information on the web. Although posting information online may help you find a lot of friends, in these days of the Internet, phishing scammers live off the juicy snippets of information that many of us surrender to the Internet on SN sites.

Hinrichs says that users need to take careful decisions about what information they want to reveal about themselves, and carefully investigate their privacy settings on SN pages.

He explains, "People should always think carefully about which information they want to put online. The real challenge for SN sites now is in sensitizing members as to how they handle private data. In the end, Internet users should always remember that they are presenting themselves in a forum discussion online, not in a private discussion between two individuals."

tda@hotmail.com