Wikipedia describes Social Network Services as:
"A social network service focuses on building online communities of people who share interests and/or activities, or who are interested in exploring the interests and activities of others. Most social network services are web based and provide a variety of ways for users to interact, such as e-mail and instant messaging services.
Social networking has encouraged new ways to communicate and share information. Social networking websites are being used regularly by millions of people, and it now seems that social networking will be an enduring part of everyday life.
While it could be said that email and websites have most of the essential elements of social network services, the idea of proprietary encapsulated services has gained popular uptake relatively recently.
The main types of social networking services are those which contain category divisions (such as former school-year or classmates), means to connect with friends (usually with self-description pages) and a recommendation system linked to trust. Popular methods now combine many of these, with MySpace, Nexopia, Bebo,Facebook, Hi5, MySpace, Tagged, Xing and Skyrock,Friendster, Orkut, Xiaonei and Cyworld."
But to a guy/girl who wanst to have a laydown prespective for the whole core idea behind Social Networking it means a bit different.
Social networking is the practice of expanding the number of one's business and/or social contacts by making connections through individuals. While social networking has gone on almost as long as societies themselves have existed, the unparalleled potential of the Internet to promote such connections is only now being fully recognized and exploited, through Web-based groups established for that purpose.
Based on the "six degrees of separation" concept (the idea that any two people on the planet could make contact through a chain of no more than five intermediaries), social networking establishes interconnected Internet communities (sometimes known as personal networks) that help people make contacts that would be good for them to know, but that they would be unlikely to have met otherwise. In general, here's how it works: you join one of the sites and invite people you know to join as well. Those people invite their contacts to join, who in turn invite their contacts to join, and the process repeats for each person. In theory, any individual can make contact through anyone they have a connection to, to any of the people that person has a connection to, and so on.
Chris Pirillo, a guy whom any social networking(specially twitter or facebook) neard will know says the reason why social networks are so popular is that they allow people to keep track of their friends easily. The idea is that you can have one place to visit to keep up with everyone in your network.
Of course, the problem is that there are so many social networks that it’s almost impossible to keep track of your friends. These networks - Facebook, YouTube, MySpace - don’t interact with each other cleanly.
So where does it all go????
Perhaps social networking is reaching a saturation point as it matures, but that's not to say that it's all doom-and-gloom. Many people are still joining social networks, and, with each new generation, social networking will become even more of a part of life than it was for the generation prior. Whether MySpace and Facebook will always be the hot properties that they are today is yet to be seen, but the rise of new sites like Twitter, for example, shows that there's still potential for new social networks to rise up and gain mainstream appeal.But users will want to manage their identities in a unified manner and to have the kind of openness that would allow them to map friends list across different services.
The application of social networks like MySpace and Facebook in a business context has been an issue of late. But doing things in the right way at the right time can make anything happen....so that does means it never ends....
A question was asked about the MySpace, Facebook and a few others owning the social networking space in the long term. “The lesson from the Internet is that it’s never game over,” Katz said. Indeed, looking back over the last decade you can see the leapfrogging that went on in the search arena.
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