Further research on social networking

There is no doubt that social networking has been and is currently successful. The advantages of social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, and Second Life are reasonably straightforward. For a business, they allow a company or product to gain exposure to an infinite number of consumers. Advertising on Facebook ensures that your product will be viewed by millions of consumers. Second Life enables a business to make money online, as the Second Life currency, the Linden Dollar, is an active currency, with an exchange rate of 270L$ to every 1 US$. Another social networking site, Entropia, had a turnover of £200million last year, and is about to become the first virtual world to be floated onto the stock market. The technology firm Gartner believes that by 2011, 80% of internet users will have virtual characters in a social networking site. This relates to sites such as Second Life, where your character, or avatar, is “real,” and is not like Facebook, where the consumer has only a profile of themselves. The Chinese Government believe so much in the usefulness of social networking, that they are building 10 Cyber Recreation Projects, each about 6miles squared in size. Each project will be able to support and create 150million avatars, the cost of which will be £15billion.

One problematic factor about social networking sites is the decision of who the target audience will be. Facebook is now used by people of all ages, but how many of those people can afford or are interested in the product that is being offered. Likewise, Second Life is used greatly by people to escape their own real lifestyles, as is explained later, and therefore “luxury products” need to be specifically targeted at certain audiences. A single mother living in a council flat will be reluctant to even pay £1.50 to buy a certain product. Instead, she could set up her own product and make some money for herself. This is a potential problem with Second Life. A company is not only in competition with other companies. It is in competition with every user who has set up a “business.”

There are other disadvantages of social networking websites that aren’t regularly publicised. As of December 2007, Facebook saw its first ever decline in users in the UK. The decrease was from 8.9 million users to 8.4 million. While this may be a relatively small figure, it must be noted that Facebook is not the only social networking site to see a decline in its users. MySpace saw a decline of 1.8 million users, from 6.8 million to 5 million, since April 2007. Bebo has seen a decrease of 500,000 users since April 2007 as well. Bear in mind these figures are in relation to Britain, not the rest of the world. There have also been slight declines in the number of social networking users in Spain and France as well. As far as Second Life is concerned, it is not popular in the UK. A BBC survey from the 21st February 2008 showing the top-10 most popular social networking sites in the UK did not include Second Life.

Apart from slight declines in usage, social networking sites have been facing other problems of late. On “Habbo,” a Dutch teenager was arrested, in real life not virtual, for stealing virtual furniture worth $2,800 from a virtual hotel room. The goods exist in a virtual universe, but carry a price in the real world. Second Life has also recently been investigated on the claim of child pornography. In Germany, police investigating a computer found that participants were buying sex with other players, by posing as children. There were also cases of child pornography being sold via Second Life. Virtual child pornography meetings were being held, with access to these “meetings” costing 500L$, or £1.50. There is hardly any way to control such practices. Second Life is run by the people who use it, and therefore they can run it however they wish.

To answer the question as to whether it is possible to really make friends online, it has to be said that it depends on the consumer. Many users see Second Life as a way to create a perfect world for themselves, in order to distract them from their normal lives, which are not so glamorous. Therefore, it is often the case that people present themselves virtually as the complete opposite to what they really are, in order to escape from the troubles of everyday life. Having said that, there was recently a couple who met through Second Life, and ended up getting married in real life. This does seem to be a rarity however. It is very difficult to make friends online without ever having known someone. On Second Life, it is more likely that you are making friends not with a real person, but with the image of what they wish to be. Facebook is able to prevent unknown people from looking at your profile through a number of security preventions, which allow only your friends to see you profile. An article from the Daily Telegraph in February 2008 has also announced that messages sent on Facebook can count as unreasonable behaviour, and therefore legitimate grounds for divorce. Even if a physical relationship is non-existent, flirtatious emails are now enough to justify “unreasonable behaviour,” perhaps showing that social networking sites can lead to divorce just as much as marriage.