Does Social Networking Or Bookmarking Really Work?
The bookmarks on your social networking site are stored and tagged by you using key words. Users who are also interested in the same topics can access your site and your bookmarks by running a search for those same key words.
In social networking, key words really are “key”. It is by searching for these words or “tags” that you can find web pages on topics that you are interested in. This is also how other people can find you and your web pages.
This is why social networking gets its name, because by searching for web sites through social networking users not only find web sites that cater to their interests but people as well. You can get to know other users by getting to know what they are interested in.
The biggest advantage in the use of a social networking site is the human factor inherent to the operations of the site. Because it is humans who are scanning the WebPages and classifying them by the key words, you can be sure that they understand the content of the resources they are making available to searchers.
However, this human factor also has certain disadvantages. For one thing, there is no standard set of key words or a standard structure to tags. This means that one bookmarked page might have several tags or key word might lead to it. There is also the chance of miss tagging due to something as simple as a miss spelled word.
Since the tags and keywords are assigned by individuals, there is also the danger of a webpage having unclear tags as the person who tagged the page might have a different perspective on the topic as the searcher. You can miss out on a resource that could have helped you because of tags that are to “personal” or unorthodox.
Because social networking can be used as a tool to increase website traffic, some unscrupulous individuals may take advantage of the tag system to make their sites more visible. They can attach “popular” tags to their page and even bookmark their page multiple times using a lot of different tags that may have nothing to do with the actual content of their web page.
The first social networking sites cropped up in 1996 with the first site called itlist.com. During the dot-com bubble burst in 1999, most of the already developed social networking sites disappeared.
Social networking was revived in 2004 with the founding of such sites as del.icious, Simpy and Furl. These three remain some of the most well known and largest social networking sites in the web with Yahoo and Google developing their own versions.
Social Bookmarking Website
