SOCIAL NETWORKBy Joel Meza Ríos

• 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.

FACEBOOK• Facebook is an online social networking service. Its name

stems from the colloquial name for the book given to students at the start of the academic year by some American university administrations to help students get to know each other. Facebook was founded in February 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with his college roommates and fellow Harvard University students Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes.

The website's membership was initially limited by the founders to Harvard students, but was expanded to other colleges in the Boston area, the Ivy League, and Stanford University. It gradually added support for students at various other universities before opening to high school students, and eventually to anyone aged 13 and over.

TWITTER

•Twitter is an online social networking service and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based messages of up to 140 characters, known as "tweets".

MYSPACE

•Myspace (stylized as myspace, previously stylized as MySpace and My_____)is a social networking service with a strong music emphasis owned by Specific Media LLC and pop music singer and actor Justin Timberlake. Myspace was launched in August 2003 and is headquartered in Beverly Hills, California. In June 2012, Myspace had 25 million unique U.S. visitors.

•Myspace had a significant influence on pop culture and music and created a gaming platform that launched the successes of Zynga and Rock You, among others. The site also started the trend of creating unique URLs for companies and artists.

LINKED IN

•LinkedIn /ˌlɪŋkt.ˈɪn/ is a social networking website for people in professional occupations. Founded in December 2002 and launched on May 5, 2003, it is mainly used for professional networking. As of June 2013, LinkedIn reports more than 225 million acquired users in more than 200 countries and territories.

• The site is available in 20 languages, including English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, Romanian, Russian, Turkish, Japanese, Czech, Polish, Korean, Indonesian, Malay, and Tagalog. As of 2 July 2013 (2013-07-02), Quantcast reports LinkedIn has 65.6 million monthly unique U.S. visitors and 178.4 million globally. In June 2011, LinkedIn had 33.9 million unique visitors, up 63 percent from a year earlier and surpassing MySpace.

LinkedIn filed for an initial public offering in January 2011 and traded its first shares on May 19, 2011, under the NYSE symbol "LNKD