One of the great benefits of the Internet is that it allows easy communication worldwide. This is being leveraged more and more and that is confirmed by the emergence of a multitude of social networks, designed to get people in touch with each other.
These networks have different purposes and different flavours. From the most popular dating sites, to the more socially and business orientated (linkedin.com).
Accordingly, even traditional job searching sites like careerone.com and monster.com are trying to integrate more and more social network aspects in their sites to make users feel like they belong there and make it easy for them to have something to go back to. Here is a brief summary of what different places have to offer and how they can be useful in the business world.
linkedin.com – this site is building a community exclusively with business in mind. It allows users to find prospects, communicate with future possible clients, find subcontractors, or just network and ponder upon different business possibilities. The site is opened to anyone and once you build a network around you (add a few friends), you can contact all their acquaintances, through them – just like real world introductions. Furthermore, the site allows users to give feedback for the services they have been provided with by other users and as such it gives advantage to good professionals to increase their customer base by virtual referrals.
Even the wording of the site is very professional and it is a good equivalent to all those social networking meetings organized by business associations to get people to meet and discover each other.
orkut.com – That site has been around for more than an year and has recently been purchased by google.com as a way to provide an entry position into the growing market of social networks and online dating. It is significant to note that they are taking this seriously and it lays within their core interests and strategical directions.
The site is invitation only, which leaves it exclusive for the selected few who are invited. Invitation only has also lead to a side effect – 90% of members all come from one country due to the widespread there. This also results in most communities being in languages, different than English.
Communities is what it is all about. Anyone can establish their own group, which works like a forum. Anyone in orkut can join that group (after being screened by the admin) and contribute. There are communities about an incredible number of areas, even in these relatively early stages of the site.
Orkut's drawbacks are not to be ignored however. Being built by invitation only may be good for screening out potential scammers and spammers, but it also means that the network cannot grow as fast as possible. This however is probably not a bad thing, since the major problem with the network is that the servers cannot handle the load from the members it already has. The response of the servers is slow and 30-50% of the pages throw server errors (which require you to go back and redo your action). Hopefully Google will invest into addressing these problems and will build it to become a leader in online communities as it has managed to do with all its other products.
As a conclusion, it is good to see that the Internet is being leveraged for what it does best – connect millions of people from all over the world and provide them with a good medium to share all kinds of information with minimum hassles or problems.
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