Social Networking

• Social networking is both old and new to the Internet. For the last two decades people have used the Internet to communicate with one another, send pictures to each other, and even post messages to each other in a public forum. The very thought and action of socializing with people via the Internet is at the heart of social networking.
  But in the middle of the 2000s, social networking became a more commercial and user-friendly tool of the Internet. Instead of just posting messages and pictures to large servers run by a lot of people, social network sites allowed users to create their own pages, using their tools to personalize and manipulate how the page looks according to the user's wishes. No better example of that exists than MySpace.
  
  

Fundamentals of Myspace

• MySpace as we know it was created in 2004. It was first designed to be a storage site for a group of employees that worked for another website company but quickly became a public social networking tool. How MySpace was able to become so popular (attracting 230,000 new users per day) was due to the myriad of options that MySpace offered people in order to personalize their page on the Internet.
  
  MySpace works by offering free accounts to anyone who qualifies, i.e. meeting specific age requirements and abiding by legal agreements. The bandwidth and storage space is largely paid for by ads that companies pay MySpace to feature on the main site. The ads are designed for users to see yet do not interfere with a user's functions on the site.
  
  

MySpace and User Capability

• When a user creates an account on MySpace, he can input as much or as little information about himself as he wants. MySpace has tools that allow people to upload pictures, videos, links to other websites and even music. Once a person creates his MySpace page, he has the option of adding friends, or other people with pages. Through various search engines within MySpace, a person can find friends and ask for an invite. If a friend accepts the invitation, a picture (chosen by the user) shows up on the other friend's "Friend List," which is on the front page.
  
  Other people can see this and invite those friends to become friends. Thus the networking begins. Within these networks, even more communication tools that MySpace has become available. Friends can send a blog to friends who subscribe to their MySpace blog. They can post bulletins for everyone on the Friend List to see. MySpace users can even suggest links for different MySpace themes or layouts for MySpace pages.
  
  

Myspace And Safety

• MySpace also works to use its vast networking capability for safety. MySpace has an Amber Alert tool that creates a pop-up whenever an Amber Alert is activated in your general area. By pressing the pop-up button, the Amber Alert message displays, letting the user know all the information that authorities think people should know about recently missing children. From social networking to social safety, MySpace has come a long way since starting out as storage space online.