The Nevada Sagebrush

‘Niche’ social networks allow students to connect on specific interests

Donica Mensing’s online journalism class set out with a mission at the beginning of this semester – to connect journalism students and professors using a newly made social network. Called Soup du Journalism, they wanted to test how people made connections and how those connections could be used to spread information.

Soup du Journalism allows the students to connect with former graduates, potentially networking for future jobs.

As of Monday, their network – launched at the beginning of February – had 215 members and continues to grow, Mensing said.

The class’s experiment exemplifies what Mensing calls a changing culture – how social networking has evolved over the last decade. Starting in the hands of a few people with Web sites like Classmates.com and AOL buddy profiles in the 1990s, social networks MySpace and Facebook are now the third and fifth most visited Web sites, respectively, in the United States and fifth and sixth in the world, according to Web information company Alexa.com.

“It just shows how things have changed, how people’s preferences have changed,”Charli West, a 20-year-old journalism major said.

College students now have the opportunity to take the popularity of social networking to new levels, experts said.

With social networks allowing people to connect socially and professionally, social media specialist Dan Schawbel said college students have advantages that previous generations didn’t experience.

“College students are in a gold rush right now and they don’t even know it,”said Schawbel, a recent Bentley College graduate. “There used to be a lot of barriers to starting a company or to getting your name out there, but now if you have a blog, join social networks and form alliances, you can accomplish your dreams at any age.”

Social networking is at an all-time high with the technological advances that have been made over the last decade, said Tim Gibbon, co-founder and editor of the Social Media Portal, a Web site that connects social networks and studies the interactions between them. While social network giants Facebook and MySpace hold mass appeal and draw millions of users – Facebook has 67 million active users and MySpace has 185 million registered users – Gibbon said networks are starting to fragment.

“Social networks are now starting to fragment and many niche sites are being created, so there is interest there for anyone and everyone,”he said.

Casey Allen said while he has a Facebook profile, it isn’t necessarily something he uses often.

But a niche content network for medical students would appeal to him because he would be able to talk with others around the country about their own experiences.

“It’d be a specific way to communicate with a certain population,”said Allen, a 23-year-old medical student. “I like the idea of that.”

Web sites like Ning.com and Snappville.com allow users to create their own social networks based on topics ranging from new businesses to shared interests.

Mark Sigal, Snapp Networks’s CEO, said Snapp and other smaller networking sites allow people to create their own communities.

“I’ve seen HIV-oriented communities, SecondLife communities,”Sigal said. “College students these days are the first people who’ve grown up and into this kind of world where everything they want to know, everyone they want to meet, is literally at the tips of their fingers.”

Sigal said for students to take advantage of technology, they couldn’t just create networks, but push them on the Internet. From developing a unique message to targeting certain audiences, success in a growing networking world meant working on it day-to-day and week-to-week.

“Facebook and MySpace don’t happen often,”Sigal said. “But people can break in by focusing on specialized topics – different networks work for different people.”

With social networking growing, the future holds possibilities that are endless, Mensing said. People will be able to connect with another professional while sitting in their cars or standing in line at the grocery store.

“I see all of this becoming mobile, with iPhones and other smart phones,”she said. “Sitting at a computer to connect with other people online may become old-fashioned.”

 

1. Blogsphere
Started: 1998 (Open Diary)
Users: 112 million blogs
The blogsphere represents all blogs on the Internet with a single author. Bloggers cannot make friend lists or directly connect to one another. Blogs are fragmented and spread throughout the Web, though some are hosted on Blogger.com, OpenDiary.com and other sites, allowing people to “lurk”multiple blogs. Users can only contribute comments.

2. Digg
Started: 2000
Users: 2.7 million registered
Digg exists only because people link information from other sites, comment on them and decide what’s most important based on a point system. Only about 100 people contribute 90 percent of the content on Digg while the rest — mostly unregistered — read it. Digg allows people to create profiles and connect through friend lists so they can watch each other post or digg content.

3. News Blogs
News professionals work together to author these blogs. Many news blogs gather a large following of niche readers though only a few contribute comments.

4. Regular news web sites
Web sites like NevadaSagebrush.com and NYT.com publish information with a “we write it, you read it”mentality that only allows users to comment on articles. On most sites only about 25 to 100 users out of thousands or millions of readers comment on most topics. These sites have no profile or friending abilities.

5. Social Networked news web sites
News sites like IndyStar.com and to an extent, RGJ.com, allow readers to create profiles, connect to each other in friend lists, community groups and contribute news articles, photos, blogs and comments in addition to reading journalists’ articles. Though a minority of users still contribute a majority of the information, far more people are involved in the process.

6. Facebook
Started: 2004
Users: 67 million active*
Facebook relies entirely on profiles and user content to exist and “lurkers”must have profiles to view anything. Some applications in Facebook, such as Posted Items and WidgetBox, rely on feeds from other sites to work. Users on Facebook are infinitely connected through local networks, friends, groups and applications.

7. Twitter
Started: 2006
Users: 450,000 active
A user can type up to 140 characters to update friends about anything. Twitter also cannot exist without user content nor can anything be viewed without a profile. Large contributors, such as Microsoft or news Web sites, contribute more updates than average users.

8. Ning
Started: 2004
Users: 200,000 networks
Ning allows any user to create a self-contained and highly customizable social network within the main platform. Some networks are connected through friends or share links and information. Some networks leave Ning by using personalized addresses while others take the site code and leave the Ning platform all together. Users create profiles, make friends, contribute content, comment and create even smaller “group”networks within the larger network.

9. LiveJournal
Started: 1999
Users: 920,000 active
This is the basic model for Friendster, MySpace, LinkedIn and hundreds of smaller sites. These sites are self-contained and only require members and profiles to exist. Users can friend each other but registering is not required to view most profiles, thus these sites have thousands of “lurkers”who never join.

9. Friendster
Started: 2002
Users: 65 million registered

9. MySpace
Started: 2003
Users: 185 million registered (April 2007)

9. LinkedIn
Started: 2007
Users: 20 million registered

– Michael Higdon

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