On social Web sites

Today hundreds of millions of Internet users are using thousands of social Web sites to stay connected with their friends, discover new “friends,” and to share user-created contents, such as photos, videos, social bookmarks, and blogs. There are so many social Web sites, and their features are evolving rapidly. There is controversy about the benefits of these sites, and there are social issues these sites have given rise to. There are lots of press articles, Wikipedia articles, and blogs—in varying degrees of authoritativeness, clarity and accuracy—about some of the social Web sites, uses of the sites, and some social problems, and business challenges faced by the sites. In this paper, we attempt to organize the status, uses, and issues of social Web sites into a comprehensive framework for discussing, understanding, using, building, and forecasting the future of social Web sites.