Social networking service in the context of Network effect

The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a network of networks that comprises private, public, academic, business, and government networks of local to global scope, linked by electronic, wireless, and optical networking technologies. The Internet carries a vast range of information services and resources, such as the interlinked hypertext documents and applications of the World Wide Web (WWW), electronic mail, internet telephony, streaming media and file sharing.

Most traditional communication media, including telephone, radio, television, paper mail, newspapers, and print publishing, have been transformed by the Internet, giving rise to new media such as email, online music, digital newspapers, news aggregators, and audio and video streaming websites. The Internet has enabled and accelerated new forms of personal interaction through instant messaging, Internet forums, and social networking services. Online shopping has also grown to occupy a significant market across industries, enabling firms to extend brick and mortar presences to serve larger markets. Business-to-business and financial services on the Internet affect supply chains across entire industries.

A virtual community is a social network of individuals who connect through specific social media, potentially crossing geographical and political boundaries in order to pursue mutual interests or goals. Some of the most pervasive virtual communities are online communities operating under social networking services.

Howard Rheingold discussed virtual communities in his book, The Virtual Community, published in 1993. The book's discussion ranges from Rheingold's adventures on The WELL, computer-mediated communication, social groups and information science. Technologies cited include Usenet, MUDs (Multi-User Dungeon) and their derivatives MUSHes and MOOs, Internet Relay Chat (IRC), chat rooms and electronic mailing lists. Rheingold also points out the potential benefits for personal psychological well-being, as well as for society at large, of belonging to a virtual community. At the same time, it showed that job engagement positively influences virtual communities of practice engagement.

Facebook is an American social media and social networking service owned by the American technology conglomerate Meta. Created in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with four other Harvard College students and roommates, Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes, its name derives from the face book directories often given to American university students. Membership was initially limited to Harvard students, gradually expanding to other North American universities.

Since 2006, Facebook allows everyone to register from 13 years old, except in the case of a handful of nations, where the age requirement is 14 years. As of December 2023, Facebook claimed almost 3.07 billion monthly active users worldwide. As of July 2025, Facebook ranked as the third-most-visited website in the world, with 23% of its traffic coming from the United States. It was the most downloaded mobile app of the 2010s.

A community of practice (CoP) is a group of people who "share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly". The concept was first proposed by cognitive anthropologist Jean Lave and educational theorist Etienne Wenger in their 1991 book Situated Learning. Wenger significantly expanded on this concept in his 1998 book Communities of Practice.A CoP can form around members' shared interests or goals. Through being part of a CoP, the members learn from each other and develop their identities.

CoP members can engage with one another in physical settings (for example, in a lunchroom at work, an office, a factory floor), but CoP members are not necessarily co-located. They can form a virtual community of practice (VCoP) where the CoP is primarily located in an online community such as a discussion board, newsgroup, or on a social networking service.

Steam is a digital distribution service and storefront developed by Valve. It was launched as a software client in September 2003 to provide video game updates automatically for Valve's games and expanded to distributing third-party titles in late 2005. Steam offers various features, such as game server matchmaking with Valve Anti-Cheat (VAC) measures, social networking, and game streaming services. The Steam client functions include update maintenance, cloud storage, and community features such as direct messaging, an in-game overlay, discussion forums, and a virtual collectable marketplace. The storefront also offers productivity software, game soundtracks, videos, and sells hardware made by Valve, such as the Valve Index and the Steam Deck.

Steamworks, an application programming interface (API) released in 2008, is used by developers to integrate Steam's functions, including digital rights management (DRM), into their products. Several game publishers began distributing their products on Steam that year. Initially developed for Windows, Steam was ported to macOS and Linux in 2010 and 2013 respectively, while a mobile version of Steam for interacting with the service's online features was released on iOS and Android in 2012.

A social networking service is an online platform that people use to build social networks or social relationships with other people who share similar personal or career interests, activities, backgrounds or real-life connections.

This is a list of notable active social network services, excluding online dating services, that have Wikipedia articles. For defunct social networking websites, see List of defunct social networking services.

Instagram is an American photo and short-form video sharing social networking service owned by Meta Platforms. It allows users to upload media that can be edited with filters, be organized by hashtags, and be associated with a location via geographical tagging. Posts can be shared publicly or with preapproved followers. Users can browse other users' content by tags and locations, view trending content, like photos, and follow other users to add their content to a personal feed. A Meta-operated image-centric social media platform, it is available on iOS, Android, Windows 10, and the web. Users can take photos and edit them using built-in filters and other tools, then share them on other social media platforms like Facebook. It supports 33 languages including English, Hindi, Spanish, French, Japanese, and Korean.

Instagram was originally distinguished by allowing content to be framed only in a square (1:1) aspect ratio of 640 pixels to match the display width of the iPhone at the time. In 2015, this restriction was eased with an increase to 1080 pixels. It also added messaging features, the ability to include multiple images or videos in a single post, and a Stories feature—similar to its main competitor, Snapchat, which allowed users to post their content to a sequential feed, with each post accessible to others for 24 hours. As of January 2019, Stories was used by 500 million people daily.

X, formerly known as Twitter, is an American microblogging and social networking service. It is one of the world's largest social media platforms and one of the most-visited websites. Users can share short text messages, images, and videos in short posts (commonly and unofficially known as "tweets") and like other users' content. The platform also includes direct messaging, video and audio calling, bookmarks, lists, communities, Grok chatbot integration, job search, and a social audio feature (X Spaces). Users can vote on context added by approved users using the Community Notes feature.

The platform, then called twttr, was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams, and was launched in July of that year; it was renamed Twitter some months later. Twitter grew quickly; by 2012 more than 100 million users produced 340 million daily tweets. Twitter, Inc., was based in San Francisco, California, and had more than 25 offices around the world. A signature characteristic of the service initially was that posts were required to be brief. Posts were initially limited to 140 characters, which was changed to 280 characters in 2017. The limitation was removed for subscribed accounts in 2023. 10% of users produce over 80% of tweets. In 2020, it was estimated that approximately 48 million accounts (15% of all accounts) were run by internet bots rather than humans.

A blog (a truncation of "weblog") is an informational website consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries also known as posts. Posts are typically displayed in reverse chronological order so that the most recent post appears first, at the top of the web page. In the 2000s, blogs were often the work of a single individual, occasionally of a small group, and often covered a single subject or topic. In the 2010s, multi-author blogs (MABs) emerged, featuring the writing of multiple authors and sometimes professionally edited. MABs from newspapers, other media outlets, universities, think tanks, advocacy groups, and similar institutions account for an increasing quantity of blog traffic. The rise of Twitter and other "microblogging" systems helps integrate MABs and single-author blogs into the news media. Blog can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.

The emergence and growth of blogs in the late 1990s coincided with the advent of web publishing tools that facilitated the posting of content by non-technical users who did not have much experience with HTML or computer programming. Previously, knowledge of such technologies as HTML and File Transfer Protocol had been required to publish content on the Web, and early Web users therefore tended to be hackers and computer enthusiasts. As of the 2010s, the majority are interactive Web 2.0 websites, allowing visitors to leave online comments, and it is this interactivity that distinguishes them from other static websites. In that sense, blogging can be seen as a form of social networking service. Indeed, bloggers not only produce content to post on their blogs but also often build social relations with their readers and other bloggers. Blog owners or authors often moderate and filter online comments to remove hate speech or other offensive content. There are also high-readership blogs which do not allow comments.

The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a network of networks that comprises private, public, academic, business, and government networks of local to global scope, linked by electronic, wireless, and optical networking technologies. The Internet carries a vast range of information services and resources, such as the interlinked hypertext documents and applications of the World Wide Web (WWW), electronic mail, discussion groups, internet telephony, streaming media and file sharing.

Most traditional communication media, including telephone, radio, television, paper mail, newspapers, and print publishing, have been transformed by the Internet, giving rise to new media such as email, online music, digital newspapers, news aggregators, and audio and video streaming websites. The Internet has enabled and accelerated new forms of personal interaction through instant messaging, Internet forums, and social networking services. Online shopping has also grown to occupy a significant market across industries, enabling firms to extend brick and mortar presences to serve larger markets. Business-to-business and financial services on the Internet affect supply chains across entire industries.

A bulletin board system (BBS), also called a computer bulletin board service (CBBS), is a computer server running software that allows users to connect to the system using a terminal program. Once logged in, the user performs functions such as uploading and downloading software and data, reading news and bulletins, and exchanging messages with other users through public message boards and sometimes via direct chatting. In the early 1980s, message networks such as FidoNet were developed to provide services such as NetMail, which is similar to internet-based email.

Many BBSes also offered online games in which users could compete with each other. BBSes with multiple phone lines often provided chat rooms, allowing users to interact with each other. Bulletin board systems were in many ways a precursor to the modern form of the World Wide Web, social networks, and other aspects of the Internet. Low-cost, high-performance asynchronous modems drove the use of online services and BBSes through the early 1990s. InfoWorld estimated that there were 60,000 BBSes serving 17 million users in the United States alone in 1994, a collective market much larger than major online services such as CompuServe.

Virtual goods are non-physical objects and money purchased for use in online communities or online games. Digital goods, on the other hand, may be a broader category including digital books, music, and movies. Virtual goods are a subclass of intangible goods.

Including digital gifts and digital clothing for avatars, virtual goods may be classified as services instead of goods and are usually sold by companies that operate social networking services, community sites, or online games. Sales of virtual goods are sometimes referred to as microtransactions, and the games that use this model are usually referred to as freemium games.

Active users is a software performance metric that is commonly used to measure the level of engagement for a particular software product or object, by quantifying the number of active interactions from users or visitors within a relevant range of time (daily, weekly and monthly).

The metric has many uses in software management such as in social networking services, online games, or mobile apps, in web analytics such as in web apps, in commerce such as in online banking and in academia, such as in user behavior analytics and predictive analytics. Although having extensive uses in digital behavioural learning, prediction and reporting, it also has impacts on the privacy and security, and ethical factors should be considered thoroughly. It measures how many users visit or interact with the product or service over a given interval or period. However, there is no standard definition of this term, so comparison of the reporting between different providers of this metric is problematic. Also, most providers have the interest to show this number as high as possible, therefore defining even the most minimal interaction as "active". Still the number is a relevant metric to evaluate development of user interaction of a given provider.

Homestay (also home stay and home-stay) is a form of hospitality and lodging whereby visitors share a residence with a local of the area (host) to which they are traveling. The length of stay can vary from one night to over a year and can be provided for free (gift economy), in exchange for monetary compensation, in exchange for a stay at the guest's property either simultaneously or at another time (home exchange), or in exchange for housekeeping or work on the host's property (barter economy). Homestays are examples of collaborative consumption and the sharing economy. Homestays are used by travelers; students who study abroad or participate in student exchange programs; and au pairs, who provide child care assistance and light household duties. They can be arranged via certain social networking services, online marketplaces, or academic institutions. Social networking services where hosts offer homestays for free are called hospitality exchange services.

LiveJournal (Russian: Живой Журнал), formerly stylised as LiVEJOURNAL, is a Russian-owned social networking service where users can keep a blog, journal, or diary. American programmer Brad Fitzpatrick started LiveJournal on April 15, 1999, as a way of keeping his high school friends updated on his activities. In January 2005, American blogging software company Six Apart purchased Danga Interactive, the company that operated LiveJournal, from Fitzpatrick.

Six Apart sold LiveJournal to Russian media company SUP Media in 2007; the service continued to operate out of the U.S. via a California-based subsidiary, LiveJournal, Inc., but began moving some operations to Russian offices in 2009. In December 2016, the service relocated its servers to Russia, and in April 2017, LiveJournal changed its terms of service to conform to Russian law. As with other social networks, a wide variety of public figures use the service, as do political pundits, who use it for political commentary, particularly in Russia, where it partners with the online newspaper Gazeta.ru.