ComCorp, Inc. Articles

Facebook Builds Up Edge versus Other Social Networks

The growing competition between social networking websites continue to build-up as online social networks continue to update their website features. According to a report from CNN Money, Facebook, one of the most popular and widely viewed social networking website in the United States, is currently creating a new feature that would enable users to group their work friends separately from other social and school friends. But introducing this feature already provided by another professional social networking website, LinkedIn, could mean an affront challenge to websites that target users who are connected professionally or by employment.

Internet marketing experts and analysts believe that Facebook’s recent move to introduce user options of creating a professional profile aside from its current social one and separating friends for each profile would be a lot popular especially with the social network’s existing users. However such development would make specialized social networking services such as LinkedIn obsolete. “At some point people are going to want to simplify. The open question that no one is really prepared to answer is how many networks do you really want to belong to?” Jupiter media analyst Barry Parr explains.

Although the two social networking websites differ in targeted user audience, once the new features become finally introduced, Facebook could increase its edge over other social networking websites including specialized social networks such as LinkedIn. But all would depend on how both Facebook and LinkedIn users would react to these developments and spell out how this could contribute to the expansion of each website.

The emergence of online social networks has proved that Internet marketing could mean work and “play” at the same time. Facebook was launched on February 4, 2004 as an online version of paper facebooks that feature members of school communities that are usually distributed by colleges and preparatory schools in the United States to incoming students, faculty and staff to help them make acquaintances and to know other people on campus.

Initially restricted to Harvard College students, where its founder, Mark Zuckerberg graduated, the social network subsequently expanded to other schools in Boston such as the Boston College, Boston University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Tufts and eventually to other schools across the country such as Rochester, Stanford, New York University, Northwestern and all Ivy League schools all within a period of two months. The growth continued steadily over the next year, allowing individual users with a university email address to join the social network. The expansion of the social network continued by allowing high school students and large company employees to join the website and just recently, it has become possible for any user with an email address and within a certain age range to join the social networking website. The social networking features also continued to be improved as users can also join other networks aside from their college network such as high school, employment or even geographical region.

As of July 2007, Facebook continued to be the largest college-focused social networking website with over 34 million active users from all over the world. In over the year, it jumped from being 60th to 7th most frequently visited website and with over 8.5 million photos uploaded daily, it is currently the top website for photos in the United States, way ahead of public websites like Flickr.