Developers who are on assignments building a social networking web site come across the issue that there isn’t any specific definition of this. There’s some functionality, which is considered as social network services. Moreover, the target audience has to be specifically defined without that, any social network would not progress even with any functionality at hands.

So which functionality can be considered as social networking? Surprisingly but over the third of such functionality is allocated in simple networks: registration, search, voting, user profiles, administration, SEO, forums. The source of social networks is the news sites with forums (the so called ‘portals’).

Web 2.0 gave an opportunity for closer virtual communications: personal blogs, comments, RSS, tags, interaction with friends. Primarily visitors and not the site admins as before do filling out with content here.

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