COMPARATIVE STUDY AND ANALYSIS OF SOCIAL NETWORKING SITES A Thesis Presented to the Faculty of San Diego State University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Science in Computer Science by Alay Rameshbhai Patel Spring 2011
iii Copyright 2011 by Alay Rameshbhai Patel All Rights Reserved
iv DEDICATION I would like to dedicate this thesis to my parents, who taught me never to give up regardless of the circumstances. I am also thankful to Professor Dr. Joseph Lewis for his everlasting support.
v ABSTRACT OF THE THESIS Comparative Study and Analysis of Social Networking Sites by Alay Rameshbhai Patel Master of Science in Computer Science San Diego State University, 2011 Social networking sites have become an integral part in the modern world today. This thesis focuses on comparing and analyzing in detail the technical architectures of the two topmost leading networking sites--facebook and LinkedIn. Detailed research on the communication services and network update services is presented. Scaling techniques: Functional partitioning, class partitioning along with data archiving and load balancing schemes have been explored in depth, and improvements have been proposed. The technical workflow between MySQL, Memcache, Alternative PHPcache, custom partitioning data, graph based data access libraries, leaf servers, aggregators, chat loggers, channel clusters, Network resolvers, Network collectors, Network digesters and supporting programming languages have been explored and documented. An extensive support to the open source platform with the customized developed frameworks has been well studied. Business aspects, strategies keeping the target audience in context, have been researched and then underlying opportunities in e-commerce world have been explored. An official survey was conducted with the approval from the Institutional Review Board among the target audience to learn about the users issues: following this appropriate solutions have been proposed. This thesis will serve as a single point of data access for the aspiring networking site developers to learn about technical architectures, corresponding supporting customized services, data models and all other required technical details of the two existing most popular networking sites.
vi TABLE OF CONTENTS PAGE ABSTRACT...v LIST OF FIGURES... viii ABBREVIATIONS... ix ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS...x CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION...1 1.1 Purpose of the Study...2 1.2 Limitation of the Study...2 2 SOCIAL NETWORKING SITES PROFILE...4 2.1 Introduction of Social Networking Sites (SNS)...4 2.2 History of Social Networking Sites...8 3 COMPARATIVE STUDY, ANALYSIS OF FACEBOOK AND LINKEDIN...14 3.1 Graphical User Interface Features of Facebook and LinkedIn...16 3.2 Analysis and Comparison of the Features...16 3.3 Audience of Facebook...45 3.4 Audience of LinkedIn...45 4 MARKETING AND FINANICAL SOURCES FOR FACEBOOK, LINKEDIN...47 4.1 Self Service Advertising...47 4.2 Brand or Engagement Ads...50 4.2.1 Poll Engagement Ads... 50 4.2.2 Video Engagement Ads... 50 4.2.3 Branded Gift Engagement Ads... 50 4.2.4 Event Engagement Ads... 50 4.2.5 Fan Page Ads... 51 4.2.6 Hybrid Engagement Ads... 51 4.2.7 Virtual Goods... 52
vii 4.2.8 Investors... 52 4.3 Financial Sources for the LinkedIn...53 4.3.1 Advertisements... 53 4.3.2 DirectAds... 53 4.3.3 Advertising Sales... 55 4.3.4 Pay Per Use Membership... 58 4.3.5 Investors... 59 4.3.6 Partners... 60 5 TECHNICAL ANATOMY OF FACEBOOK AND LINKEDIN...62 5.1 Facebook Architecture and Technical Details...62 5.2 Facebook Chat Architecture...70 5.3 Facebook Summary...74 5.4 LinkedIn Architecture and Technical Details...75 5.4.1 Message Creation... 77 5.4.2 Message Delivery... 78 5.5 LinkedIn Architecture for Network Updates Service...79 6 CONCLUSION: USERS SURVEYS, REVIEWS AND FUTURE WORK...88 6.1 Future Work...92 6.2 Personal Statement...93 BIBLIOGRAPHY...94
viii LIST OF FIGURES PAGE Figure 3.1. Homepage showing the basic features....17 Figure 3.2. Personal homepage showing the basic features....18 Figure 3.3. Personal profile....20 Figure 3.4. Personal profile page....21 Figure 3.5. Personal messages....22 Figure 3.6. Events....24 Figure 3.7. Personal and public albums....25 Figure 3.8. Friends list....26 Figure 3.9. Applications list....27 Figure 3.10. Games list....28 Figure 3.11. Groups list....29 Figure 3.12. Advertisement list....30 Figure 3.13. Movies applications....31 Figure 3.14. Links posted by friends....33 Figure 3.15. Personal notes like blogs....34 Figure 3.16. Personal home page....35 Figure 3.17. Personal home page....36 Figure 3.18. Personal profile page....38 Figure 3.19. Connections list....39 Figure 3.20. Group list....40 Figure 3.21. Job search page....41 Figure 3.22. Personal message inbox....43 Figure 3.23. Companies search engine....44 Figure 5.1. Basic architecture of Facebook....64 Figure 6.1. Survey results - 1....90 Figure 6.2. Survey results - 2....91
ix ABBREVIATIONS APC API CPC CPM DDL IM IRB JMS JMX JNI LAMP LFU LRU PHP SDK SDSU SMC SMTP SNS Alternative PHP Cache Application Programming Interface Cost Per Click Cost Per Thousand Impressions Data Definition Language Instant Messaging Service Institutional Review Board Java Message Service Java Management Extension Java Native Interface A solution stack of free, open source software which is coined from the terms Linux, Apache Server, MySQL and PHP Least Frequently Used Least Recently Used Hypertext Pre-Processor Software Development Kit San Diego State University Service Management Console Simple Mail Transfer Protocol Social Networking Site
x ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank Dr. Jospeh Lewis for providing constant support and motivation during the entire thesis work. I will also like to thank Dr. Carl Eckberg and Dr. Carmelo Interlando for being thesis committee members. I am thankful to my parents for giving me everything to attend the Graduate school. I will also like to thank Jalpa for her constant motivation to successfully complete my thesis.
1 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION A human being is a social animal. From early times, it has been seen that man, wherever he goes, develops social connections. Networks may depend on various factors. In earlier centuries, the network was being developed in order to form communities wherever he lives. The network helped him to get socialized, helped each other whenever they had need, and thus social networking helped him to make life stable. This social networking was at the time when there was no technology. With the passing of the time, social networking expanded from a specific region to different regions. This led to the formation of various caste communities across the region, city, state, country and the world. Each network had its features or characteristics. The formation of different communities lead to the creation of different networks. Networks together led to help each other, develop various rituals, and feel humanity as a whole. Things started to change drastically with the birth of the Computer and related internet technology. In earlier times, email and blogging were the unofficial form of the social networking. Sending messages to each other via electronic mail (email) instead of regular mail seemed to fascinated people. Emailing one email to many, which cannot be done in regular postal mail, is an earlier example of social networking. Specially the speed of the internet boomed the development of the social networking. With the passage of time, blogging was the biggest revolution. It was a hit. People started to express emotions on it. They used to post their experiences which can be shared with other people. Lot of blogs came into picture. Profile on blog started to became as an Identification of an Individual. People got space to share their views where it can be read by all. Other people of same experiences or views started to feel a way of communicating with them. Now social networking started get more active due to blogs which is directly result of the Computer and the related internet technology. With the passage of the time, the next development in the path of social networking in technological world was Instant Messaging Service (IM). This led to people be more
2 addicted to the Internet related Social Networking. They felt an easy way to keep in touch with friends, schoolmates, colleagues, etc. rather than meeting them specially sacrificing lot of them and money. Within short time, IM attained tremendous popularity. Some examples are AIM, Yahoo Messenger, etc. Still the above development was not officially Social Networking Site (SNS). It was a form of social networking but not fairly enough to be called SNS. In the later part of the book, we will learn how SNS officially came into picture and development, success, failure, technical details and a detailed comparisons between the two biggest networking sites, Facebook and LinkedIn. 1.1 PURPOSE OF THE STUDY The SNS has become an integral part of our life. Its not only about networking with people but more than it. SNSs is product of internet technology which is not limited to only technocrats but all the people. It is a part of the global world. There exists a lot of SNSs but only few of them are hit. The purpose of the study is to first understand mechanisms going on behind the SNSs, understand the technical details and study them. After studying, the comparative analysis of the two most famous networking sites, Facebook and LinkedIn is done from all the technical aspects. This explores all the areas, technical and non-technical, responsible for the commercial success, development of those sites. Several issues are addressed from the users point of view and corresponding solutions are presented. Several users are also interviewed to so as to get real picture and not only the paper knowledge. This is one of the interesting part of the book. This book is intended not only for the technical persons but also for non-technical persons so it can serve as a reference for making them educated about SNSs from every aspect. Hence we have interviewed may users to understand what positive points and negative points they have for the SNSs and ask them for non-technical solutions. 1.2 LIMITATION OF THE STUDY The study of the SNSs is limited to the amount of time in which it is studied. The reason is technological development is more quick than the speed of this thesis. So by the end of the thesis, there will be more enhancement in SNSs which thesis may not have talked about. The comparative analysis, which is heart of this thesis, is limited to only two but most
3 famous sites, Facebook and LinkedIn. There can be more SNSs taken into comparative analysis like MySpace, Twitter, hi5, Orkut, etc. The users views has also been taken in thesis. Every effort has been made to consider the users view, their understanding, the flaws, suggestions but number of users are restricted. It is impossible to interview more than three digit number of users. The users interviewed are limited only to US region. Sometimes a specific area may restrict in getting a bigger picture. But of course the research articles has been studies and enough reviews have been given for the SNSs outside the US region. The future work and research suggested may not be adopted by the Facebook and LinkedIn. But results presented here are definitely an important success for the analysis for the SNSs.
4 CHAPTER 2 SOCIAL NETWORKING SITES PROFILE 2.1 INTRODUCTION OF SOCIAL NETWORKING SITES (SNS) SNSs are attracting the attention of all the possible users in the world-students, high school kids, researchers, academicians, industrialists, celebrities, etc. The noticeable feature is that all the age groups are users of SNSs. SNS can be defined in various ways. Some of the definitions according to couple of users are: (1) An online community for friends for checking status of each other (2) Network of Friends. These are just two examples from users who are using SNS- Facebook a lot. SNSs are something which people use a lot in their day to day life but fail to understand it. SNS can be defined according to me in the following ways: (1) A personal profile on a site which keeps you in network with your friends. (2) A website within a bounded system to articulate among the list of friends of their own as well as of others. The definitions varies from person to person. Whether we should call Social Networking site or Social Network site is a debatable question. Whenever any user makes a profile, he intends to create to create a network of his own friends. This is the motto of a social network site. But the way it is used, that is also used to meet random strangers and other activities which is outside the circle of known friends, make it to be called as Social Networking site. The interesting feature of SNS is that not only allows the strangers to meet but also make the users to articulate and make their social networks visible. As a result, it helps to make connections between individuals who have never met otherwise. Often this has not been the goal of the SNS. This kind of connections, some of them who may have never met each other, may be called as offline connections. People on the SNSs are not necessarily looking to make offline connection or new friends instead they may be interested to meet the known people, extending the network of old friends and just be in touch in them. And this was the main reason of creating such sites. A large community is refusing to accept the term SNS instead they prefer Social Network site. But after doing a lot of research, interviews,
5 analyzing the behavior of the sites, it will be absolutely correct to name them as Social Networking sites. Though there are a lot of SNSs with a lot of different features, the main backbone of all the SNSs consists visible profiles that display an articulated list of friends, who are also users of the system. These visible profiles are the unique pages where user needs to enter the data on himself. Initially user needs to join the system. There are different ways of joining but the most commonly used is logging with the help of a valid email ID and creating a password. The valid email ID is a form of way of authentication from the SNSs for the users. After logging, the user is directed to those visible pages where he is asked several questions. These questions typically include information regarding name, age, location, hobbies, etc. It basically ask questions to answer about me from the users. Most of the sites also encourage users to upload a picture though its not mandatory. Some sites also allow the users to create or modify their profile page by certain themes or multimedia content so as to make it fancy. This is a way popular in MySpace. On the other hand, Facebook allow users to add applications totally created by them. LinkedIn does not have such applications that can modify the appearance or add applications but their target of audience is totally different. The visibility of the profile pages varies from site to site. Earlier in sites like Friendster, the profile were always visible to anyone who searches for the person on the search engine. There was almost no privacy for the user. Perhaps at that time, there was no requirement as people were not aware about the importance of the privacy issues and the scams associated with it. But with the passing of the time, people started to see the privacy issues and various scams where user s information was stolen and misused it to a tremendous level. Hence sites that came later like Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn were concerned about the privacy issues since the beginning. In Facebook it is absolutely up to what profile pages they want to keep visible. They can even keep them hidden in the system even if anyone searches for them. They have different options even within the list of friends. On the other side, MySpace takes a kind of simple approach. It leaves up to the users whether they want the profiles to be public or private. It does not provide privacy options within the list of friends unlike Facebook. LinkedIn has totally different approach. It controls what a viewer can see based on paid or free account. This approach is kind of totally different but it is really professional approach. Hence this is better for the users who are professionals and want to
6 build professional network. In sites like Orkut, you have the options same available in Facebook but there is option of Profile visitor which is one of the best features in Orkut. But there are options to disable that too. Structural variations and access to profile pages are one of the main differences by which the SNSs differentiate themselves. After becoming a member of the site, users are prompted to identify the relationships. There are different options in identifying relationships. It starts with simple to identify close blood relatives to totally unknown people. It varies from each site but still the most popular includes- Friends, Contacts, Fans. Most of the sites require two way acceptance for the friendship but not all. For becoming a fan or a follower, it is one directional. The user technically searches for his friends network so as to create the network. One thing is to be noted here, when searching for the friends, the user looks for his real friends or at least whom he knows. But the results is not always the same. This is the one of the important factors in the formation the base of SNSs. The public display of connections or friends is a crucial part of the SNSs. The Friends list contains links to each Friend s profile thus allowing the user to travel through the network of each friend s friends. Thus say you may have ten friends on your network but each of those friends has hundred friends. Hence you are virtually connected to 1,000 connections. These are 1,000 connections but not friends. It depends on the user whether he want to make them as friends or keep only as connections. On most of the sites, the list of friends is visible to anyone who is permitted to see the profile but at the same time there are exceptions. It is left up to the user whether he want to keep the list of his friends visible to his own friends or not. For instance in LinkedIn, user has the option to opt out of displaying the network. Almost all the SNSs have the feature of leaving the comments on the each other s profile. In Facebook, it is called Wall while in Orkut it is called scrap. It is a kind of short message for each other. User can reply back on the comment and communicate with each other. In earlier versions of SNSs it was public by default meaning everyone can see it. However, in all the versions now users have the option to keep it private. Users can even decide to which friends it can be set as private. At the same time, there is feature of sending private messages just like an normal email. These two features are the attractions of the SNSs. In earlier versions, there was no option for having an online chat like an IM. It started
7 with the Facebook where users can having live chat with their friends. It was later on adopted by Orkut and other versions. The notable feature is that even in IM there are options to be in offline mode and still use the SNS. You can also be in offline mode and still chat with your selected friends. SNSs is not all about being putting comments, private messages or IM. Some of them have photo sharing or video sharing capabilities while some of them have playing various kind of games for fun. In photo sharing feature, users can create albums and express their views. At the same time, users can comment on the photos. There are options where someone can also report certain pictures abuse if they violate the SNSs terms and conditions. Uploading pictures is a feature which is really difficult to control as SNSs cannot instantly control the type of pictures. There has been lot of issues where people has uploaded pictures which created a lot of controversy. We shall see specific issues in much details in later part. In the pictures there is an option of tagging. It means one can identify the persons in the pictures which in terms informs other viewers about the persons in a specific picture. At the same time, picture can be shared by other users. Another striking feature in few of the SNSs is video uploading and sharing capability. Users can upload all the kind of videos ranging from music, sports, funny to personal videos. But while uploading the video, the requirement is that it needs to be in specific format. The reason is for the compatibility with technical specifications of the SNSs. But it wont be a surprise if we see in coming months when the user will be able to upload the video of any formats. User also has the option of sharing the videos. This leads to have the video which you like from your friend s list of videos. At the same time, there are options of reporting a video as abuse if any user sees any inappropriate video. Its surprising to see all these photo and video uploading and sharing features in SNSs as this was never intention of such sites when it was launched. Another feature of most of the SNSs is the formation of the various communities. User need to have a specific reason and a purpose for the formation of a community. In typical community formation there is owner and if he wishes he can keep the moderators. Formation of communities ranges from light topics to the serious ones. In Facebook you can see communities ranging from like I like to Brad Pitt, I love my girl to Economy recession, etc. These are just couple of examples. One can never have the exact number of
8 communities on SNSs as they are made new almost every hour. There is also option to keep a picture for the community. Joining a community varies. Some are open communities where user can join just by clicking on join button. In such communities owner and the moderator have very little roles to play. There are some communities which requires approval of the owner or the moderator before joining it. This communities are for a specific purpose and hence owner feels to make those as members which can contribute to something valuable. Once a community is created, anyone can start a discussion on a certain topic. This is called as threads or discussion board. Members of the community contribute useful knowledge in the discussion but not always. There are many times when owner of the community to delete certain topics or discussions. Formation of communities varies greatly depending on which SNSs it is formed. SNSs like LinkedIn, all communities are very specific. This SNS is all about professional network. Majority of users are interested to look in LinkedIn the career opportunities. On the other side, majority of the communities in Facebook, Orkut are less oriented from career side. Another striking feature in SNSs like Orkut is profile visitors, fans and total views. User can see the list of the profile visitors. Sometimes its known friends while many of the times its random. Here privacy feature plays an important role. Some users keep everything private so that unknown users wont be able to see their profile at all. While some of the users keep it totally public so everyone can see it. This is totally up to the user what he prefers. There is another feature to become fan of a specific user as you admire that user in some specific way. The total views feature shows how many times you have logged to your profile. This is the introduction of the SNS. In the following sections we will brief history with specific details before going into the comparative analysis of the world s two most popular sites. 2.2 HISTORY OF SOCIAL NETWORKING SITES Let us see the history of the SNSs. There have been lot of SNSs but not all have been successful. We will try to see why some of them failed and why some of them became too famous even though they came at a very late stage. SNSs did not came all by itself initially. Email and blogging have been always there. But they were really not used for social networking. The first recognized social network site
9 was launched in 1997. It was SixDegrees.com. It allowed users to create profile, list the friends and later on it allowed to surf the friends list. Such features were not new totally of course. Such profiles already existed in dating sites and many community sites, online chatting sites. AIM and yahoo messenger buddy lists existed but it was in personal page and others cannot view the list of friends. Another site was developed called classmates.com which allowed users to affiliate with high school or college friends. At this time, users could not make profiles or list the friends. This feature came but after few years. SixDegrees.com on the other hand combined the features which Classmates.com lacked. SixDegrees lasted from 1997 to 2001.The name was derived from six degrees of separation concept. It means if a person is one step away from a person they know, and two steps away from each person who is known by the persons they know then each person is at most six steps away from any other person on the earth. Users can post bulletins and send messages to the people in their first, second and third degrees and can also see the connection of other users on the site. Users can also invite non-users to join it. It attracted million of users but if failed to become a sustainable business. Finally it had to be closed in 2001. The founder believed the site was too ahead of the time. It certainly looks true in 2010. Internet was pretty new to people at that time. Many of the users were just interested to surf on the internet and not to get much involved in such sites. They were interested in maintaining contact with old friends but not interested to meet new strangers. The site lacked lot of activities other than making friends like games, etc. which is a prominent feature nowadays on SNSs like Facebook, Orkut. Within the year of launch of SixDegrees.com to 2001, a number of communities developed tools to support combinations of profile along with the list of articulated friends. Some of the examples are AsianAvenue, BlackPlanet, MiGente. They allowed users to create personal, professional and dating profiles. It also facilitated users to identify the friends in their personal profiles without the approvals. Then came another major launch of LiveJournal in 1999. It is virtual community where internet users can maintain a blog, journal or diary. Blog and diary, one to support blogging and another for social networking, is an unique feature of this site. This is very different from other sites where you can only blog or only social network. Of course, many of the sites do have dual feature now. LiveJournal was started by owner to keep updated his high school friends on his activities. In LiveJournal,
10 users marks others as friends to follow their journals which is a way different from SNSs nowadays. The Korean virtual site called Cyworld was started in 1999 but was not having much features. It added the specific SNS features in 2001 which was totally independent of other sites existing at that time. Another simultaneous site at that time was LunarStorm, a Swedish community developed in 2000, it contained Friendlists, guestbooks and diary pages. The next major launch was of the site called Ryze. It was developed to leverage the professional networks of the users particularly new entrepreneurs. It was started in 2001 by Adrian Scott. The site contains more than 500,000 members in over 200 countries. There are paid and unpaid memberships. The owner of the site initially introduced the site to his friends who were primarily members of the San Francisco business and technological community, including the investors and entrepreneurs who had found different SNSs later on. Ryze was a big influencing factor on Friendster. The people who are behind the sites like LinkedIn, Friendster, Tribe.net were personally and professionally related. In the end, Ryze never got a mass popularity. Except LinkedIn, others did not attained grand success. Friendster is described by many people as the biggest disappointment of the Internet history. Friendster was launched in 2002. It was kind of social complement to Ryze. The main goal was to compete with a dating site called Match.com. While most of the dating sites target people on introducing to strangers with similar interests, Friendster was designed to help friends-of-friends meet. It was assumed the friends-of-friends would make more romantic dates rather than just totally random person. Users can contact other members, sustain those contacts, share videos, photos and messages. On the other side, it was focused also on dating based on common interests. Friendster has over 115 million users. The major traffic of Friendster is from India. In Asia, Friendster has more monthly unique visitors than any other social network. Friendster gained attention a lot among the bloggers. It attracted 300,000 users through word of mouth before traditional press coverage. As the popularity of Friendster s gained heights, the site started to face technical difficulties along with social difficulties. Friendster s databases and servers were not well sufficient to handle its rapid growth and hence it started to hinder the site. This started to frustrate users who started to use the Friendster to replace email. This had a kind of negative effects on the users who were planning to join it. The media had negative news for Friendster
11 due to its inability to handle so many users. So new users were reluctant to join because of the media coverage. Also the existing users started to face social problems. At one time Friendster had many members, users had to face their bosses and some persons along with their close friends. So Friendster had to restrict the activities of their passionate users, which got bad impression on the users. In initial design of the Friendster, it restricted the users from viewing profiles of the people who were for degrees away (Friends-Friends-Friends-Friends). As a result in order to make more contacts or view profiles, users started to check any profiles they came across. As a result people started to make fake profiles resembling various characters: Fictional, celebrities, concepts, etc. As a result, company started to remove fake profiles as a result users were restricted to within that four degrees level. The active deletion of fakesters (along with genuine users who preferred to choose non-realistic pictures) felt that the company did not share the users interests. As a result many of them started to leave Friendster. Already many of them had started not to use anymore because of the technical and social problems, reduced the popularity of the Friendster. Its popularity was fading in USA but it was reaching great height in Asian countries. One of the biggest bad luck was written in Friendster s destiny when they turned down the offer of 30 million dollars offered by the Google. Fortune may have changed if Friendster would have accepted that offer. Friendster stumbled more when MySpace was launched around that time. MySpace got more features at a quick speed than Friendster and it was able to handle the traffic very well. If Friendster would have been able to handle the traffic easily then MySpace probably would have never got space to become multimillion company [1]. Friendster started to change the technical design and its far better right now in 2010 but its popularity in USA is not up to the mark as that of Facebook and MySpace. Another example which can be classify a kind of social networking, not in the terms of making friends list but video uploading is Youtube. It is a total revolution in the video world. Youtube was formed in 2005 at San Bruno, California. It was formed by three former PayPal employees. It was later purchased by Google in 2006.There are two types of accounts. In the first one, there is no need of any registration. User can just go to the website and browse the videos. In second one, to gain more access to specific videos, user needs to fill out registration. User just requires valid email address and confirm his age. The website uses Adobe Flash video technology to display a wide variety of user generated video content.
12 The videos are uploaded by the registered users. They can upload unlimited number of videos. Initially there were few users but once it attained popularity, there are million of users and video ranges from every topic. It contains the videos right from movies, clips, funny songs, live concerts, educational tutorial to sports highlights, etc. Users can get almost video on any topic he feels to find. Some of the videos are requires the users above the age of 18 so it confirms the age before browsing videos. Registered users can create their own music play lists which can be saved and played anytime. The account profiles of registered users are referred as Channels. Though majority of the videos are uploaded by the users, media corporations including CBS, BBC, UMG and other companies do offer the videos in partnership with the Youtube. There is comments section area right under the space where video is uploaded. Users from all over the world can post comments on it. These comments are creates a lot of controversies many times. Some users upload inappropriate videos ranging from sensitive religious videos to some adult stuff. Youtube do have policies for uploading videos but its difficult to control the users on the kind of videos they upload. In 2003, Iran blocked the site temporarily until the ban was lifted in 2009. In 2008 Pakistan blocked Youtube because of the offensive material towards the Islam Religion. In 2010 Libya has blocked Youtube because of the controversial videos associated with killing. Youtube is even blocked in some of the schools. From 2003 onward there have been ample of SNSs sites developed. Many of the sites took the profile centric approaches, developing social network even among the strangers, few sites focused on building up the professional network such as LinkedIn. The major revolution came with the launch of MySpace in 2003.It had different applications where users can even customize their own profile by adding different themes. It was build to compete sites like Friendster. Their major approach was to attract the users who had quit Friendster. After rumors spread that Friendster may take paid approach, users of Friendster posted messages encouraging people to join alternate SNSs like MySpace, Tribe.net. As a result MySpace was able to capture market rapidly. One particular band that helped to the promotion of the MySpace were indie-rock bands who were removed from the Friendster because they failed to follow the rules and the regulations of Friendster. MySpace welcomed them even though it was not designed
13 specifically for them. As a result, the fan followers of the indie-bands became members of the MySpace. Local promoters started to use MySpace to advertise the passes for those bands. The popularity of the MySpace started to reach heights. MySpace also contacted to local musicians to show them how they can support them. Well this was not the only reason for the success of MySpace, it was their user friendly approach with their users. There were a lot of teenagers who were attracted to MySpace. Instead of rejecting users, MySpace developed policies for the minors. This was a great welcome approach. Along with them, college students were always a part of the fan following of MySpace to make social network. So MySpace created three main categories of users: Local bands or musicians, teenagers and college or post college graduates. In July 2005, MySpace was purchased by News Corporation. It attracted a great media attention. Though there were some issues in MySpace such as sexual interactions between minors and the adults, prompting legal actions still the popularity did not fall. In 2004, a new SNS was launched, Facebook. This was probably another great revolution in the social networking world. It was initially launched to connect only college students and required a valid school email ID for registration. With the time, it was expanded to everyone. It caught the attention of almost every user. The best feature of Facebook is they develop new applications for the users from time to time according to the users. They have great technical team to support the millions of users requirements. We shall explore more about Facebook in next section. Another site which was launched almost as the same time as Facebook, though little bit early was Orkut by Google. Orkut was a big success in Brazil, India but not USA. Orkut was unique in his features but Facebook was quicker in developing applications than Orkut. LinkedIn was launched in 2003 but it reached profitability in 2006. It was not that famous in earlier stages. The site was launched with focus on building professional network. In 2006, another SNS was launched, Twitter. It enables users to read and send messages known as Tweets. It is often called as the SMS of the internet. While there have been no major launch of SNS that attained the popularity though there are many small SNSs launched after Twitter. DefnHistory.pdf has been referred to write about the history [2], SNS on attitude.pdf [3], (see also [1], [4], [5]).
14 CHAPTER 3 COMPARATIVE STUDY, ANALYSIS OF FACEBOOK AND LINKEDIN This chapter is the heart of the thesis. It focuses on the comparison, study and analysis of the two famous SNSs. They are Facebook and LinkedIn. In earlier chapters we saw the history and the evolution of various famous networking sites. Considering the limitations of this thesis, the two sites selected for comparative study and analysis are Facebook and LinkedIn. Facebook, a SNS mainly focuses on meeting old friends, make new friends, various entertainment applications, etc. On the other hand, LinkedIn, a professional networking site focuses only on professional networking. Both the SNSs, built on common approach but different intentions are most famous ones in the web world. In the chapter, we shall be studying specific information regarding the evolution, features, technical architecture, marketing strategies, security issues and implementations. Facebook, a website created by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004. Zuckerberg was an Harvard Student. Initially it was know as Facemash. Its earlier intention was to compare two persons, objects combinations and select which one is more hot (in terms of the website s original intention). For the images of the person, Zuckerberg hacked into the Harvard s restricted computer networks. Harvard did not had a student directory at that time with images and the basic information. The site generate very good response in the initial few hours of the launch. The photos along with the information, is the base of the today s Facebook which was laid by the Facemash. Zuckerberg faced the consequences for the Facemash and was eventually expelled from the school but later on the charges against him were dropped. In the later on, this project was expanded by the Zuckerberg. He used this as an social study tool for his one of his history class where he uploaded 500 Augustan images with one image per page and a comment section. This was opened to his classmates where they started sharing notes and the comments. The project was classified as the best one of any of the finals by the professor. The following semester Zuckerberg started to work on a
15 site created by him. It was called as TheFacebook.com. He was inspired by the concept of Universal Facebook which was supposed to be developed in the Harvard. It was intended so as to connect all the students in the campus. The university estimated to do it in around two years. Zuckerberg found this silly and he was very confident to finish it around one week and in better than the university. This was his intention initially for the creation of the site. He along with his friends launched in one of the mailing list in the dorms. The result was highly positive. He even faced the controversies with his seniors regarding the stealing of the ideas which were originally for the creation of the HarvardConnection.com. However, they were solved later on mutually. Initially this service was restricted only to the Harvard students connecting each other. But later on it was expanded to other schools like Columbia, Stanford and Yale. With its growing popularity. It was later expanded to other schools and even in Canadian universities. Anyone with a valid school email ID can be a member of TheFacebook.com. In 2004, Sean Parker who had been informally advising to Zuckerberg became the company s president. Later on the company move its headquarters to Palo Alto, California. The company acquired the domain Facebook.com. The next critical step was when they started to accept the high school students. The company reached to the high school students. The high school and the college students were the members of the Facebook.com at that time. The membership eligibility was expanded to the employees of the various companies. This led to the immense popularity of the company. Anyone above the age of thirteen was an eligible member of the Facebook. The company popularity immensely grew in 2008-2009. Sometimes later during the year, the company was more visited in a day than any other sites like Google, Yahoo, etc. The company went ahead of their strong competitor MySpace.com. Facebook popularity initially more in United states but now it has virtually reached every part of the world. Facebook has left other popular SNS called Orkut.com a long way behind. Facebook became a way for the users to reach their icons, models or other celebrities. Almost all the famous celebrities have a page on Facebook where they keep their fans posted about their life. Facebook received its first investment of 500,000 from the PayPal founder and later on it kept receiving funds regularly from different investors and today company has grown to 300 million dollars worth. The company captured the market with its innovation and always keeping the users interests in mind. It surely learned from the failures of its successors like
16 Friendsters which became famous tremendously but failed to handle the users interests and the lack of the strong technical architecture. Another SNS, actually a professional networking site was developed around the same year as that of Facebook was LinkedIn. LinkedIn is intended purely towards the building the network with professionals persons. LinkedIn was founded by Reid Hoffman. The headquarter is based in Mountain View, California. It has more than 60 million registered users spanning over more than 200 countries. The company is funded by Greylock, Sequoia Capital, Bain Capital ventures, Bessemer Venture partners and the European founders fund. LinkedIn has features which are very different from the Facebook as the purpose of both of them are different. LinkedIn is also based on the mutual trust of the two connections. It helps to make new connections between professional persons whether its job seekers, employers, small business owners, big business owners, etc. LinkedIn also has a mobile version with reduced features. It is available in six different languages right now i.e., English, French, German, Japanese, Spanish, Chinese. LinkedIn allows to upload the profile picture. It unlike Facebook where you can create and upload many pictures. LinkedIn graphical user interface is strictly designed from a professional point of view. LinkedIn has a feature of a paid user which is not found in any other social networking days. In order to access certain feature, user needs to be a paid member. We shall explore more features in the later section where features are compared exclusively [6], [7], [8], [9], [10], [11]. 3.1 GRAPHICAL USER INTERFACE FEATURES OF FACEBOOK AND LINKEDIN In this section, we shall be studying the existing features of the Facebook and LinkedIn with the snapshots. Snapshots have been taken from the existing websites itself. The figures that follow cover all the features comparing the sites. With the help of the snapshots, it becomes very easy to understand the features. The following pages will present a list of total 23 snapshots and describe them in detail and comparison at the same time. 3.2 ANALYSIS AND COMPARISON OF THE FEATURES Figures are taken from the Facebook site directly. Figures 3.1-3.2 present the information on the home page of the user as soon as the login is verified. On the left side, it
17 Figure 3.1. Homepage showing the basic features. has menu bar where the user can go to corresponding feature by clicking it. The menu contains all the main options the Facebook has. They are as follows: News Feed Messages Events
18 Figure 3.2. Personal homepage showing the basic features. Photos Friends Applications Games
19 Groups Marketplace Movies Links Notes On Figures 3.1-3.2 it is the page, the option which is displayed from the Menu is News Feed. News feed informs all the stories in short description from all the features from the menu bar going in user s friends list. From the Figures 3.1-3.2 we can see it displays information such as the current status of users updated by him, the new friends connections, the various applications played by anyone on the friend list like someone playing Farmville, the latest information from any of the groups user has joined, any of the latest videos uploaded, notifications of the friends joining some new groups and various comments users have made on all of the above news. It is called News feed as it keeps on updating the news regularly on the users profile regarding their friends. On the right side, user is presented quick invited information such as Friend requests, friend suggestions, either by the system or by the other user through different friend finding applications, group invitations, event invitations and various other requests such as accepting the virtual gifts or requests send by user s friends s at the time of using various applications. It also displays information regarding upcoming birthdays of the friends and the various events coming up which are send by the friends. We can see the other options like poking to some of the friends, an indirect way of saying hello to them if the user has not interacted with them from a long time. On the bottom of the Figure 3.2, we can an chatting option. It shows the number of the friends present online at that specific time. User can click on any of the friend s name, a pop of chat window appears and he can start the conversation. On Figure 3.3 and 3.4, it represents the page when user clicks on the Profile. User is displayed all the associated activities related to him only. The page is known by the wall term in Facebook. It is like a blackboard where he can see everything commented by his friends list and the news feed related to user specifically and not others. From the Figure 3.3, it gives more clear idea of the wall section. On the left side, user is displayed his profile information along with his personal photo uploaded, list of all the friends, videos uploaded by the user
20 Figure 3.3. Personal profile. i.e., himself, the list of user s albums, various movie quiz, reviews, favorites, etc. that is related to the entertainment. The next feature present in the menu bar is messages. It is shown in Figure 3.5. Its like email service but this message service has very basic features. The main concept is that
Figure 3.4. Personal profile page. 21
Figure 3.5. Personal messages. 22
23 user can communicate with each other without being even friends. User can send message to anyone on the Facebook. This is very effective when user want to share or gain some information without increasing his friends list. Whenever user gets a message, notification is presented by the system. The next feature of the menu bar is Events. It is shown in Figure 3.6. It basically notifies the user regarding the event invitations, upcoming events where has elected to attend. At the same time, the user has the option to create an event. Basically the entire content presented here is basically of three categories: Friend Events, Birthdays, Past Events. The next feature of the menu bar is Photos. It is shown in Figure 3.7. It provides four options: Video, recent Albums, Mobile uploads, My Uploads. User can come to know about the photos, videos any of his friends have uploaded through normal web or even by mobile web. The user has the option to tag anyone in the album providing privacy features are not set. The last option My Uploads is related to photos and the videos related to the user himself only. User gets to see all the photos and videos uploaded by him only in the last option and no one else. The next feature of the menu bar is Friends. It is shown in the Figure 3.8. It lists user s friend requests and friend suggestions. It also displays the updates from the friends related to any changes they have made in their profile. The whole information has been divided mainly in two categories: Status updates and Find friends. Status updates shows only the update changes from the friends if they have made recently. Find friends is an application which helps user to find the friends. This application is based on the mutual friends concept. The application tries to introduce those friends based on the friend list presented in the user. The next feature of the menu bar is Applications. It is shown in Figure 3.9. It is the heart of the Facebook. Different applications made from time to time are put up here. This page always keep on changing depending on the development by the developers and the users. Technically it is divided into Your Applications, Friends Recent Activity, Friends Applications. It lists the applications that the user has been using recently along with what their friends activities and the applications. The next feature of the menu bar is Games. It is shown in Figure 3.10. It is another important feature of the Facebook. It represents the different kind of games. Technically it is