social media
Social media can take many different forms, including social networks, blogs, vlogs, social bookmarks, user reviews, video sharing, podcasts, rating systems, collaborative ranking, wikis, comments, message boards, and online forums. Technologies include: picture-sharing, wall-postings, e-mail, instant messaging, music-sharing, crowdsourcing, and VoIP, to name a few.
Examples of social media applications are Google Groups (reference, social networking), Wikipedia (reference), MySpace (social networking), Facebook (social networking), Last.fm (personal music), YouTube (social networking and video sharing), Second Life (virtual reality), Flickr (photo sharing), Twitter (social networking and microblogging). Many of these social media services can be integrated via social network aggregation platforms like Mybloglog and Plaxo.
More specifically, Facebook is one of the most popular social media platforms. Facebook pushed the door wide open to user-generated content when it launched its application in May 2007. Facebook's platform is an API that developers can use to create widgets that can easily be distributed on Facebook. To encourage "take-up," Facebook's platform strategy allows developers to keep the revenue they generate through traffic to their applications. Within a year, Facebook had nearly 20,000 applications created mostly by thousands of 3rd party developers.
Primarily, social media depends on interactions between people as the discussion and integration of words builds shared-meaning, using technology as a conduit. Among overall online users, reading others' comments on a Web site and reading blogs are the most popular social media activities.
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