Social Networks

The book I read to research this post was Social Networking Spaces: From Facebook To twitter And Everything In Between which is a very good book which I read at http://safaribooksonline.com

This book mostly focuses on Twitter & Facebook but also looks at quite a variety of social media sites including blogging platforms, photo & video sharing sites & virtual worlds. The book has quite a lot of pictures and is fairly long. I was quite impressed that they cover sites like second life and google+ and even mention virtual business and evite. There is a chapter on meetup.com which they call the original social network and allow users to find local people and basically meet up somewhere. Second Life which is a virtual world has replicas of Dublin City Centre, The Louvre & The Sistine chapels among its places to explore. You are given an avatar and can buy virtual things like clothes and a house. This can get rather expensive but one benefit is you can buy gifts for other users with out the need to post them. So they don't need to give out their postal address. I must admit I think the concept of virtual gifts are a bit of a con. This book also covers you tube but surprisingly not pinterest. One of the authors is a 3d artist so she has designed some models which are exhibited throughout the book and are quite impressive. I did enjoy reading it and it's a very interesting subject that I can't understand why there aren't more books on.