Kenneth C. Laudon,Jane P. Laudon Management Information System 12th Edition pdf

Social networking 

sites enable users to build communities of friends and

professional colleagues. Members each typically create a “profile,” a Web page

for posting photos, videos, MP3 files, and text, and then share these profiles

with others on the service identified as their “friends” or contacts. Social

networking sites are highly interactive, offer real-time user control, rely on

user-generated content, and are broadly based on social participation and

sharing of content and opinions. Leading social networking sites include

Facebook, MySpace (with 500 million and 180 million global members respec-

tively in 2010), and LinkedIn (for professional contacts). 

For many, social networking sites are the defining Web 2.0 application,

and one that will radically change how people spend their time online; how

people communicate and with whom; how business people stay in touch

with customers, suppliers, and employees; how providers of goods and

services learn about their customers; and how advertisers reach potential

customers. The large social networking sites are also morphing into

application development platforms where members can create and sell

software applications to other members of the community. Facebook alone

had over 1 million developers who created over 550,000 applications for

gaming, video sharing, and communicating with friends and family. We talk

more about business applications of social networking in Chapters 2 and 10,

and you can find social networking discussions in many other chapters of the

text. You can also find a more detailed discussion of Web 2.0 in our Learning

Tracks.

W e b   3 . 0 :   T h e   F u t u r e   W e b

Every day about 110 million Americans enter 500 million queries search

engines. How many of these 500 million queries produce a meaningful result (a

useful answer in the first three listings)? Arguably, fewer than half. Google,

Yahoo, Microsoft, and Amazon are all trying to increase the odds of people find-

ing meaningful answers to search engine queries. But with over 100 billion Web

pages indexed, the means available for finding the information you really want

are quite primitive, based on the words used on the pages, and the relative pop-

ularity of the page among people who use those same search terms. In other

words, it’s hit and miss.

To a large extent, the future of the Web involves developing techniques to

make searching the 100 billion public Web pages more productive and

meaningful for ordinary people. Web 1.0 solved the problem of obtaining access

to information. Web 2.0 solved the problem of sharing that information with

others, and building new Web experiences. 

Web 3.0

is the promise of a future

Web where all this digital information, all these contacts, can be woven together

into a single meaningful experience. 

Sometimes this is referred to as the