Social Network sites

Nowadays, there are hundreds of SNSs, with various technological affordances, supporting a wide range of interests and practices. While their key technological features are fairly consistent, the cultures that emerge around SNSs are varied. Most sites support the maintenance of preexisting social networks, but others help strangers connect based on shared interests, political views, or activities. Some sites cater to diverse audiences, while others attract people based on common language or shared racial, sexual, religious, or nationality based identities. Sites also vary in the extent to which they incorporate new information and communication tools, such as mobile connectivity, blogging, and photo/ video-sharing.

Social networking sites (SNS) have infiltrated people’s daily life with amazing rapidity to become an important social platform for computer-mediated communication (Correa et al., 2010).

Tapscott (2008) said SNS is a cyber environment that allows the individual to construct his/her profile, sharing text, images, and photos, and to link other members of the site by applications and groups provided on the Internet. Hence, Kane et al. (2009) indicated SNS enables users to present themselves, connect to a social network, and develop and maintain relationships with others

Sledgianowski and Kulviwat (2009) argued that SNS is a pleasure-oriented information system that the individual becomes more willing to use as more friends or peers join.

Lin& Lu (2011) thought that correlations between users and network

externalities, perceived benefit, and continued intention to use.

Social networking sites are the latest online communication tool that allows users to create a public or semi-public profile, create and view their own as well as other users' online social networks (Boyd & Ellison, 2007),

Subrahmanyam et al. (2008) proposed the communication forums of the internet are many and varied, and include applications such as instant messaging, email, and chat rooms as well as internet sites such as blogs, social networking sites, photo and video sharing sites such as YouTube, and virtual reality environments such as Second Life.

2.2.1 Definition of social network sites

Kane et al.(2009) defined social network sites(SNS) provides a new method of communicating, employing computers as a collaborative tool to accelerate group formation and escalate group scope and influence

Boyd and Ellison (2008) pointed out social network sites as web-based services that allow individuals to do the things, as follows:

(1)To construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system (2)To articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection

(3)To view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system. The nature and nomenclature of these connections may vary from site to site.

2.2.2 Social network sites

On many of the large SNSs, participants are not necessarily

‘‘networking’’ or looking to meet new people; instead, they are primarily

communicating with people who are already a part of their extended social network. To emphasize this articulated social network as a critical organizing feature of these sites, we label them ‘‘social network sites.’’

With the evolution of the times, now we are familiar with social media and it is becoming increasingly diversified, such as Myspace, Facebook, Youtube and so on. Although that belong to a kind of social media, but its function and characteristic is somewhat different.

Boyd and Ellison (2007)define social network sites as web-based services that allow individuals to (1) construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system, (2) articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection, and (3) view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system. The nature and nomenclature of these connections may vary from site to site.

Table 2-2 Classification of Social Media by social presence/media richness and self-presentation/self-disclosure

Table 2-2 shows the classification of Social Media by social presence/media richness and self-presentation/self-disclosure, and it can be classified by six categories, including Blogs, Social networking sites, Virtual social worlds, Collaborate projects, Content communities, Virtual game worlds (Kaplan& Haenlein, 2010).

(1) Collaborative projects

Collaborative projects enable the joint and simultaneous creation of content by many end-users and are, within the collaborative projects, Wiki is different from others.–—that is, websites which allow users to add, remove, and change text-based content–—and social bookmarking applications–—which enable the group-based collection and rating of Internet links or media content. The main idea underlying collaborative projects is that the joint effort of many actors lead to a better outcome than any actor could achieve individually; this is similar to the efficient-market hypothesis in behavioral finance (Fama, 1970).

(2) Blogs

Blogs, which represent the earliest form of Social Media, are special types of websites that usually display date-stamped entries in reverse chronological order (OECD, 2007). They are the Social Media equivalent of personal web pages and can come in a multitude of different variations, from personal diaries describing the author’s life to summaries of all relevant information in one specific content area. Blogs are usually managed by one person only, but provide the possibility of interaction with others through the addition of comments. Due to their historical roots, text-based blogs are still by far the most common.

(3) Content communities

The main objective of content communities is the sharing of media content between users. Content communities exist for a wide range of different media types, including text (e.g., BookCrossing, via which 750,000+ people from over 130 countries share books), photos (e.g., Flickr), videos (e.g., YouTube), and PowerPoint presentations (e.g., Slideshare). Users on content communities are not required to create a personal profile page; if they do, these pages usually only contain basic information, such as the date they joined the community and the number of videos shared.

(4) Social networking sites

Social networking sites are applications that enable users to connect by creating personal information profiles, inviting friends and colleagues to have access to those profiles, and sending e-mails and instant messages between each other. These personal profiles can include any type of information, including photos, video, audio files, and blogs.

(5) Virtual game worlds

Virtual worlds are platforms that replicate a three dimensional environment in which users can appear in the form of personalized avatars and interact with each other as they would in real life. Virtual worlds are probably the ultimate manifestation of Social Media, as they provide the highest level of social presence and media richness of all applications discussed thus far.

Virtual worlds are probably the ultimate manifestation of Social Media, as they provide the highest level of social presence and media richness of all applications discussed thus far.

(6) Virtual social worlds

The second group of virtual worlds, often referred to as virtual social worlds, allows inhabitants to choose their behavior more freely and essentially live a virtual life similar to their real life. As in virtual game worlds, virtual social world users appear in the form of avatars and interact in a three-dimensional virtual environment; however, in this realm, there are no rules restricting the range of possible interactions, except for basic physical laws such as gravity. This allows for an unlimited range of self presentation strategies, and it has been shown that with increasing usage intensity and consumption experience, users of virtual social worlds–—or ‘‘residents,’’ as they prefer to be called–—show behavior that more and more closely mirrors the one observed in real life settings.

2.2.3 Social network sites in Taiwan

MIC (2011) has sorted the social network sites in Taiwan, including Facebook, Youtube, Mobile01, Blogger, Xuite, Pixnet, Plurk and so on. It can be arranged into six parts, like social network sites, multimedia sharing platforms, micro-blogs, forums, album blogs and dating communities.

Figure 2-3 Percentage of community type Source: MIC (2011)

Album blogs and Forums are the main using sites in Taiwan, but the album blogs is in the decrease than before. And the social network sites including Facebook, Google+ and so on are becoming more and more popular in Taiwan, so this study select the many differences existing in media richness and self-presentation, PTT(forum) and Facebook(social network site) to explore the network operation on the sites.

Table 2-3 Classification of Social network sites in Taiwan their social network. This study classifies the major social network sites which are popular in Taiwan, and was shown in Table2-3.

According to Kaplan& Haenlein (2010) classification, this study classified the type of social network sites that are commonly used in Taiwan.

(1) Blogs: obtaining micro blogs and photo oriented blogs, like Wretch, Weibo, Twitter and so on. The photo oriented blogs were popular in Taiwan in early days, as more and more social networks sites appearing, the users of photo oriented have become less than before.

(2) Social networking sites: including rich media interface, and provide more functions for using, like Facebook, Google + and so on. Those types of sites

connote the rapid growth potential.

(3) Virtual social worlds: nestling up against the people relationships in the real world, like iPart and Match. The sites are for the making friends on the way of charging payments.

(4) Collaborative projects: providing abundant information and knowledge, like Wikipedia and Mbalib, these sites are similar to the database and dictionary.

(5) Content communities: providing abundant script, picture and film content, like Youtube, Moble01 and PTT and so on. These types of sites have its core function, for example Youtube is film based and PTT is script based.

(6) Virtual game worlds: supporting a platform for users to play games, like World of Warcraft, Diablo and LoL.

2.2.4 Remarks

There are many kinds of social network sites in the virtual world.,and the sites users not only use one but numerous social network sites. It means that the social network sites can attract particular users for its functions provided.

By surfing the sites, they can meet what they need, such as information inquiring, game playing, video watching or even friend making. Because there is no social network sites is able to obtain the whole functions for use, it makes each social network sites attract specific members, and form the virtual community in the end. Therefore, this study will take the two social network sites to compare the roles of virtual member and the information diffusion process of these sites.