Social Networking Service

A social networking service (also social networking site or SNS) is a platform to build social networks or social relations among people who share similar interests, activities, backgrounds or real-life connections. A social network service consists of a representation of each user (often a profile), his or her social links, and a variety of additional services such as career services. Social network sites are web-based services that allow individuals to create a public profile, create a list of users with whom to share connections, and view and cross the connections within the system. Most social network services are web-based and provide means for users to interact over the Internet, such as e-mail and instant messaging. Social network sites are varied and they incorporate new information and communication tools such as mobile connectivity, photo/video/sharing and blogging. Online community services are sometimes considered a social network service, though in a broader sense, social network service usually means an individual-centered service whereas online community services are group-centered. Social networking sites allow users to share ideas, pictures, posts, activities, events, and interests with people in their network.

According to the Oxford Dictionary, a "social network" is a dedicated website or other application that enables users to communicate with each other by posting information, comments, messages, images, etc. The main types of social networking services are those that contain category places (such as former school year or classmates), means to connect with friends (usually with self-description pages), and a recommendation system linked to trust. Popular methods now combine many of these, with American-based services such as Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, Vine, Tumblr, and Twitter widely used worldwide; Wechat, Sina Weibo, and Tencent QQ in China; Nexopia in Canada; Badoo, Bebo, Vkontakte (Russia), Delphi, Draugiem.lv (Latvia), iWiW (Hungary), Nasza-Klasa (Poland), Soup (Austria), Glocals in Switzerland, Skyrock, The Sphere, StudiVZ (Germany), Tagged, Tuenti (mostly in Spain), Myspace, Xanga and XING in parts of Europe; Hi5 in South America and Central America; Mxit in Africa; CarnivalPics based in Nigeria; Cyworld, Mixi, Renren, Friendster, Sina Weibo and Wretch in Asia and the Pacific Islands. Social network services can be split into three types: socializing social network services are primarily for socializing with existing friends (e.g., Facebook); networking social network services are primarily for non-social interpersonal communication (e.g., LinkedIn); and social navigation social network services are primarily for helping users to find specific information or resources (e.g., Goodreads for books).

There have been attempts to standardize these services to avoid the need to duplicate entries of friends and interests (see the FOAF standard). A study reveals that India has recorded world's largest growth in terms of social media users in 2013. A 2013 survey found that 73% of U.S. adults use social networking sites.

Facebook is a corporation and online social networking service headquartered in Menlo Park, California, in the United States. Its website was launched on February 4, 2004, by Mark Zuckerberg with his Harvard College roommates and fellow students Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes. The founders had initially limited the website's membership to Harvard students, but later expanded it to colleges in the Boston area, the Ivy League, and Stanford University. It gradually added support for students at various other universities and later to high-school students. Since 2006, anyone who is at least 13 years old was allowed to become a registered user of the website, though the age requirement may be higher depending on applicable local laws. Its name comes from the face book directories often given to American university students 

Twitter is an online social networking service that enables users to send and read short 140-character messages called "tweets".

Registered users can read and post tweets, but those who are unregistered can only read them. Users access Twitter through the website interface, SMS or mobile device app. Twitter Inc. is based in San Francisco and has more than 25 offices around the world.

Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams, Biz Stone, and Noah Glass and launched in July 2006. The service rapidly gained worldwide popularity, with more than 100 million users posting 340 million tweets a day in 2012. The service also handled 1.6 billion search queries per day. In 2013, Twitter was one of the ten most-visited websites and has been described as "the SMS of the Internet". As of May 2015, Twitter has more than 500 million users, out of which more than 332 million are active. 

Google+ (pronounced and sometimes written as Google Plus) is an interest-based social network that is owned and operated by Google Inc.

The service, Google's fourth foray into social networking, experienced strong growth in its initial years, although usage statistics have varied, depending on how the service is defined. Three Google executives have overseen the product, which has undergone substantial changes leading to a redesign in November 2015.