Lecture
Annotation: the first part of the report describes the general principles of social networks, the history of development, the impact of social networks on people's lives, contains fresh data on popular networks and highlights problem areas of this issue.
Not everyone knows that the concept of “social network” appeared as far back as 1954 and, of course, did not have anything in common with the Internet, but they began to study this phenomenon in the 1930s. The concept was introduced by sociologist James Barnes: “social network” is a social structure consisting of a group of nodes, which are social objects (people or organizations), and connections between them (social relationships) (for more details, visit Wikipedia http: //en.wikipedia .org / wiki / Social_network). In a simpler language, this is a certain group of familiar people, where the person himself is the center, and his friends are branches. There are two-way or one-way connections between all members of the network. For example, it may be a group of fellow students, in which a certain Jack is the center, and Bill and Catherine are his acquaintances (branches).
Gradually, the scientific concept gained popularity, first in the developed capitalist countries, then in Eastern Europe. As society developed, we came to the information age, in which we created a mass of types of communication, which led to a jump in the development of social networks, and now this scientific concept is used everywhere. I will consider only the development of social networks on the Internet.
The first social network with the use of computer technology has become the technology of e-mail in the distant 1971, which was used by the military in the network ARPA Net.
Further, in 1988, the Finnish student Brightly Oikarinen invented the IRC technology (Internet Relay Chat), which allowed you to communicate in real time.
A landmark event was the invention of the Internet, which became public in 1991, thanks to the British scientist Tim Berners-Lee.
In 1995, Randy Conrad created Classmates.com - the first social network in the modern sense. The concept turned out to be very popular, and this year begins the rapid development of social networks on the Internet. Today, this network still remains one of the most popular in the world and has more than 50 million users.
In 2004, Facebook appears, which for several years becomes the most popular social network in the world. It uses the same communication mechanism, on a slightly different plane, which leads to a revolution in this area. The number of active users in mid-2011 - more than 700 million.
In September 2005, Tim O'Reilly makes an ideological coup, introducing the concept of “Web 2.0” in his article “Tim O'Reilly - What Is Web 2.0”, which describes the modern Internet. One of the central parts of the new concept is occupied by social networks.
In 2008, the Groupon project appears - a collective discount service, which on the one hand is based precisely on the principle of social networks (call your friends and get a total discount), and on the other hand uses social connections very superficially (only for purchases). The service connects communication and business, which can surely be called a new level of development of social networks on the Internet, which combines online and offline worlds.
There are many different social networks in the modern Internet. To organize, you can derive a certain classification, in which since 2008 several new types of networks have appeared.
Type:
By availability:
By region:
The most interesting classification of social networks is by type, there are many different projects with different types of content and for different purposes, each of which has occupied its niche. If we analyze this classification, it is not difficult to come to the conclusion that now all the main topics in the network are socialized, regardless of the type of content, rapid development continues only in certain niches in which thematic social networks actively appear. The latter group in the classification of "thematic" networks hides a huge number of communities, each of which is based on thematic content and communication.
The second type of classification shows how many networks are available. Now the overwhelming majority of networks are completely open to the outside world, for which users actively criticize them, but on the other hand it is very beneficial for them. Some projects are not aimed at publicity because of their business model, so they were initially created closed. Mixed networks usually develop poorly: their task is often to gain maximum popularity, like open ones, however, users are not used to barriers and therefore are reluctant to become members of networks of this type.
The last gradation — by geographic region — is the simplest and most obvious: first, world giants appeared that erased physical boundaries, networks began to develop in certain regions a bit later, often copying in whole or in part world giants, but with a slant on their region. With the development of the Internet, networks began to appear even in individual cities. It is also worth remembering the networks that are attached not to the region, but to the organization, for example, the social networks of corporations or political parties.
The impact of social networks on people's lives is enormous, many are not even fully aware of the scale of this phenomenon, but social networks are the most popular activity on the Internet. Today, of the 100 most visited sites in the world, 20 are classic social networks and 60 more are socialized to one degree or another. More than 80% of companies around the world use social networks in their work. About 78% of people trust information from social networks. Through them even whole revolutions are organized. Social networks have become the very center of the modern Internet.
Information about a person
At the moment, social networks are essentially a huge database with a wide variety of information about hundreds of millions of people around the world, which is also well structured. Recently, the network is increasingly open to the outside world, and many personal user data is already available to all comers. The more a person communicates in various social networks, the more information about him can be collected without any labors. That is why the controversial statement that “special services collect 70% of information from open sources,” is acquiring an entirely plausible hue today.
Modern social networks offer users to specify almost everything about themselves: a photo; video; communications (including types); interests; education; job information; places where there is a person; preferred products; personal thoughts, etc. Most of the information is available without registration, it is enough to find the user’s page in popular social networks, the rest can be seen after adding the user as a friend, and all information, including personal correspondence (at least), is available to the administration of this network, and no privacy settings will hide it.
I will conduct a small experiment regarding the availability of information about myself: I am an average user of social networks, registered in several projects, periodically communicate in 3, of which I am active in one, deliberately do not show all information about myself in networks and in different projects I focus on different aspects of your life. By name and surname you can easily find me on Facebook, Vkontakte, My Circle, Profeo, Habrahabr and some other networks. First we find a profile in the My Circle business network where you can find: business photos, professional skills, interests, career information, services I provide, links to other sites. Next, we find a profile in the business network Profeo, in which little information is available without registration, namely, you can find out about the current job, see connections, groups, industry and region. Next we find the profile of Vkontakte, in which you can see a huge amount of my thoughts in the microblogging, a few extraneous photos and videos, a couple of my unofficial photos, my birthday, a couple of desires and subscriptions, and the likes on the page can reveal friends. Next, we find a Facebook profile, from which several friends and interests can be seen. Last we find the IT community Habrahabr, in which you can find out my interests, contacts, my friends, companies that interest me, see the materials and comments I have published. All these data can be viewed by any user, even without registering with a specific social network. According to them you can make my full professional portrait and a lot of personal information to collect, and if you add to friends, the portrait will be full by about 50-60%. And this is taking into account the fact that I deliberately do not show full information about myself on social networks, and in general I don’t have much time to communicate in them.
It is important to understand one feature: on the Internet, as in the real world, people unite in certain social groups (social masks) that do not overlap with each other. The main global division occurs by projects, within which the target audience is divided into informal groups according to interests, age and other characteristics. Moreover, there may be several such social masks: in the afternoon a person needs business communication, in the evening communication with friends and family, on weekends communication, for example, related to a hobby, etc. Each set of masks will have its own, but each of them will have its own characteristics that will affect all behavior. That is why a modern person is often registered in several social networks, in which he satisfies different needs and gives different information about himself, and recently many have even started several accounts in each social network in order to be able to “put on” different social masks.
In addition, a person gradually changes: he grows old, his interests, life priorities, etc., change. And this means that yesterday's schoolchildren, who communicated VKontakte, may already be able to communicate on LinkedIn with entirely different life priorities and will want to show completely different information about themselves. That is why it is so important to filter information about yourself in different social networks.
Networking
Today the networks have gathered a huge audience, which attracts more and more specialists from various fields. Some networks make it possible only to communicate, some provide working tools, but one thing is for sure - any popular social network has become a workspace for many millions of people.
The first in the networks began to work people whose work is based on communication. These are sales managers, network marketers, researchers and many others. Behind them came entrepreneurs and HR specialists. Now people of any specialties work in networks to one degree or another.
It is quite obvious that this feature is more inherent in business communication networks, which can be said to be created for work, as well as in thematic networks where certain groups of people gather. Networks provide an opportunity to search for work (for example, a special section “Work” in the popular network among IT specialists of the CIS countries “Habrahabr” - http://habrahabr.ru/job/), the ability to sell something (for example, a special section “Marketplace Facebook "- http://facebook.com/marketplace/) or simply find business partners (for example, the business network" XING "- https://www.xing.com/).
People actively use networks for work and every year they make it all the more successful. Many change jobs through social networks, companies find employees for themselves, some groups of specialists have completely transferred their professional activities there. In the near future, we can expect the development of specialized functionality that will create virtual workplaces, in particular, this concerns professional networks.
Information Security
In the past 3-4 years, the topic of information security and privacy in social networks has attracted a lot of attention. This is understandable: the networks are increasingly opening up to the outside world, there have been cases of leakage of personal data, user accounts are easily cracked, and the administration of the networks has access to any information. But all this is only the external part, which lies on the surface and about which the press writes, but it is far from a complete picture of the potential threats to personal data.
The most innocuous, at first glance, option of using personal data without the user's permission can be considered the internal mechanisms of social networks to show targeted advertising, select potential acquaintances or select potentially interesting content. These mechanisms have become the standard in almost all social networks, and no one hides this fact: they all collect and analyze personal data, which are very many in any network, and then use them for commercial purposes. Moreover, social networks transfer personal data to the outside world, and have already officially recognized this fact.
More problems for users are created by the leakage of personal data through the fault of the network, which has repeatedly happened in different projects. One of the largest is the leakage of personal data of 77 million users of the PlayStation Network gaming network in April 2011, and the consequences of this incident are not yet clear, it is possible that there is a leakage of users' billing information. Security problems are always many and it is likely that most of these leaks are simply hidden from the public.
Even more serious problems can be caused by hacking individual accounts and gaining access to all the personal information of an individual user, if the target of an attacker is a certain person. Today it is not difficult to do even for an ordinary user who simply knows a person and can use social engineering, and besides there are special services for hacking, the cost is only $ 20. The motivation of intruders can be very different, from hacking into the accounts of officials of a certain company for the purposes of industrial espionage to personal goals. So, for example, marriage lawyers in the US are already fixing every fifth divorce due to social networks: spouses get access to a partner’s profile, find correspondence with their lover / mistress there, and as a result, this leads to divorce.
We should also remember about viruses and phishing, which can steal usernames and passwords unnoticed by the user and then use them for illegal actions (for example, automatically sending spam on behalf of the user).
However, the biggest threat is that a fairly large group of people have access to all personal information, and they can view it at any time, even if a person has deleted something from the network. First, they are employees of the social network itself: they have access to databases that contain all the information, as well as special tools for logging into user accounts, such as a special master password on Facebook, which allows you to log into any account . Secondly, law enforcement agencies, such as the CIA in the United States or the FSB in Russia, also have access to information. Not so long ago, the famous whistleblower Julian Assandzh, the founder of Wikileaks, said that Facebook has a special interface that uses US intelligence, and in Russia, the previously popular VKontakte network has already managed to publicly admit the facts of cooperation with law enforcement agencies and the transfer of personal data. All this is quite logical: social network employees can not have access, this is their job, and law enforcement officers catch criminals in the networks, but this does not eliminate the danger of transmitting data to third parties, and often this can be whole psychological portraits or confidential information.
Recently, users are less likely to trust social networks and are increasingly beginning to filter information that networks are willing to trust, give false information or are completely removed from the network, but even deletion does not give confidence: often the information is stored on company’s servers and can be used later on. Particularly, Facebook, VKontakte and other networks do this.
Addiction
Internet addiction is a long recognized psychological disease, and dependence on social networks is its new form. Причины этого явления вполне объяснимы: у каждого человека есть явные и скрытые потребности, которые он стремится удовлетворить, это может быть потребность в общении, самореализации, экономии времени или еще чего-то, а социальная сеть дает ощущение удовлетворения этих потребностей. И все это кажется очень доступным, стоит написать красивую цитату и тебе отвечают 10 человек; стоит загрузить новое фото и тебе скажут 10 человек, какой ты красивый; стоит сделать пару кликов и в друзьях уже новый интересный знакомый… Однако по сути это уход от реальности, подмена реального на виртуальное, которое только дает ощущение удовлетворения потребностей, а на самом деле Интернет не может заменить реальной жизни, и поэтому человеку хочется еще и еще, и еще, но чем больше он получает «общения» через Интернет, тем больше его хочется, а потребности все также остаются неудовлетворенными, по крайней мере, большинство из них.
Подобная зависимость постепенно развивается у многих людей, которые единожды попали в социальную сеть. Человек «подсаживается на сеть», и чем больше времени он ею пользуется, тем сложнее ему жить реальной жизнью. Почувствовать это сложно, нужно на несколько дней оторваться от компьютера, и только тогда возникнет целый букет чувств, начиная от сильного желания зайти в Интернет и заканчивая серьезной депрессией, это и есть симптомы зависимости. Зависимость приводит к множеству проблем: появляются комплексы, депрессия, страхи, перепады настроения и даже сексуальные расстройства.
It is a psychological disease and, like any disease, requires treatment. To treat any psychological problems is difficult, and even more addictive. First of all, you need to realize the existence of the problem and recognize it for yourself. The second step in treatment should be the replacement of virtual communication with a real one, and gradually it will be possible to recover with the help of friends and a relative.
There are already a lot of different social networks in the world. I analyzed several global projects and several projects in Eastern Europe. Consider each project separately.
Самая популярная социальная сеть в мире и самый посещаемый сайт. С момента своего создания не перестает демонстрировать потрясающий рост, как пользователей, так и прибыли. Компания постоянно придумывает и внедряет новые идеи, ведет активную интеграцию с внешним миром, создает свой «facebook-интернет». В ближайшие несколько лет стремительный рост останется неизменным.
Сайт: http://www.facebook.com/
Регион: преимущественно США, Индонезия, Великобритания, Турция, Индия, Мексика, Филиппины, Франция, Италия, Германия, более 5 млн. пользователей в России. В последние несколько лет сеть ведет активную экспансию на рынки многих других стран.
Год основания: 2004 год.
Тип: сеть для личного общения.
Посетителей в месяц: более 700 млн. активных пользователей.
Прирост посещаемости: положительный.
Проблемы: Facebook часто критикуют за проблемы с приватностью и сильную открытость для внешнего мира. Также есть проблемы с монетизацией, в связи с чем компания постоянно экспериментирует в этой области, хотя даже несмотря на проблемы валовая прибыль растет ежегодно в 2 раза. Многим не нравится интерфейс сети.
Социальная сеть для делового общения экономически активных людей. Сайт активно используют целые компании по всему миру. В целом проект имеет очень хорошие перспективы: его аудитория отличается «высоким качеством», а все показатели неуклонно растут буквально каждый день.
Сайт: http://www.linkedin.com/
Регион: преимущественно США, также сеть популярная в Великобритании, Испании, Индии. Активно набирает популярность в развитых европейских и азиатских странах. Всего охвачено более 200 стран мира.
Год основания: 2003 год.
Тип: сеть для делового общения.
Посетителей в месяц: более 100 млн. активных пользователей.
Прирост посещаемости: положительный, более 4 млн. новых пользователей ежемесячно.
Проблемы: на мой взгляд, сети не хватает функционала для работы.
Довольно молодая социальная сеть, основанная на микроблогинге. Идея довольно интересная: создатели взяли старые идеи блоггинга, искусственно ограничили длину сообщения и сильно упростили все, что было можно, в результате в условиях современного мира, когда жизнь ускоряется с каждым днем, а времени не хватает, появилась новая популярная социальная сеть.
Сайт: http://twitter.com/
Регион: преимущественно США, а также Бразилия, Великобритания, Канада и Германия.
Год основания: 2006 год.
Тип: сеть для блоггинга.
Посетителей в месяц: 98 млн. пользователей, при этом сеть имеет более 200 млн. регистраций и быстро растет
Прирост посещаемости: положительный.
Проблемы: у данной сети при всем её успехе есть и серьезные проблемы. Прежде всего, конкуренция с другими социальными сетями, которые также имеют большую популярность и предоставляют те же возможности микроблоггинга, что и Twitter, в частности речь о Facebook, ВКонтакте и др. проектах, при этом кроме микроблоггинга конкуренты предлагают и другие социальные возможности. Многие новые пользователи после первой пробы сервиса остаются разочарованными и покидают его. Кроме того, сеть приносит мало пользы её участникам: возможности сводятся в основном к микроблоггингу, который многие используют для бесполезной болтовни и не более. Есть проблемы со спамом, который составляет 5-10% от всех сообщений. И в довершении сеть до сих пор остается убыточной, при этом с легкостью отвергая щедрые предложения инвесторов о покупке.
Groupon
Самый популярный в мире скидочный сервис, который дает большие скидки на продукты при условии значительного спроса на них. Это не классическая социальная сеть, но проект использует некоторые принципы социальных сетей, основной упор делается все-таки на электронную коммерцию.
Сайт: http://www.groupon.com/
Регион: США, Канада, Великобритания, Франция, Бразилия, Индия и многие другие страны. Для проекта регион очень важен, компания продает продукты в крупных городах.
Год основания: 2008 год.
Тип: сеть для покупок.
Посетителей в месяц: 8,8 млн. пользователей, при этом более 83 млн. зарегистрированных аккаунтов.
Прирост посещаемости: положительный, проект самый молодой из всех анализируемых и сейчас находится в стадии взрывного роста, который продлится еще не менее 1-2 лет.
Проблемы: у компании есть только одна большая проблема – как справиться с ростом и максимально быстро расширять свою региональную сеть. На мой взгляд, большой потенциал кроется в социализации проекта, добавлении возможности коммуникации внутри проекта и геолокационных сервисов. Некоторые эксперты называют бизнес-модель Groupon сомнительной.
In contact with
Самая популярная социальная сеть в СНГ, по сути, является аналогом Facebook. Темпы роста в последнее время снизились, особенно с начала действий Facebook по локализации сайта для русскоязычной аудитории и ввода ВКонтакте регистрации по приглашениям в начале 2011 года. За последний год сеть начала очень активно развиваться, постоянно появляется новый функционал.
Сайт: http://vk.com/
Регион: преимущественно Россия, также проект популярен в странах СНГ: Украина, Беларусь, Казахстан и др. С 2009 года ВКонтакте купил домен VK.com, с чего и началась экспансия в другие страны, однако до сих пор большого успеха не наблюдается.
Год основания: 2006 год.
Тип: сеть для личного общения.
Посетителей в месяц: более 40 млн. активных пользователей, при этом более 135 млн. аккаунтов на начало 2011 года. Точные цифры не раскрываются.
Прирост посещаемости: положительный.
Проблемы: : популярность во многом поддерживается за счет пиратского контента (музыка, фильмы), из-за чего у компании большие проблемы с правообладателями, а власти США внесли сайт в список крупнейших распространителей пиратского контента в мире . Уже сейчас многие заходят ВКонтакт «послушать музыку и посмотреть фильмы», что подтверждается исследованием TNS Web Index Report , согласно которому около 30% популярности сети приходится на видео. Это, безусловно, очень негативно для социальной сети, люди перестают использовать её по назначению, а правообладатели постепенно удаляют свой контент, такое положение дел со временем может привести к серьезному падению популярности. Хотя основатель сети Павел Дуров это отрицает, он недавно заявил : «Обращения к страницам с видео составляют менее 5% от всей активности пользователей ВКонтакте». При этом умолчав, что именно понимается под «обращениями», – если это время, проведенное в разделе или количество просмотренных страниц, то выглядит вполне правдоподобно, пользователи тратят основное время на общение, а если это процент уникальных посетителей раздела от общего числа посетителей сайта, то данные сомнительны. Павел также ничего не сказал про раздел аудио, который занимает важное место у пользователей. Также сеть известна некачественной поддержкой, и в СМИ неоднократно появлялись скандальные истории, связанные с этим.
Classmates
Social network for finding classmates, Russian analogue of Classmates.com. Two years ago, it was the most popular in Eastern Europe, but now it has lost its leading position.
Website: http://www.odnoklassniki.ru/
Region: Russia, Ukraine and other CIS countries.
Year of foundation: 2006.
Type: network for personal communication.
Visitors per month: more than 20 million users, with more than 68 million accounts.
Increase in attendance: positive.
Problems: Classmates have a big problem with aggressive monetization; in the project, many services are paid, which causes a negative reaction from users, although the new project team is trying to solve this problem. In addition, the network is very open, and a lot of information is available to the outside world after registration. The last big problem is the poor-quality interface, which is poorly perceived by users. All these problems seriously inhibit the growth of the audience, despite the fact that it is still positive, growth may stop in the next few years, or even become negative.
Connect
The most popular social network in Ukraine. In fact, it was created as a clone of Facebook, but now the project has moved to the dating niche.
Website: http://connect.ua/
Region: Ukraine, now goes to Russia with the project Plirt.ru, plans to enter Asian markets.
Year of foundation: 2007.
Type: personal network.
Visitors per month: more than 2 million users.
Increase in attendance: positive.
Problems: there are certain problems with the interface, big competition in the niche of acquaintances with popular services of the CIS countries.
Quite unequivocal conclusions can be made from the analysis: social networks have not yet reached the peak of popularity and will grow steadily over the next 3-5 years. All projects now have mostly extensive (quantitative) growth due to the attraction of uncovered users in the main and secondary regions, however companies are already starting intensive (qualitative) growth, and very tough competition between projects will begin in the coming years. There are still many free thematic niches in the market in which billions of dollars worth of businesses can be created, which is now the case. Today, networks are popular that effectively address not only the need for communication, but also other global human needs. This year's trends can be called geolocation and e-commerce in social networks.
Many social networks against the background of rapid growth in popularity and profitability have serious problems underlying their work. Solving these problems will lead to the strongest growth of social networks, which they are now trying to do.
Little utility
The problem of many social networks, especially non-thematic ones, is a small utility. People spend there a huge amount of time, and in return receive only electronic communication, most often text, which transmits only 7% of the information, which makes such communication very unproductive, as well as a large amount of data, 90% of which is of no value at all. Understanding this problem, many social networks are trying to create new tools that allow users inside them to buy-sell, work, have fun, etc. The solution to this problem will be the basis for the development of networks in the next 3-5 years.
Monetization problems
Social networks today is not a very profitable business. To create and maintain them, considerable resources are required, and there are few direct monetization tools, and most of them are based on attendance, which does not allow us to overcome the break-even point in the first few years of the project’s existence. In this regard, constantly conducted experiments in the field of monetization. Solving this problem will also greatly affect the development of social networks in the coming years: e-commerce tools will be introduced, new paid services will appear, much attention will be paid to mediation between users, but I will talk about monetization in 4 parts of the report.
Intersection audience
Social networks have already covered the entire Internet. Today there is a huge variety of projects in many countries. They contain hundreds of millions of people from all over the world. In addition, each project is unique and solves slightly different needs: in some networks people communicate about their personal life, in others about work, and in the third they consume content. This led to a significant intersection of the audience, when the same person is registered in several social networks or even has several registrations in each of the projects to meet different needs. First of all, this is due to the fact that many networks have not yet done the tools to effectively meet different needs, which often interfere with each other, but on the other hand, companies do not want to integrate with each other for fear of competition. That is why people broke up into different social groups in different networks, and a single person can be present in several groups at once. In the future, those projects that will be able to learn how to combine the satisfaction of different needs will benefit, and thereby create a huge competitive advantage for themselves or at least begin to integrate with projects from an indirect competitive group.
Distorted user information
In recent years, conscious users often distorted their personal data. Many people completely or partially change the name and surname, indicate false data in the profile, a lot of information does not reveal at all. The number of such people was not precisely estimated, but already now their number can reach 10-15% of the total number of active users, and this figure is constantly growing. In general, the problem is related to the privacy of data: it is beneficial for social networks to open as many users as possible, which they successfully do, and people, on the contrary, want to hide some of the information. The trend will continue until social networks begin to provide tools to preserve guaranteed anonymity from everyone, including the networks themselves.
Spam
Another big problem in social networks is spam. This is a paradise for spammers who can do personalized unsolicited advertising. Social networks are trying to actively deal with this, introducing all the new mechanisms for detecting spam and blocking it, but spammers also do not stop developing. This problem brings serious losses to networks and causes inconvenience to users.
Accounts of the dead
People are born, live and die. This is a natural process, and it is not under our control. However, this process creates a problem for social networks: how to determine what a person is dead and what to do with his account?
All these are common problems inherent in almost all social networks. At the same time, it should not be forgotten that in each region there will also be local problems of their own, which are also not small.
The whole world is not evenly developed and social networks, respectively. North America can be called the most developed region, first of all, the USA, in which the penetration of social networks per capita is very high. It is in this country that many popular social networks are created and developed, and its residents become the core of users of popular projects.
North America and Western Europe
These two geographic regions are most developed in the field of economics and IT, they have a large number of social networks of all popular types. Regions can be called innovative, here new ideas are actively generated and strong startups are being created, which in a few years turn into large corporations.
Now this market is already overflowing with social networks of a general type that solve a person’s need for communication. Much attention is paid to thematic projects, which are based on thematic communication, narrowly focused content and unique services, although there are still free niches.
Existing projects seek to enter other regions (for example, Facebook has recently announced plans to enter the Chinese market) and at the same time is improving steadily from a qualitative point of view. Much attention is paid to the monetization of projects.
Asia
Very closed market with a large number of features, which at the same time is characterized by large volumes, which makes it attractive for many companies. Many world-famous projects have tried and are trying to enter Asian markets, but this is extremely difficult.
In Asian countries, mainly their social networks, which largely clone popular counterparts from the United States, however, there is also a large proportion of innovations. Perhaps the only exception is India, in which social networks are actively developing from North America and Western Europe.
The market is quite full and free niches every year is less.
Eastern Europe
Actively developing market with already impressive volumes. It lags behind the more developed regions by 3-5 years. Social networks are mainly copied from popular counterparts in the developed countries of North America and Western Europe, in the past few years much has been copied from Asia, which has saturated the market with clones, and there is very little innovation. The most developed region is Russia, in which almost all popular social networks of the region are concentrated. The lag in the market has also stepped up investors who are happy to invest in clones.
In Eastern Europe there are social networks of a general type, they are actively developing, while there are still a lot of free niches for thematic projects, which are still lacking.
Local projects are mainly developing within the local market, several large companies began to think about expanding to other regions.
Conclusions: of course, this is only the tip of the iceberg, it is already possible to write entire encyclopedias about social networks. Networks have already penetrated very deeply into our lives and continue to gain popularity, their influence on people is still underestimated. Now generally developed networks of a general type, however, in the near future new projects will be developed, both in subject and in functionality. As in any fast-growing segment, there are a number of tangible problems, but they are all completely solvable. Soon, social networks on the Internet will change the world quite a bit, they have already become an influential instrument of power.
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Highly loaded projects. Theory of parallel computing. Supercomputers. Distributed systems
Terms: Highly loaded projects. Theory of parallel computing. Supercomputers. Distributed systems