Social networking

Navigation Bar:
Introduction 
User contribution 
Ratings and reviews 
Tagging 
Editorial control 
User-generated content 
Social networking 
Implications 

There’s one more potential component of user contribution that lies underneath all the others: community. Social networking functionality, born on sites such as Friendster, LinkedIn and MySpace, is becoming more useful as organizations discover how to use social connections to enhance their overall online experience.

On Yahoo! Local, when you’re reading reviews of a restaurant and your friend has written a review, it appears first in the list and is highlighted with an icon. Similarly, when you’re browsing movies on Netflix and a friend has rated a movie, that information is easy to see because your friends’ opinions are important.

So, should you create your own social network? Maybe, but approach with caution, since few users are happy about creating separate social networks on every site they visit. But if community is critical to your strategy, then a social network could be just the thing to make your user-generated content truly shine.

Next: Implications