Social networking is the grouping of individuals into specific groups, like small rural communities or a neighborhood subdivision. Although social networking is possible in person, especially in schools or in the workplace, it is most popular online. This is because unlike most high schools, colleges, or workplaces, the internet is filled with millions of individuals who are looking to meet other internet users and develop friendships and business relationships.

A Social Network is a social structure made of nodes (which are generally individuals or organizations) that are tied by one or more specific types of interdependency, such as values, visions, idea, financial exchange, friends, kinship, dislike, conflict, trade, web links, disease transmission (epidemiology), or airline routes. The resulting structures are often very complex.

Social networking relationships are supposed to benefit both parties. Never take more than you give. When the opportunity presents itself, don’t be afraid to ask your contact to introduce you to a prospect. The old saying rings true: it’s not what you know; it’s who you know.

Social networks connect people at low cost; this can be beneficial for entrepreneurs and small businesses looking to expand their contact base. These networks often act as a customer relationship management tool for companies selling products and services. Companies can also use social networks for advertising in the form of banners and text ads. Since businesses operate globally, social networks can make it easier to keep in touch with contacts around the world.

Professional networking sites function as online meeting places for business and industry professionals. Other sites are bringing this model for niche business professional networking.

Virtual communities for business allow individuals to be accessible. People establish their real identity in a verifiable place. These individuals then interact with each other or within groups that share common business interests and goals. They can also post their own user generated content in the form of blogs, pictures, slide shows and videos. Like a social network, the consumer essentially becomes the publisher.

A professional network is used for the business to business marketplace. These networks improve the ability for people to advance professionally. Business professionals can share experiences with others who have a need to learn from similar experiences.

The traditional way to interact is face-to-face. Interactive technology makes it possible for people to network with their peers from anywhere, at anytime in an online environment. Professional network services attract, aggregate and assemble large business-focused audiences by creating informative and interactive meeting places.

Social networks are beginning to be adopted by healthcare professionals as a means to manage institutional knowledge, disseminate peer to peer knowledge and to highlight individual physicians and institutions. The advantage of using a dedicated medical social networking site is that all the members are screened against the state licensing board list of practitioners.

The role of social networks is especially of interest to pharmaceutical companies who spend approximately "32 percent of their marketing dollars" attempting to influence the opinion leaders of social networks.

Several websites are beginning to tap into the power of the social networking model for social good. Such models may be highly successful for connecting otherwise fragmented industries and small organizations without the resources to reach a broader audience with interested and passionate users. Users benefit by interacting with a like minded community and finding a channel for their energy and giving.

Social network services are increasingly being used in legal and criminal investigations. Information posted on sites such as MySpace and Facebook, has been used by police, probation, and university officials to prosecute users of said sites. In some situations, content posted on MySpace has been used in court.

Facebook is increasingly being used by school administrations and law enforcement agencies as a source of evidence against student users. The site, the number one online destination for college students, allows users to create profile pages with personal details. These pages can be viewed by other registered users from the same school which often include resident assistants and campus police who have signed-up for the service.

Social networks use the internet as an amplifier for social interaction. It offers a solution of how to connect people from anywhere in the world and close the gap of separation which is present in real-life society. Rival companies are competing to find the shortest path to an individual, whether they are trying to sell a product, find a date or locate an old friend on a person’s behalf. There are three main difficulties in involved with the current social networking solutions available online to solve problems of this sort. The biggest problem to a site is attracting enough users to the service in order to make it useful, allowing its survival. The minimum number of users a site requires is called its critical mass and must be achieved in order for potential users to deem joining it worthwhile. Once an initial, loyal base of users has been established sites can grow very quickly due to a viral marketing effect with each user getting their friends to join and so on.

The second major problem revolves around the effort a user must exert in order to upload contacts into a variety of different social networking sites. Actively participating in multiple sites consumes more free time than the average user has available for such activities. The final problem is the isolation of each social networking site from its siblings. Most are being developed as standalone systems forcing the user to start from scratch every time they join a new site. However, a few of the latest additions to the collection of social networking sites enable users to import contact lists from their rival sites. This is new method has already been adopted by The Facebook, which revolves around the users having a shared experience of going to the same college or university. By understanding that all these people have a common object, their place of origination, they are better placed to provide a more effective and efficient service to their users.

There is an enormous demand for online social networks which is backed up by the large numbers of visitors to such sites as; YouTube, Bebo, Facebook, del.icio.us, flickr, digg and MySpace. With such a demand existing it is unlikely, that even in the event of a dotcom like disaster hitting the social networks, that they would all disappear. If an event like that was to happen at least some of the bigger networks would likely still exist but they would still have to evolve in order to survive in such competitive market.

Object-centred sociality appears to be a major step forward in the creation and management of contact lists. Having separate categories for; work, friends, family etc, would enable a user to cross-reference the groups, looking for individuals with multiple shared objects. The results of such a query would yield individuals with a greater relevance or association to the user. Unfortunately for users, current social networks have become a competition of who has the most contacts, resulting in users adding individuals who they will never interact with. This attitude must change if sites are to fulfil their potential and enable better connection between users.

Enhancing existing functions and adding new functionality, not just with gimmicks and novelties, is also vitally important in sustaining and even improving on the massive numbers of social network users. Future sites must also address the problem if integration with other software to reduce the workload on the user. In addition, video will likely play an increasingly larger role in online social networks, as broadband becomes more popular and new computers, especially laptops, are coming with built in cameras.

Future developments could include trying to incorporate user meta data such as; marked favourites, joined social groups and contact lists into this facility to not only identify how “interesting” an item is to a user but how likely it will be “interesting” to a specific user. Social networks have reached a crossroads in the journey from a simple text messaging service to a fully integrated, multimedia, knowledge based means of communication. There is more than a little room for excitement when considering the future of social networks, whatever that turns out to be.

The name ATOM applies to a pair of related standards. The Atom Syndication Format is an XML language used for web feeds, while the Atom Publishing Protocol (short AtomPub or APP) is a simple HTTP-based protocol for creating and updating web resources.

The Atom Syndication Format is the next generation of XML-based file formats, designed to allow information--the contents of web pages, for example--to be syndicated between applications. Like RSS, Atom places the content and metadata of an internet resource into a machine-parsable format, perfect for displaying, filtering, remixing, and archiving. Atom is an up-and-coming format for editing, syndicating, and archiving weblogs and other episodic web sites.

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