Social networking – the world’s latest phenomenon

Social networking has become part of our everyday lives and is used across the world for personal and business use, to catch up with friends, arrange meetings, share information and play the odd game. This comes as the social network giant Facebook announces the registration of its 500 millionth member, of which 26 million are from the UK.

With the ability to interact with people all over the world Facebook has become the ‘social Google’. If you want to find out information, need advice or simply want to find out what people think about a particular subject we now go to the most trusted place for the answer – our friends and family on Facebook.

Alongside Facebook is Twitter, the micro-blogging site where users can ‘tweet’ about what they are doing right now. This is an instant messaging service that is used to get information out and talk to a community that cares about the same things as you.

With the busy lives we all live today social networking sites are great for talking to friends and keeping up to date with what they’re doing, and you don’t even have to be sitting at a pc to use it. Many people access the sites through mobile phones so they can interact with their friends on the go.

The success of Facebook has been down to word of mouth. It started off small with a circle of friends and has escalated and grown to 500m people – it has become the new way of communicating.

Facebook is almost guaranteed to reach one billion users, so there’ll be no excuse about not keeping in contact with friends and family in future, just get a Facebook account and join the latest addiction.