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Social Networking Industry Analysis

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1. Introduction 1.1 Background Ever since the so-called “eve” networks of Internet founded in 1969 (http://www.livinginternet.com accessed on 11.05.10), till now in the 21th century, the new era of Internet surfing, people‟s life has become not only material but cyber. The social networking sites, as a new online practice since late 1990s, has gained noticeable popularity among Netizens. The social networking sites have been penetrating into people‟s daily life. Create a profile on a social networking site, make friends, and tell the others what you are doing at the moment, all these have become a new lifestyle of people today, especially young people. Moreover, it has become a new multimedia platform for users sharing their own lives with …show more content…

It provides similar function of profile creation and information sharing. As the application is associated with the user‟s Windows Live ID, it may owe its popularity to the widely used Windows Live Messenger programme. MySpace.com MySpace is the earliest developed social networking site among the four. The brand has once been one of the most popular sites of this kind. However, its former popularity has been overtaken by Facebook in 2008 (http://en.wikipedia.org accessed on 20.4.10). 3. Industry Remote Environment Analysis Finlay (2000) sees the “remote environment” as crucial to business that it is “a model of those elements in the environment” that may affect the business‟s decision making but it is beyond the influence of the business. Those different elements‟ effects on different industry may also vary according to the nature of the individual industry. 3 As the industry has no control power of the remote forces, the analysis of those elements become of notable value for either existing players in the arena wishing to remain its domain or new entrants planning to overtake the crown. The social networking sites as a newborn industry is more limited by the remote environment. The evolution and expansion of the industry is also a process of adaptation and trial. The following section will explore the remote environment of social networking sites using a PEST analysis. 3.1 Political/legal 3.1.1 Privacy Ever since the invention of

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