1.1 Introduction
1.2.1Background
The rapid growth of social networking that has been observed over the last two to three years is indicative of its entry into mainstream culture and its integration into the daily lives of many people. There has also been considerable media coverage of the growth of social networking, its potential positive outcomes and concerns about the way that some people are engaging with it.
“… technology has not only mediated communication in countless ways, but ... the very ways we communicate – and even the ways we talk and think about communication –are changing as a result.”
Social networking services are changing the ways in which people use and engage with the Internet and with each other. Young people, particularly, are quick to use the new technology in ways that increasingly blur the boundaries between online and offline activities
Social networking services are also developing rapidly as technology changes with new mobile dimensions and features. Children and young people who have grown up taking the Internet and mobile technologies for granted, make up a significant segment of the “beta generation” – the first to exploit the positive opportunities and benefits of new and emerging services, but also the first to have to negotiate appropriate behaviours within the new communities, and to have to identify and manage risk.
Social networking services are on the rise globally, and this change is also evident in increased UK engagement with sites. Ofcom’s recent International Communications Market 07 report3 found evidence that more adults use social networking sites in the UK than in any other of the European countries included in the survey. ComScore data from August 4, 2007 suggest that UK Internet users clock up an average of 23 visits and 5.3 hours on social networking sites each month. Ofcom reported that 39% of all UK Internet users use social networking services, while the ComScore figures show 24.9 million individual social networking service visitors in August 2007. According to recent Hitwise figures, the most popular dedicated social networking sites in the UK are MySpace, Facebook and Bebo5. These types of social networking services are profile focused – activity centres around web pages that contain information about the activities, interests and likes (and dislikes) of each member
Social networking sites offer people new and varied ways to communicate via the internet, whether through their PC or their mobile phone. They allow people to easily and simply create their own online page or profile and to construct and display an online network of contacts, often called ‘friends’. Users of these sites can communicate via their profile both with their ‘friends’ and with people outside their list of contacts. This can be on a one-to-one basis (much like an email), or in a more public way such as a comment posted for all to see.
Like other communications tools, social networking sites have certain rules, conventions and practices which users have to navigate to make themselves understood and avoid difficulties. These range from the etiquette of commenting on other peoples profiles to understanding who one does and doesn’t add as a ‘friend’. Social networking sites also have some potential pitfalls to negotiate, such as the unintended consequences of publicly posting sensitive personal information, confusion over privacy settings, and contact with people one doesn’t know.
Trend of Social Networking Sites:
Figure 1: Simplified timeline of select social networking sites (2000-2007)
2000 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007
Friends Reunited
Freiendster
MySpace, Hi5
Filckr,Facebook
Bebo,FaceBook (School Network)
FaceBook ( everyone)
Sagazone
1.2.2 Definition
“Social networking services” refers here to a wide-range of rapidly developing services tools and practices. Social networking services can be broadly defined as Internet- or mobile-device-based social spaces designed to facilitate communication, collaboration and content sharing across networks of contacts.
Social networking services allow users to manage, build and represent their social networks online. Service usually (but not always) includes other individuals; they might also include the profiles of events, companies, even political parties. They may let you add anyone in the network as your friend or contact, or they might ask both parties to agree all connections.
Social networking services typically support the public display of networks, although they may offer privacy restrictions or facilitate closed communities. Permissions are a very important feature of most social networking services. They allow members and groups to control who can access their profiles, information, connections and spaces, as well as determining degrees of access.
The level of granularity and control varies from service to service, but typically settings allow you to:
Ø Keep your information private (i.e. be seen by only those to whom you give permission) or restrict the visibility your information to:
· signed-in service members only
· people on your contacts list
· particular groups of service users
Ø make your information public so that even people who are not members or are not signed in as members of the service can see it. Through these combinations of privacy settings, users can manage a range of different relationships online, as well as manage their online presence – how they appear to friends, acquaintances or the general public.
Through these combinations of privacy settings, users can manage a range of different relationships online, as well as manage their online presence – how they appear to friends, acquaintances or the general public.
Social networking sites vary in the types of tools and functionality they provide (boyd & Ellison define social networking sites as having three common elements: a member profile (in their definition this is always a webpage), the ability to add other members to a contact list, and supported interaction between members of contact lists (interaction varies greatly, and there will typically be some degree of interaction facilitated between people who are not on each other’s contacts lists).Social networking sites are often perceived by their users as closed environments, where members talk to other members8. This impression of social networking services as providing a private space is likely to account for behaviour, language and postings that do not translate well outside their intended closed context. While it is important that children and young people understand the public nature of much of their activity within social networking services (and can use permissions and privacy controls to manage personal information and communications), we also need to ensure that online activity is understood holistically – i.e. as the sum of activity of all the online sites and networks that an individual belongs to.
1.2 Objectives
This report is the first dedicated look at social networking that has undertaken. It seeks to understand how people are using social networking sites as well as their attitudes to this form of communication.
The objectives of this report are as follows:
• To set social networking sites in the wider media literacy, online and communications context;
• To profile the use of sites;
• To understand people’s use of sites; and
• To investigate concerns about privacy and safety;
• Connecting with existing networks, making and developing friendships/contacts;
• Viewing content and/or finding informations;
• Creating and customising profiles;
• Adding and sharing third party’s content;
• Authoring and uploading your own content;
• Posting messages – public and private;
• Collaborating with other people.
1.4 Rationale of the Study
The common purpose to develop this Social Networking System is to manage the interaction of people in easier way. In today’s world, people do not have enough time to visit friends, their relatives and people of their interest. Therefore, this developed system aims to increase the accessibility of people to their friend and relatives and helps in facilitating the meeting with their friends virtually. This whole procedure can take place staying at home without visiting the people personally. Further, the system also has facilities of direct conversation with friends and people around them. Thus this will help them to connect them around with their community via map.
The web-based “Social Networking with Google Map API tm” is proposed with the aim to overcome those difficulties by providing an interface to all interested who want to get involve in online facility.
1.5 Limitation of the study
Ø There was time and resource constraint to carry out the research. Therefore, the research may have suffered in its comprehensiveness.
Ø This project was carried on by taking several examples of other relevant Social Networking Sites available. Therefore, the findings may not be completely new to the users.
Ø This project may not have covered all the detailed features as provided by other Social Networking sites.
1.6 Definition
Information Technology: It is a contemporary term that describes the combination of computer technology with telecommunication technology.
Internet: A large network made up of a number of smaller networks.
Web: Web is an internet facility that links documents locally and remotely. The web document, or web page, contains text, graphics, animations and videos as well as hypertext links.
Database: A database is a collection of data, typically describing the activities of one or more related organizations. For example, an online health services system may contain information about entities such as department, doctor, patient tips, and problem.
DBMS: Database Management System is software designed to assist in maintaining and utilizing large collection of data.
SQL: Structured Query Language is the most popular languages used to create, modify and retrieve data form relational database management system.
MySQL: MySQL is an open source relational database management system. Information in a MySQL database is stored in the form of related tables.
Use case: use case is a methodology that describes a set of possible sequence of interactions between online health services and its users.
State diagram: It models dynamic behavior of object in a system.
AJAX:
PHP: PHP is a widely-used general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for Web development and can be embedded into HTML. It is a server-side scripting language.
JavaScript : JavaScript is a scripting language used to design to add interactivity to HTML pages .A scripting language is a lightweight programming language
1.7 Types of Social Networking
This section attempts to order the current range of social networking services available, and outlines two main formats: sites that are primarily organised around users’ profiles, and those that are organised around collections of content. However, it is important to remember that services differ and may be characterised by more than one category.
Users may also tailor the intended use of platforms to suit their own interests. For instance, sites that are primarily profile focused may be used by individuals to showcase media collections or be used as a work space for particular topics or events. Educators setting up private groups to collaborate and use tools are a great example of how social networking services can be tailored for users’ own ends.
1. Profile-based Social Networking services
Profile-based services are primarily organised around members’ profile pages – pages that mainly consist of information about an individual member, including the person’s picture and details of interests, likes and dislikes. Bebo, Facebook and MySpace are all good examples of profile-based services. Users develop their spaces in various ways, and can often contribute to each other’s spaces, typically leaving
text, embedded content or links to external content through message walls, comment or evaluation tools.
Users often include third-party content (in the form of widgets) to enhance their profiles or as a way of
including information from other web services and social networking services
2. Content-based Social Networking services
In these services, the user’s profile remains an important way of organising connections, but plays a secondary role to the posting of content. Photo-sharing site Flickr is an example of this type of service, one in which groups and comments are based around pictures. Many people have empty Flickr accounts and signed up to the service to view their friends’ or family’s permission protected pictures.
Shelfari is one of the current crop of book-focused sites, with the member’s “bookshelf” being a focal point of each member’s profile.
3. Multi-Users Virtual Environment
Sites such as Second Life and World of Warcraft – online virtual environments – allow users to interact with each other’s avatars. (An avatar is a virtual representation of the site member.) Although the users have profile cards,their functional profiles are the characters they customize or build and control. Friends lists are usually private and not publicly shared or displayed.
4. Mobile Social Networking Services
Many social networking sites, for example MySpace and Twitter, offer mobile phone versions of their services, allowing members to interact with their friends via their phones. Increasingly, too, there are mobile-led and mobile-only communities, which include profiles and media-sharing just as with web-based social networking services. MYUBO, for example, allows users to share and view video over mobile networks
5. Micro Blogging/Presence Updates
Micro-blogging services such as Twitter and Jaiku allow you to publish short (140 characters, including spaces) messages publicly or within contact groups. These services are designed to work as mobile services, but are popularly used on the web as well. Many services offer status updates – short messages that can be updated to let people know what mood you are in or what you are doing. These can be checked within the site, read as text messages on phones, or exported to be read or displayed elsewhere. They engage users in constantly updated conversation and contact with their online networks.
1.8Feasibility Study
The feasibility analysis of a project is one of the most important things to be considered for a project development. The feasibility analysis must be performed for analyzing different factors affecting the project. Here four types of feasibility study were carried out to determine whether the project “SOCIAL NETWORKING using GOOGLE MAP API” setup under the WAMP and Google Map API platform is feasible or not.
1.8.1 Technical Feasibility
The necessary technology to develop this project under WAMP and Google Map API platform exists. Different Free Open Source Software (FOSS) like database packages, free e-mail servers can be used to develop the back end which contains the actual database and mail handling of each and every record. Server side programming languages like PHP is used to develop a user-friendly interface to be used by the system user and Administrator. All the facility of back end programming languages are available in PHP and front end scripting languages are available in the JAVASCRIPT and AJAX packages. The server configuration is the simple task to perform with special knowledge of WAMP as each and every configuration terminology and application exists on the same rpm packages within a WAMP and Google Map API platform. The project team feels it is capable of making use of the available technology to build this project. Hence, system is technically feasible
1.8.2 Operational Feasibility
This project “Social Networking using Google Map API” is not intended to have a user-friendly interface, but for easing the end user tasks, we can use FOSS. All the aspect of this project are built considering the comfort of the end-user. Although the scripting pan is a tedious job to handle, it’s not the headache of end user as they are completely unaware of the scripting and only have to deal with GUI interface. Considering the configuration part, advanced users are responsible for creating an environment so that there will be little difficultly in bringing the system into operation in an actual work environment as long as the user’s requirement is met.
1.8.3 Economic Feasibility
Economic feasibility is carried out in terms of operating costs and benefits in this project
1.8.3.1 Costs
a. Cost of developing/purchasing required materials: Cost of computers on which to develop application + wages of project team.
b. Costs of a personal computers and accessory devices on which implement the system.
1.8.3.2 Benefits
· People as social participants and active citizens.
· People developing voice and building trusts.
· People as content creators, managers and distributors.
· People as a collaborators and team players.
· People as explorer and learner.
· People becoming independence and realience.
· People developing key and real world skills.
It was a great experience working on the project because each and every member of our project thought that the project and self satisfaction of every team member has ruled out the cost of the project.
1.8.4 Schedule Feasibility
The given time period was sufficient for analysis of project requirement, domain registration,uploading the codes via core FTP pro to the server. In the given time period we were able to test the project under different browsers, implement security for all potential users and site administrators. Pre allocated schedule become sufficient to check all the output of the project. So this project is scheduled feasible.
SYSTEM ANALYSIS
2.1 System Overview
System analysis is the study of a business problem domain to recommend improvements and specify the business requirements and priorities for the solution. It is intended to provide with a more thorough understanding of the problems and needs that triggered the project.
During this phase, the system that exists in present is carefully studied and the various shortcoming of the current system is identified and analyzed. Taking these problems in account a new system is proposed that could solve the inconvenience and difficulties associated with the existing system. The problems are identified and different feasibility analysis are performed. Then based on these feasibility tests, the proposed system is designed with various tools used as structured analysis.
2.2 Existing System
In Nepal, Social Networking is gaining popularity because of its wide application. It has brought great impact on human life. As Social Networking sites are popular these days, but we people of Nepal still behind in the development of these Social Networking sites. The reasons behind this may be due to lack of Digital Divide, awareness , infrastructure, networking development and slow progress in IT sector. Few websites have provided Social Networking Services but could not provide to view location of friends situated around them.
2.1 Google Map API Introduction
Google Maps (for a time named Google Local) is a free web mapping service application and technology provided by Google that powers many map-based services including the Google Maps website, and embedded maps on third-party websites via the Google Maps API. It offers street maps, a route planner for bicycles, pedestrians (routes less than 6.2 miles) and cars, and an urban business locator for various countries around the world.
Like many other Google web applications, Google Maps uses JavaScript extensively. As the user drags the map, the grid squares are downloaded from the server and inserted into the page. When a user searches for a business, the results are downloaded in the background for insertion into the side panel and map - the page is not reloaded. Locations are drawn dynamically by positioning a red pin (composed of several partially-transparent PNGs) on top of the map images.
By using the Google Maps API it is possible to embed the full Google Maps on an external web site. Developers are required to request an API Key, which is bound to the web site and directory entered when creating the key. Creating your own map interface involves adding the Google JavaScript code to your page, and then using JavaScript functions to add points to the map.
The flagship product of the open source movement Google Map API has gained a lot of recognition and popularity in recent years. The basic advantage of this software is its cost, reliability and flexibility.
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