Google Chrome OS unveiled, released to open source community

Social networking

Web-based social networking services provide ways for people to find, connect and interact with other online as well as typically providing tools for online communities of interest to communicate. Having grown tremendously over the past half-decade, this sector of web services is dominated by enormous sites, often with millions of members, such as Facebook and Myspace primarily in North America, Hi5 and Xing primarily in Europe, Orkut in South and Central America and Orkut, Friendster and Cyworld in the Asia-Pacific region.

Users of social networking sites are typically encouraged to create a public profile with information about their interests and hobbies, and seek out other members to add as friends (or invite existing friends who aren't using the service yet). Services typically include various methods of communicating with one's set of friends via profile updates, private or public messaging, forums, blogging, photo, audio and video-sharing, real-time chat, and other tools and methods of online communication. Some give users a wide range of control over the appearance, style and layout of their personal profiles, and some (notably Facebook) encourage the installation of plug-in "applications" that can bring in data and information from third-party sites to display and interact with on one's profile.

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