SHARING INFORMATION

Social networks as virtual environments for communication, interaction and the sharing of resources. They can be divided into two groups: horizontal and vertical.

- Horizontal social networks.
The users create communities. The most popular are:

· Facebook.
This application allows groups to publish public or private messages with text, links, news, photos and videos. Lets you know what people are doing at any paricular moment.

· Twitter.
In this application the users publish short text messages (tweets) with no more than 140 characters, which is called microblogging. The relationships between users are not always bidirectional.
People use hashtags to follow interesting events or topics.

· Google+.
This social network allows users to create groups to share information. They can share photos and form public or private communities.

- Vertical social networks.
The users form communities who have similar reasons for using the application. These reasons, which can be personal or professional, may include:

· Sharing professional information: The most popular network is LinkedIn.

· Sharing general information: People can create private groups to share information, for example with FriendFeed.

· Sharing photos: Instagram are one of the most popular.

· Sharing videos: YouTube among others.

· Live streaming: Live streaming is a technique for sharing very large audio and video files. For example Skype or Livestream.

· Other services related to other topics: For example related to books, Wattpad.