Social media
Social media employ web- and mobile-based technologies to support interactive dialogue and “introduce substantial and pervasive changes to communication between organizations, communities, and individuals.” Social media are social software which mediate human communication. When the technologies are in place, social media is ubiquitously accessible, and enabled by scalable communication techniques. In the year 2012, social media became one of the most powerful sources for news updates through platforms such as Twitter and Facebook.
Social media
Classification of social media
Social media technologies take on many different forms including magazines, Internet forums, weblogs, social blogs, microblogging, wikis, social networks, podcasts, photographs or pictures, video, rating and social bookmarking. By applying a set of theories in the field of media research (social presence, media richness) and social processes (self-presentation, self-disclosure) Kaplan and Haenlein created a classification scheme in their Business Horizons (2010) article, with six different types of social media: collaborative projects (for example, Wikipedia), blogs and microblogs (for example, Twitter), content communities (for example, YouTube), social networking sites (for example, Facebook), virtual game worlds (e.g., World of Warcraft), and virtual social worlds (e.g. Second Life). Technologies include: blogs, picture-sharing, vlogs, wall-postings, email, instant messaging, music-sharing, crowdsourcing and voice over IP, to name a few. Many of these social media services can be integrated via social network aggregation platforms. Social media network websites include sites like Facebook, Twitter, Bebo and MySpace.
Mobile social media
Social media applications used on mobile devices are called mobile social media. In comparison to traditional social media running on computers, mobile social media display a higher location- and time-sensitivity. One can differentiate between four types of mobile social media applications, depending on whether the message takes account of the specific location of the user (location-sensitivity) and whether it is received and processed by the user instantaneously or with a time delay (time-sensitivity).[1] 1. Space-timers (location and time sensitive): Exchange of messages with relevance for one specific location at one specific point-in time (e.g., Facebook Places; Foursquare) 2. Space-locators (only location sensitive): Exchange of messages, with relevance for one specific location, which are tagged to a certain place and read later by others (e.g., Yelp; Qype) 3. Quick-timers (only time sensitive): Transfer of traditional social media applications to mobile devices to increase immediacy (e.g., posting Twitter messages or Facebook status updates) 4. Slow-timers (neither location, nor time sensitive): Transfer of traditional social media applications to mobile devices (for example, watching a YouTube video or reading a Wikipedia entry)
Mobile social media can also be used on the go when one is not near a personal computer, lap-top...etc. With all the new devices that are arriving at our finger tips, gadgets such as tablets, ipods, phones, and many other new products, there is no use for sitting at home using ones PC; mobile social media has made other sources of internet browsing obsolete, and allows users to write, respond, and browse in real-time. New mediums of social networking such as "Instagram" allows the world to interconnect and makes space and time much smaller. Instagram allows individuals to snap a photo wherever they may be and share it with the rest of the world instantly, delivering a social media site full of foreign accomplishments and strange scenarios. This feature was introduced by facebook and other existing social media sites, iinstagram is a recent addition to the social media scene, and has made picture sharing much easier. Mobile social media is a