In a previous time in American culture, social networking in real life included harnessing the people you knew and their resources to benefit in a variety of ways, from increased social activity to career advancement. As Hyatt (2008) notes, "Networking has clearly shown social as well as economic (jobs, contracts, sales, information, etc.) benefits in real life" (p. 2). In real life social networking, individuals typically know the people they know with little knowledge of whom their contacts know. Known as "first-degree" contacts; the power of your network increases dramatically if you can "tap the network of your first-degree contacts" (Hyatt, 2008, p. 1). In this real life networking environment, one of the main challenges was keeping track of the contacts of others on top of managing our own contacts.
Over the past decade there has been a proliferation of what are known as online social networks (OSNs), like Second Life.com, MySpace.com, and FaceBook.com, sometimes referred to as "social networking services (SNSs)" (Young, 2007, p. 1). Online social networks remove the traditional challenge to real life social networking; because they help individuals track the relationships of first-degree contacts. Andrew Weinreich, founder of Friendster, an OSN, explains this newfound capability: "You are no more than two degrees from anyone you want to meet. The problem is finding the right two people. The reason for an infrastructure that defines every relationship between people is to ensure that you are always pursuing the shortest and most meaningful path to the target person" (Hyatt, 2008, p. 2). Only a lack of information keeps individuals from finding such persons.
Despite the growing popularity of OSNs (recently Facebook boasted of having more than 90 million members); there are also potential threats from their use from identity fraud to reports of teen suicides caused by pranks on such sites (B...