Social networking allows people from different social networks to meet online through some common site. Social networking sites are also called as friend of a friend sites. Today, Social Networking Sites are very popular among young generation because of its self-ruling features. These sites provide a common place to share one’s thoughts, likings & disliking, opinions etc. People can explore their knowledge through these sites. These sites attract people based on common language, sex, religion, or nationality-based identities. These sites also integrate new information and communication tools, such as mobile connectivity, blogging, and photo/video-sharing.

Services of Social networking sites: Social networking Sites generally provides following services:-

- Create your own FREE profile webpage

- chatting

- Writing blogs

- Instant messaging

- Plying online games

- Sharing ideas

- sending a friend request or a secret crush etc.

Social networking benefits: Social networking is beneficial for us in many ways. Some major advantages are as following:-

• Interaction—it can help in creating followers in your list for the purpose of improving your products or services, maintaining trust or being seen as an power in your space

• Links – It allows you to build groups to your website. This in return increases your ranking in the search engines.

• Sales—it can help in promotion of sales for a small business house by creating a group on network and promoting your brand.

• Source of Information—it also acts as a source of information as it allows group formation. So we can raise any issue to Increase our knowledge.

Some social networking sites: MySpace, Friendster, Facebook, Cyworld, Orkut, Zorpia, Hi5 and Bebo

Risks involved with Social networking: You know there are so many benefits are linked with social networking, but somehow it is proved to be inefficient. Some risks involved with social networking are as following:-

1. These sites are risky to some extent because nothing is private on these sites. Every part of information is common for others. Anybody can visit your profile without informing you.

2. Sharing your personal information with a stranger is not a good choice. Moreover these sites are more about discussing personal behaviors, date offers, friend groups etc.

3. Any malicious content can be circulated with these sites very easily. Such a worm is called as samy worm and one such implementation takes place on MySpace in October 2005. The author of the worm has thousands of friends on the site and whenever a person visits his profile, he/she get attacked by worm.

4. A new technology called as Content-based Image Retrieval (CBIR) can be used to locate a user. This technology works on the principle of features matching.