Social Connections 
Consider the social connections cultivated through the following tools:
MySpace: MySpace is specifically a social networking tool, with a strong music emphasis. Individuals create profiles and connect to other friends. Besides showing the explicit connections, friends can comment on each others' pages and share pictures and songs.
Facebook: Facebook is another, very popular, social networking service. It was started at Harvard, expanded to include other universities, then to high school students, and was later opened to anyone aged 13 or over. Facebook has evolved to include various social networking features. It now has over a billion registered users worldwide, and is one of the world's most popular websites.
YouTube: YouTube is not as explicitly a networking tool, but it still provides opportunities for collaboration. When a video is posted to YouTube, people can comment and add it to their collection of favorites. Every video can be rated by other users, and people can subscribe to other users videos. Groups and contests provide other interactions. When someone likes a video, besides giving it a good rating, they often share it with others, so the popularity of a video and number of views is a sign of how much the community values it.
Flickr: Like YouTube, Flickr builds connections through sharing and commenting on media, but with the focus on photos instead of videos. Flickr also allows other users to add notes directly on other people's photos. Flickr uses tags to organize photos and therefore has a folksonomy of classification.
del.icio.us: Del.icio.us is a social bookmarking site where you can bookmark your favorite links and share them with others. As an individual, you can retrieve your collection of saved links from any internet-connected computer, but the real power lies in the sharing and networking. When you add a favorite, you can see how many other people have saved the same link, who they are, and how they tagged the link. If you discover someone else with a list of great links, you can add them to your network and easily add their links to your collection. Like Flickr, tags are used to organize content, creating a folksonomy.
Diigo: Diigo, an acronym for Digest of Internet Information, Groups, and Other stuff, is a social bookmarking site that enables users to bookmark and tag web pages. It allows users to highlight and annotate either part of a web page or the entire page. Collected information can be kept private or shared with other individuals or groups.
Wikipedia: Wikipedia is an encyclopedia where everyone can contribute. It is an intrinsically collaborative product, although it is less explicitly about building connections with other people. Wikipedia's focus is primarily on the content rather than the connections, but the model is that anyone can edit and create pages. Find an error in a Wikipedia entry? You can correct it yourself without even creating an account. Wikipedia will be examined more closely in Module Four.
Blogs: Social connections through blogs happen through two primary methods: comments and links. You can comment in response to someone else's blog post even if you don't have your own blog. Blogs also link to each other, creating networks to share information.