The car that a person chooses to drive will reflect many things about the driver and business people know this and make their automobile selections accordingly. Some young business executives might choose to buy an automobile that seems fashionable but does not fit with the personality of the driver. The car may be out of salary range and could upstage the person from receiving a raise or promotion.

This is a critical flaw that many young executives make because bosses recognize the character difference almost immediately and know that the car is a bad choice and this error will not go unnoticed. While making a dramatic social statement, it might also come across as an error in judgment that makes a boss begin to wonder what other mistakes the person has made that have not come to their attention yet.

Not only can a new car make a powerful statement about a person, but it can also serve as a double edge sword that makes people wonder about how honest an individual is. An accountant might be considered a wise investor if they had purchased a mid-sized automobile, but if the same person chose to buy an expensive luxury car that exceeded the income they made, people might think that the books were being adjusted to allow the person to make such a high car payment each month.

Any person can own an attractive automobile and impress many people with the interior features and colorful exteriors. That positive social statement can be instantly ruined if the person is not the type who schedules the new car to be cleaned and detailed on a regular basis. Any automobile that presents a dirty appearance will reflect negatively on a car owner because people might choose to believe that the person is too lazy to make such decisions.

The most powerful statement that anyone can make with the cars that they drive is to treat the car with a sense of loving. People love to hear stories about the people that they met at the carwash. This tells people that the car is well taken care of and that the car owner is a sociable and very friendly person who will do well in the corporate world because they are willing to take reasonable chances and will be likely to make a good impression on future clients.

Many people maintain social networking profiles as a way to keep in touch with their friends. The sites allow you to post information about yourself, pictures, blog updates of your day-to-day life, and what sort of movies and music you are enjoying. You can instantly leave comments on your friend’s pictures and information, and send messages. Whether the friend is in the same neighborhood, or on a different continent, you can keep in touch equally well.

Some people use social networking site such as BizFace and LinkedIn for their business spin on things. Business networking is a popular way of gaining contacts, finding employment or employees, and finding correspondents in your industry. The principles are the same, but instead of writing about what your favorite movies are, you write about your job experience, your skills, and what exactly you are looking for.

Other people use the sites as a dating service, if they are too busy or too shy to meet someone otherwise. If you think about it, social networking sites provide a great opportunity to meet someone. You can view thousands of different people, and find out about their interests, hobbies, and accomplishments.

Perhaps the greatest attraction of social networking sites is that you can take advantage of all these different things on one site. You can keep up with friends from a different state, make plans with your local friends, find business contacts, and get dates, all on one site. The dynamic abilities of these sites attract many different people from all walks of life, with all sorts of different goals. So if you haven’t tried it yet, you should definitely look into getting a social networking profile to bring together many different aspects of your life.

The first step to building a communal networking site, regardless of what type of social networking site you want to build, is to find a good social networking script. A networking script is essentially all of the code that is necessary to put together a basic public or private networking site, but you still have to populate it with content and customize it to your own liking once the basic code has been installed.

There are some free options for social networking scripts out there, and there are also a number of commercial solutions as well. Some of the free options that are available to you for social networking scripts include Dolphin and PHPizabi. Commercial social networking scripts options on the other hand need to be paid for, either purchased outright or paid for via an annual subscription fee.

If you are paying for the social networking script that you intend to use, then you need to take the time to choose a good one. You do not want to pay for a social networking script that isn’t going to do the job for you. Most websites selling social networking scripts will detail the features and benefits to you, but you should also do your own research and find unbiased reviews from other users before you buy into one program. The more you know about each social networking script, the more easy you will find it to choose the right community network script for the website that you are building.

Once you have a social networking script installed, the next step is to populate your website. A social networking script is like a skeleton for your social networking website, but you need to fill in the other details to get the site working. The more you work to customize your social networking script, the easier it will become for you to bring people to your website.

Customize your social networking script with images, text, links, information, videos and photos and people will eventually come to see what you are up to. As more and more members join and begin to use your social networking site, its popularity will increase which will drive even more new users to your site. As social networking sites grow, they increase in traffic exponentially. But it all begins with a good social networking script, so choose wisely.

Simple but powerful features such as the amount of freedom you have to change your MySpace profile help make Myspace so versatile. Make your MySpace profile look better with free MySpace templates and layouts available from www.t0nes.com. Pimp out your myspace profile with cool animations, comment box tweaks and glitter sparkle images. We hope that you will enjoy using the free services available for you to customize your MySpace layouts and profiles to make them really unique.

At www.t0nes.com they offer Myspace free graphics and backgrounds for cool images, icons, and smilies for your unique Myspace page. The website www.t0nes.com is working hard to develop the most comprehensive free Myspace codes and layouts site on the internet. Browse through our MySpace codes until you find the free images or custom tweaks for your MySpace you need.

MySpace Music has taken second place ranking within the Hitwise Music category. Go to myspace music to search for your most popular bands and view the many featured artists while you are surfing. MySpace Music is the hottest internet music site for bands and fans to connect online.

The versatility of MySpace is that it is more than a social network, MySpace is an amalgamation of everything that social interaction brings. MySpace is well on its way to becoming the brand name associated with all online social communities. For at least the time being Myspace remains a rapidly expanding community based site where users meet new friends and hang out online with like minded people.

As well as making new friends on Myspace you can use the social network to reconnect with old friends and find people you have lost touch with. A good start is to simply put yourself on Myspace and many times your old friends will find you and initiate contact. They may be looking for you at the same time as you are looking for them, so they may find you via your name, hobbies or a nickname you may use through Myspace searches. When searching for old friends start by trying a search for their full name, if that does not prove fruitful try using nicknames they may have used in the past. Sometimes finding an old friend may not be that east and you need to start looking into members that have similar hobbies or interests as the person you are looking for. Try browsing through the Myspace profiles in some of these searches and you may get lucky and see a picture of your long lost friend staring you in the face.

The phenomenon that is Myspace is expanding rapidly all the time throughout the world. This means you can not only make friends in your own country but you can connect with Myspace members from many different countries and cultures. You may never meet many of the friends you make on the Myspace if they live around the other side of the world, but Myspace gives you the chance to reach across the globe and make friends internationally.

Because many social networking sites are viewable by anyone as a default, any information you enter into your profile could be easily searched and available to the world. Most people give little thought to posting their birthday, where they were born, and full name, but sometimes even this small amount of information can be all a professional identity thief needs to access your identity.

One of the simplest ways to increase security is to set your profile page to private. Most social networking websites, like MySpace or Facebook, will allow you to control who can and can’t see your profile. By only allowing your personal friends access to your information, you’re significantly reducing the risk.

Another easy way to protect your identity is simply to not include private information in your online profile. Don’t post your address and phone number where the world can see it. Consider this, if your address or city is posted and you write a post on your profile that reads “will write soon, am off to Denver for 10 days,” not only will a potential identity thief have your address, but also the knowledge that your mailbox will be unsupervised for the next 10 days. So not safe.

Finally, before posting anything online, really consider whether or not its necessary. Ask yourself if you’d write that information on a bathroom wall or distribute it on a flyer. If the answer is no, then perhaps you shouldn’t be posting it at all. Remember, social networking can be fun, but make sure you’re the one in control.

A basis for the theory of social networking was a study performed by Stanley Milgram in 1967 that established that any two random United States citizens are connected to one another by a series of six intermediaries, on the average. This idea was made more popular by the play and subsequent movie, “Six Degrees of Separation”, as well as the television show “Six Degrees”. Current Internet experiments continue to explore this concept, such as the Ohio State Electronic Small World Project and Columbia’s Small World Project. These experiments currently confirm that five to seven degrees of separation are sufficient to connect two people through the Internet. This also serves to confirm the potential effectiveness of Internet social networks to build new connections between people.

The first Internet social network began in 1995 and has 12.9 million visitors today. This makes it difficult to comprehend the rule of 150, also known as the Dunbar number, that states that the size of a genuine social network is limited to about 150 members. Over 200 Internet social networking sites exist and the number of members that belong to most them steadily increases.

In an Internet social networking site, a group of founders sends messages to invite members to join the site. Those members then invite additional members and the links continue to grow. Some social networking sites offer viewable profiles for members, address books and online social connections on a social or business level. Many Internet social networks are open to the public.

Internet social networks are a convenient way to link with new people, both personally and professionally. Consider that the senior director of Nielson/NetRatings, Jon Gibs, states that Internet “…social networking is not a fad that will disappear. If anything, it will become more ingrained in mainstream sites.”

Orkut, sounds interesting doesn’t it? With other popular websites such as Yahoo! 360, Friendwise, Classmates, and MySpace, there are many who wonder how Orkut became the name of this popular online community. Orkut is named after the individual who created it. That man was an employee of Goggle and he is known as Orkut Buyukkokten.

If the name of the website doesn’t automatically draw you in, there is a good chance that the website features will. Like many other social networking websites, Orkut has a number of different member benefits. These benefits are what makes it worthwhile to become a member of this popular social networking website. As popular as Orkut is and as much as you would like to join, there are special procedures that you must follow. Unfortunately, Google does not allow just anyone to become a member, you must be invited.

Current community members are the only ones who can extend you an invite. This means that you should not waste your time trying to convince Google to let you join. Being invited to join Orkut really isn’t as difficult as it may sound. Orkut is so popular that there is a good chance that you know someone, if not personally than online, who can extend you an invite. By performing a standard internet search, you should also be able to find Orkut members who would be willing to extend you an invitation, without even knowing who you are.

Although many internet users refrain from joining Orkut, just because of the invitation requirements, there is a good reason for limited membership. Orkut is a social networking website that is free to use. Unfortunately, free means that many people would wish to use the website. Many online social networking sites, that are free to use, have literally become ridiculous. A large number of internet users get joy out of creating fake accounts and causing online controversy. Google decided to make Orkut a special membership online website to prevent instances like that from happening.

Orkut, like many other online social networking websites, has a number of different purposes. Of course, the main purpose of Orkut is to allow you to connect with your friends, especially the ones that have extended an invitation to you, but you can do much more than that. Once a member of Orkut, you can easily famialrize yourself with other website members who share the same interests as you do. This will not only help you make new friends, but it may also result in the finding of your next romantic partner. That is what is nice about Orkut, once you are a member, just about anything is possible.

If you are interested in learning more about Orkut, before trying to obtain an invite, you will want to visit their online website. You can do this by going to www.orkut.com.

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For all intents and purposes, Social Bookmarking sites are not that much different to Search Engines, but they offer users so much more than the traditional Search Engine site.

To demonstrate the differences, let’s talk about Google for example as a search engine and how it works compared to Social Bookmarking site such as Furl or Delicious. I don’t have any intention of getting into all of the technicalities here, but more of an overview to demonstrate the benefits of Social Bookmarking to users.

With Google, a web site owner purchases a domain, writes a site (let’s say it’s about dog training for the purpose of this example), buys some hosting and puts the site live online. They may or may not choose to submit the site name to Google, but one way or another Google will eventually find the site sitting on the web. Google will then analyse the coding of the site, the keywords used (dog training) and their density in the text and headings, the titles and descriptions for the site and through the awesome power of their secret algorithm place the page somewhere in their index. And guess what? This is all done by a computer that has no regard for the aesthetics of the site, the richness of design or the quality of the graphics used. Quite simply, to some extent it could well be another machine generated site out to make a quick buck with Adsense ads.

Social Bookmarking sites on the other hand provide a refreshing change for user oriented search. If you haven’t seen a Social Bookmarking site, go to one of the most popular sites Delicious. (You can’t put links in articles, so search it on Google.) To detail all of the available features at these sites is well beyond the scope of this article. It would require a small ebook. The most important thing to note however is that if you search sites by popularity, this means that they are ranked by the number of users that have them bookmarked and not by some machine. This is people power in action. Real human beings have viewed these sites and considered them good enough to add to their own personal bookmarks.

Another very popular site is Furl and for blogs, well you just can’t beat Technorati.

You can perform searches on these sites in the same way you would perform a search on Google, but you can have sites ranked by most recent, popularity and tags.

The tags are the most interesting feature of these sites. When you go to the tag area, the site will show a “tag cloud”. Your screen will show a range of tags which are in different colors, size and intensity. The larger the tag and the brighter the intensity the more popular the tag is.

In order to use a Social Bookmarking site, you need to register, which is free and set up your own account. Then when you bookmark a site in your own account, you allocate it tags, similar to how you set up categories in your browser. But tags provide a much better system because unlike a browser, you can use more than one tag. For example, if you have a category on your browser for clothing and you come across a site, you might well bookmark it and place it in that category. If you’re anything like me and have heaps of categories, it can be easy to forget where that site was bookmarked. But with social bookmarking you can tag the site with “clothing”, “fashion” and “footwear” for example and when you select any of these tags in your own bookmarking area the site will be listed.

One of the other great features about these sites is that your bookmarks are with you wherever you go and not just on your own computer. You just have to log on to your account and there they are.

To sum up then, social bookmarking is the future of search. It is powered by humans, assessed by humans and voted on by humans. These sites provide a great means of sharing quality content sites so start bookmarking today.

Talking to your kids before-hand about the dangers of social networking is the best way to them safe. Lay the ground rules for internet online usage, but make sure you tell kids why it needs to be done. How much you tell them and the boundaries you decide to set depends on your kids’ ages and their computer know-how, and will have to be reviewed regularly as they grow.

Here are some of the precautionary measures that need to be re-enforced no matter how old your kids are.

Remind them to never share personal information about themselves or their family with any stranger online. Information including their real name, address, name of their school or even sports clubs that they play for can be used to find anyone offline.

Discourage your kids from using their real names or any other screen names that could be directly linked to them. For people who want to, it can be very easy to combine the clues and figure out who the person is and where they can be found.

Install internet filtering software on your computer to restrict access to unacceptable site. Regularly monitor the chat rooms that your child frequents, even if it is a kid-friendly site. Restrict access to your child’s website and only allow family and friends from their school or local club to view it and to post their views.

Most important of all, encourage your kids to come to you if something does happen that makes them feel in the least bit uncomfortable or threatened. Kids need to learn to make their own judgments but they also need to know that you are there to support them when things go wrong. And a lot of things could go wrong when kids use social networking sites.

The common goal behind all social causes is to raise awareness or consciousness surrounding a particular issue, motivating thought and taking action. In order to be effective, it requires committed people with incredible focus and an interested audience. In the past, these movements burned an incredible amount of time simply reaching out, trying to spark interest, educate and usually exhausting resources preventing asking for the support required to further the cause.

In the past many grassroots efforts were reduced to door-to-door strategies, calling people at home or soliciting outside sympathetic storefronts. Results do vary, but more often than not, an eye roll or an apology was the response rather than a smile or handing over cold-hard cash. For the larger, better-funded social causes, the vehicle became traditional media, fighting for the attention of the would be philanthropists among a saturated sea of competing messaging. Reality was, most of these efforts invade inconveniently upon a persons day and going in for the “ask” is less effective without the common interest. It can be hit or miss, really.

How has the gap been bridged? Web 2.0, of course.

Web 2.0, the second generation of web interactivity includes the rise of social networking, collaboration tools, enhanced connectivity, content creation platforms and a vehicle for mass distribution. People have been able to form communities unlike never before, giving strength to the old saying “untied we stand”.

Every day, I log into three or more different websites whose main purpose is bringing like-minded individuals together. Far from being simple communication tools, the online social platforms allow users to create public persona that express likes, dislikes, goals, ideals and values with the intent to connect with others with similar perspectives. Requiring no introduction, the top social networking destinations defined the manner in which we interact with each other online today. MySpace, LiveJournal, http://Tribe.net, and Facebook are among the more addictive Web 2.0 locations, providing individuals and organizations alike the opportunity to correspond with one another through forums and discussions groups on any topic imaginable. Perhaps the most powerful tool on any one of these sites is the search field. With just a few keystrokes one is instantly connected with countless PEOPLE who together form communities of like-minded individuals, share interests from everything from microbrews to machinima, from synchronized swimming to saving the world. These connections are as real and meaningful as if they were in real life.

Thanks to Web 2.0, virtual is real.

People have been coming together to make a change in response to social causes and to create movements surrounding issues throughout history. Today, coming together no longer takes place exclusively in the three dimensional or “real” world. Virtual communities are just as real with real tools and applications to support any cause.

Take the wildly successful example of Kiva, which was founded in order to facilitate peer-to-peer connections between investors and entrepreneurs. Kiva was built as an open platform to allow anyone with $25 to invest in a small business in a developing country. Partnering with microfinance institutions in developing countries, Kiva managed to lower microfinancing as a whole, creating more transparency, thus greater interest. People helping people regardless of their geographical location.

Let’s think bigger, now. Really big. How about UNICEF? Many years ago, their first website comprised of a series of pictures, testimonials alongside a mailing address of where to send donations. Reflective of the early web, a passive experience, to say the least. Now the UNICEF site fully integrates Web 2.0 strategies through interactive games, videos testimonials and features plus the ability to engage with others across the planet on various topical issues. Fully integrated social networking and built in accountability is what makes their current site such a success. Granted, present on every page is the ability to choose your method of contribution, but that’s not all you see. You see the faces of others who are doing their part. You see familiar names and not so familiar stories. You see the accumulated results and how people just like you have made a difference. These strategies make a difference in the countless other success stories pertaining to social causes, both large and small.

The Web 2.0 trend has changed the face of giving and has created new rules effecting all social change from the largest not-for-profit organization to the solitary person with a vision, benefiting both philanthropists and the beneficiaries alike. This is the golden ticket for social entrepreneurs, politicians and grass roots activists. Voice is empowerment. Empowered people create movements. Social movements cause change.

Social movements are happening now, both online and off, strengthened through the language of Web 2.0. This is the context within a new paradigm of interaction and the implications are borderless. However, like an abstract painting, one does not have to truly understand it in order to appreciate it and receive genuine benefits simply from its presence.