The generation shift from TV to Social Networking

With the shift in networking technologies the phenomenon of social networking sites has evolved to be the Gen-X ways of communicating and sharing information. Today more than half of the youth spend more of their waking hours on the internet rather than on playing or in from of the 'stupid idiot box'.
Since, social networks connect people at low cost; it is beneficial for entrepreneurs and small businesses looking to expand their contact base. They are also increasingly being used in legal and criminal investigations. Information posted on sites such as MySpace and Facebook has been time and again used by police officials to prosecute users of said sites. Families who have lost touch with near and dear ones are utilizing such sites to get back in touch with each other.
Most social network services are web based and provide a variety of ways for users to interact, such as e-mail and instant messaging services. Users can upload pictures of themselves, create their 'profile' and can often be "friends" with other users. In most social networking services, both users must confirm that they are friends before they are linked.
From earliest social networking sites Classmates.com (1995) and SixDegrees.com (1997) ,with time the popularity of these virtually small sites attracted bigger players like Indiatimes, Google, Yahoo etc. Thus came into existence networking sites like itimes, Orkut, Yahoo 360 degree, Facebook, My Space etc. As many as 200 social networking sites exist with about millions of users catering to various divisions and strata of society.
In recent times, there have been growing concerns about users giving out too much personal information and the threat of sexual predators on large social networking services. Furthermore, there is an issue over the control of data—information having been altered or removed by the user may in fact be retained and/or passed to 3rd parties. Thus the relative freedom afforded by social networking services has caused concern regarding the potential of its misuse by individual patrons.