What is social network?

What do people mean when they say "social network?"

• Martin Pichinson was interviewed on peHUB recently and said social networks were being shut down the most.  What does he mean by "social network." It seems like most social sites now have follow or friend functionality.  For example, is Pinterest a social network?  Is BranchOut a social network?  etc.

• Answer:

  Generally the best example of a social network when anyone asks is Facebook. What is Facebook? It's a massive network of people, all within a few keyboard presses of one another. A social network is really on a technical level a database of people, the relationships between those people are tracked and mapped out. In many ways social networks are simply communities. The idea of a social network was around thousands of years before the internet or electricity was even invented. On a web level a social network is where users can join and talk to and or friend one another. A forum is a kind of social network, Tumblr is a social network, Wordpress, Blogger, Pinterest, etc... The term gets thrown around a lot but it's a rather generic say of saying: big database of interconnectable people.