English 
Italiano 
It’s finally time for a roundup of the social networks that marked the evolution to Web 2.0 and radically shaped the Internet with new services and applications.
According to latest news, Twitter is reported to have overrun MySpace by gaining the 3rd position in the ranking of the most popular social network sites, leaded by Facebook and Windows Live in undisputed 2nd place.
This is not simply competition in a rapidly moving market, but the result of a more general trend in the transformation of the Internet.
The overcome of Web 2.0 has been the crucial point of a progressive expansion of the world wide web: as long as networks and bandwith kept growing, other services such as Usenet newsgroups and IRC chat (based on specific technologies and protocols) were cannibalized.
On the other hand, this undoubtedly encouraged a huge mass of new users to sign in: even the Facebook’s secret recipe relied after all on standardization, as this factor already constituted the formula for success of blogging.
The Facebook user model provides above all an online ID, in a common and almost fixed framework, at least visually, so tight to retain the range of individual variations within a strong reference to context.
It is widely recognized that registration and user profile actions require a relatively small effort: this opened the door to millions of new subscriptions and actually provided a basic training to large portions of the Internet population.
The trend is global, but also deeply embodied in the United States, which are its source point, and it’s even more evident among those countries that have a special relationship with American culture, as for Italy: the land of mobile phones, shaped by television, crowded by cars, is ranked 3rd with Indonesia in the latest statistics about Facebook members, and first for the average time spent on a site that collects 90% of the national Internet users.
The common pattern of use is a carefree disengaged communication, not as highly motivated like the interventions in Wikipedia, shifting toward an entertaining presentation of self, with random participation to public opinion campaigns.
Instead of establishing new relationships, it tends to strenghten the existing ones, while local and national areas are still divided: for instance, such important markets as Brazil or India rely on Google’s Orkut network, and Facebook certainly does not dominate in Asia.
While Twitter has made his concise functional messaging and honest briefness key ingredients of success, on the contrary Myspace used to offer more redundant customization features than its competitors, but this proved to be a disadvantage.
This is not matter of essence: evidence suggests that a hybrid solution anyway does not involve the wider design options of a true website, and the individual profile setup is comparable to the arranging of a teen bedroom: in fact it’s no accident that most people belong to a specific age group.
The MySpace network was able to consolidate over time a strong core of enthusiasts, and become the main online stage of the music scene; after the recent statistics reports, a renovation is on schedule and its impact would soon be tested.
However, theme categorization is getting stronger: Facebook, as a “mainstream” social network, could be sooner or later confined to thoughtless routine use, if unable to exploit its supremacy in trasforming into an operating system. Ambitious plans have been undertaken to develop this shift.
Meanwhile, other social networks gain popularity as they find their own particular domain. In LinkedIn and deviantART, Flickr and Picasa, YouTube and Vimeo, Last.fm, the user experience is quite similar to common interest communities that used to meet in newsgroups and forums, now enriched by web hypertexts.
Dynamics of distinction act not only at the content scale, but also in means of expression and above all in the social and personal scope. The prominence of the topic is not really coming back simply because it never faded away.
Every market segment has a leading player, mergers and acquisitions with industries and software houses are ongoing, but somehow enclosed by corporate partnerships. Gravatar is only a first, limited but relevant example of interconnected networks that demonstrate the potential of a shared online “passport”.
Otherwise, without an equitable agreement among contenders, vertical monopolies are rising so that the main, most awful concern is not about security, privacy and control, since the social network ownership and management seems to be harmless, but it relates to how much free could ever be our choice of something to trust.
