It is difficult say that Web 2.0 became the Web in social, because since the Web was born people could collaborate and communicate online, but one of the biggest successes with the Web 2.0 is simple: the easy way to do it!. Almost of the principal services of this generation are easy and free; for example, people can create a personal page with social networking sites or write online with blogs without knowledge of web programming or pay.

Status

Now we see the hit of social networkings sites like Facebook with 350 millions of users, if Facebook were a country, it would be the 4th largest in the world, amazing!, don’t you think?. And of course we’ve another good example of success but with a different type of communication, I’m talking about microblogging platforms like Twitter, that we respond a simple question: what do you doing?, and that simple question was adopted and also forgot it in the pass of the years. The different of social networks like Facebook and Twitter is in the way of people communicate (Facebook = Synchronous, Twitter = Asynchronous). The benefits of being a part of this sites are a lot, and of course you know them, but my favorites are the community, the social tools and the conversations, everything in real-time.

The buzz of these sites on these days are becoming a food of companies and for people, people think that social networks are generating a lot of money with them; so if we talk about the business model of the social networks used, we got a big black hole, for example, Facebook has got a good investors: Paypal with $500 thousand, Microsoft with $240 million and Digital Sky Technologies with $200 million dollars (and a few more), of course advertisement is other type business model, but this has not worked well on social sites. Twitter has the same history, they could not find how monetize the service.

Who are making money?

Social networks have provided a rich source of potential customers to the companies, the consumer has been centralized and labeled, so in a short deduction: free and directly publicity for costumers. So that becomes a great marketing for companies: being a part of the costumer conversation. Why do not we ask the directives of these social networks what they think about this situation? Making money though your site and you are only watching it.. Great!. I think this is certainly great potential to exploit now that there is strong demand from users.

Conclusion

In conclusion we could say that social networks are rich, yes!, but in users and information (data generated by users).