Social media differs from the traditional media with it unique feature of ‘openness’. Media of the old times are mostly one way sharing of information. Broadcasting television video or audio are not that interactive as the online media we have today. Social media is particularly interactive sharing of information in words, pictures, videos and audio.

The below listed are some important characteristic of social media:

• Involvement- the wall between media and the audiences is transparent
• Openness- no password protected content, everyone is able to give feedback
• Discussion- social media is two way sharing thus interactive
• Community- encourage grouping people of common interest
• Connectedness- relations (for e.g. Worked together) connects people making a social graph

Today we have different kinds of media in our life and we are growing the overall social graph by joining such media especially the social network. Following is a list of social media type with example

1.  Social Networks- These are the media platform where we are connected with people for sharing and communication. Examples are FaceBook, LinkedIn and MySpace.

2. Blogs- Blogs are cheap media to share information. Everybody can have blog today with free provider like BlogSpot from Google or TypePad from SixApart.

3. Podcasts: Podcast were first introduce by Apple and are popular audio media found online. For e.g. we can find as many podcast from here.

4. Forums- Forums are traditional and most used media for discussion. BoardTracker is a comprehensive search engine to search discussion that monitors over 40,000 forum

5. Content Communities- These are the platform targeted for sharing of media of particular kind. Popular one is Flickr for sharing images, YouTube and Hulu for sharing videos, Delicious for sharing bookmarks.

6. Collaborative Platforms:  Wikis are the most popular in this kind of media that shares knowledge and information both. It gives people to add or edit content.  The most popular one is Wikipedia which has more than 2 million articles added by the public.

7. Micro Blogging: Micro Blogging was made popular by Twitter which is an integrated platform of social network and blogs which usually provides users to update content from wireless devices. Some examples are Yammer, Jaiku and Pownce.

Social media are the platforms that are never going to fade away. Enjoy your life.

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With the popularity of social network, India has already taken pace towards social shopping too. A Banglore based company has a new product named Storrz which was announced in an indian conference proto.in. They already got 6500+ product within over 130 categories from India only. I think there is no plan to go global right now. Storrz seems to have a lot of Web 2.0 stuffs, for usability and interface it has no question so far. With AJAX search & navigation, users are pushed to web 2.0 social shopping experience.

Still Storrz has no competitors in India. Other similar sites are CrowdStrom, Yelp and Kaboodle Which covers global market.