Challenges of Social Networking in Sri Lanka

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This paper described the challenges of Social Networking(SN) in Sri Lanka. SN is a web-based community of people who share interests and activities in the new version of the World Wide Web, Web2.0. These websites often feature user-friendly interface allow users to do more than just retrieve information. Social networking has revolutionized the way we communicate and share information with one another in today's society. Various social networking websites are being used by millions of people everyday on a regular basis and it now seems that social networking is a part of everyday life. Youtube, Blogs, WiKi, Hi5 and Facebook being the most widely used social-networking sites in Sri Lanka and others are Myspace, Flickr, Friendster, Bebo,LinkedIn, ZOHO Twitter and Orkut.

Several of the issues around the use of social networking sites are important from a computer literacy standpoint, attitudes to this form of communication and political & economical backwards. One challenge is getting users to join new social networks when there are few other members. Universities, Schools, and Companies are concerned about the time wasted in managing social network profiles and less bandwidth of Internet connection in Sri Lanka, they have banned SN sites.

Almost four in 10 internet users in Sri Lanka who are members of social networking sites would change the personal information they have put online, according to research. The research also showed that almost half of internet users aged 14 to 35 who were members of social networking sites and 61% of all internet users were members of social networking sites such as Facebook, Hi5, WiKi and Blogs.

A preliminary measure of this research is that no-limitation of SN sites is needed. The bandwidth of the system is not enough for the amount of requests of using the Internet, a kind of Internet usage is needed. The broadband Internet facilities in Sri Lanka are sufficiently developing. The Universities in Sri Lanka currently have over 10Mbps Internet connectivity and about 60% high schools in Sri Lanka have the Internet facility. People’s engagement with SN, understand people’s use of sites and exploring the more technical aspects of SN sites is needed. We must give students the chance to process learning and as a result better understand the content and educating the community about SN.

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