Why Do People Use Social Networks?

Online social networking (OSN) sites such as Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter are among the most popular sites around the World. In the case of Mexico, these sites are considered to be in the top. Users have different tools for reading and sharing information with his friends and/or contacts and for searching for new users that might have common interests. These sites have changed the way people get connected to each other on the web. The popularity of these sites is represented on its registered users: as today Facebook has about 500 million, and Twitter about 175 million. As these numbers grow, we believe that there is a great opportunity to study critical characteristics of online social network in order to identify the key success factors based on end users perception. Identifying such factors would provide important information for improving current information systems by including social software characteristics as well as to design new high impact applications for online social networks. This paper presents the results obtained through a focus group study to identify the most important issues and perceptions about OSN. Results give us an idea where and what we should be doing for future research in the subject