THE evolution of Information Technology gave birth to what could best be described as the next most effective medium, the social networking sites.

Social Networks like the Facebook, Multiply, Friendster, MySpace, LinkedIn, Nexopia, Bebo, Twitter, Tagged, StudiVZ, iWiW, Tuenti, Decayenne, XING, Badoo, Skyrock, Orkut, Hi5, Mixi, Wretch, Xiaonei, Cyworld, Areapal and Flixter, have in fact been considered as the next big thing insofar as being an effective media.

As a matter of proof, politicians, including no less than US Pres. Barack Obama, made use of some of them while campaigning for the highest elective position in the land.

Social network sites are becoming the strongest community building trend day by day. These sites account for quite an awesome amount of online activities.

Statistically the times spend in the social networking sites are overwhelmingly increasing keeping pace with the overall growth of the internet.

The online social networking sites manage a huge database of contacts, address book, facilitating global communication in the most convincing fashion. Users are able to create profile, share thoughts, and manage bookmarks of their favorite sites.

With everyone loving social networking sites as much as they do, it`s hard for people to think about them having flaws.

They provide a way to share photos, information with friends and share a laugh or two through thoughts of the day and instant messaging. When a family lives all over the world from each other or friends moves far apart, they give a way to communicate and share their lives with each other on a technical level.

Before venturing into the steps that we can take, to save ourselves from being a prey to the security issues, we need to understand the real reason behind them.

Every social networking website asks the user to fill up a registration form, mentioning therein all the required details. The broad divisions into which the details are segregated are social, professional and personal.

The details carry your contact information, email id, your current profession and your personal likes and dislikes.

There is a chance that the information you are supplying can be provocative to some and might land you into serious trouble.

Some Statistics

Facebook.com users increased by 153%.During last year, many social networking sites have demonstrated rapid growth in their global users. Facebook.com has taken over the global lead among social networking sites in April 2008.

Increase of growth for Facebook.com is about 153% when compared to 2007, with 0.132 billion users. Myspace.com growth rate of visitors is increased by only 3% as it failed to improve the new visitor's rate when compared to last year.

Mobile phones too are dialing in to the top social networking sites.

Here's what some of the other top social networking sites are doing:

•Social networks such as Rabble, CoolTalk, and The Facebook are also being hosted by Cingular.

•Dodgeball, owned by Google, allows users to text their location and are notified of friends or hotspot venues close by. How do they pull this one off? Through the Global Positioning Systems (GPS) that most phones have.

•Flickr has partnered with Nokia, allowing users to post photos shot with their Nokia mobile multimedia phones onto the Flickr site instantly.