Why look at existing Social Network services?

When you are designing a new service to offer consumers, it is important that you do not copy someone else’s service because they can probably (and most likely already are) do it better than you can [1]. In this series of posts, we will look at a number of existing services that inhabit similar spaces to the focus of our project – such as tools to help people learn new languages and services aimed at students.

By investigating the services already on offer, we will also develop an understanding of how an online social network should be presented, what common functionality would be useful to include, and how such a system might be financed.