In the first part we have discussed about the ingredients that form each social network: the node, the ties, the social capital and the social prestige. All these concepts must exist in any social network be it either a small community on a dedicated site or the next big thing. Community precedes technology – it is in fact the start of a civilisation. We have always felt the need to belong to a community. Human beings are a WE species with an innate need to connect and communicate ... and that is why social networking in all its forms is thriving.

At the basic level a social network consists of links and friends(profiles). Friends are the people a customer communicates with directly. Link refers to a social connection between two people. Friends have other friends leading to the friend-of-a-friend concept. The friend-of-a-friend concept is important element in the expansion of the network thus, any online social network should allow this concept to exist, eg. all the profile to have their "friend" lists public so their friends can find other friends through direct connection.

Social networks are governed by the theory of preferential attachment. It implies that new nodes tend to attach themselves to already popular ones. That means any social network should quantify and highlight the popularity of a certain node by highlighting it's social prestige element (number of friends, number of followers, number of business contacts, etc).

We will add more elements into the next article. Stay tuned.