why facebook is known as a social network ?

[fathima]

[Casey]

It exists purely for communication between people, or socializing.

[Grace]

It connects you to people across the world , so it's social network

[Robin]

Which part is hard to understand...
social = interactions between people...
network = a collection of different things connected to each other
A social network = a collection of people connected and interacting together on the internet

[Bitterfurniture345]

I only use Face Book to keep in touch with family
and friends. So it's a Scocial network.

[O]

That is a bit confusing why it's called a social network since there is the sociological term 'social network' which has a somewhat different meaning, definitely a different context.
I think Facebook is called a social network because it's for social networking, which is - 1.The use of dedicated websites and applications to communicate informally with other users, or to find people with similar interests to oneself, according to Oxford dictionary.

A network is a group of interconnected people, and it's for socializing.

[SPYDERBLADE]

It's a network to socialize.

[Jagraj Singh]

because we can communicate with people through out the world

[vinit]

Hello fathima,

Your question contains two words Social and Network. Allow me to explain their meaning

Social - The simple meaning of this is the Society. Society means the group of peoples that exists around us. We might know some of those peoples while some of them are strangers for us. But they exists. We interact with them in our day to day life. As you might know "Human is a Social animal". It means that to live our life in a better way we need a society, we need some peoples with whom we can interact.

Network - The common meaning of this word is the connection of two or more things with each other. Here the things can be humans, computers or any other stuff. If you are from computer field, you might be aware of LAN (Local Area Network). LAN means the connection of two or more computers to communicate with each other.

Now, Facebook is a media that exactly follow these two words. On Facebook you can find many peoples (our friends, strangers). So, its a virtual network of various socities/communities/religions. You can share your knowledge, information, even your life with your existing friends and also you can extend your network by adding strangers some of them might be on a later time will be your friends.

I think any media that allows us to come together can be called as a Social Network. For example, now consider this Yahoo Address service. It can also be considered as a Social Network because here we are helping each other, we are communicating each other. The only difference between Facebook and Yahoo Answers is the facilities provided by these two services. Facebook provides much better facilities like sharing pics, photos, videos, tagging and many more which are not present on Yahoo Answers. But still Yahoo Answers is a good way of interaction with peoples all around the world.

[NIKHIL.N.K]

It's connecting people and share contemporary society issues. Provides features to put comments on a statement. Simply help to being social.