SNS as Means of Information Gathering

In late years, the use of social media and social networking service (SNS) is prevailing with the increase of the smartphone users. Although various media exit, social media, particularly SNS rapidly increased the number of the users. As a characteristic of SNS, every user can share or diffuse information in real time with casual message postings. There are more than several hundred kinds of SNS, and the popularity is clear. Facebook has the largest number of the users in the world, and it is more than 20 billion. In addition, there are twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Google+, and etc. the usage of SNS and the characteristic of users are changing every day. SNS is the newest tool in the history of information gathering. This is because appearance of the Internet decreased the number of the users which use other media and developed search engines and WEB browsers which enable people to access to information more easily. Moreover, interactive information dispatch, so-called social media, made information-sharing dramatically faster than before. The latest information dispatch tool is SNS. In this study, after organizing the existing SNS of varying scales, with the analysis, I am going to submit a problem and issues of SNS as information gathering tools.