In the digital age, the word “friend” has a new meaning. People “meet” new friends and build their social or professional networks online. These online “friends” may be connected by common relations, interests, activities, or backgrounds and regularly communicate with each other through their posts. Famous social and/or professional networking websites include Facebook™, Instagram™, LinkedIn™, Skype™, and Twitter™, each of which comprises hundreds of millions of users worldwide. However, posts on existing networking websites are sometimes called “microblogs” since they generally are simple and short. For instance, a post in Facebook™ comprises only simple texts, URLs, and/or photographs. Therefore, the editing functions on these sites are generally limited. For a travel blogger who likes to share with her friends her blogs with a lot of pictures, descriptions, and sometimes video clips, she has to maintain at least two user accounts—one for blogging on a traditional blogging site and the other on an online networking site for sharing the blogs. A company that would like to promote a campaign also needs to direct traffic from an online networking site to their company website where they can provide more information about their campaign. Maintaining multiple system accounts and creating multiple posts on different websites for the same contents is counterproductive. Therefore, a system for blogging while providing social/professional networking features is needed.
Additionally, online networking sites generally list posts in a reverse chronological order. If a user has an online friend who constantly posts new updates and the user does not read all new posts in time, the user would be overwhelmed by new posts by that friend and need to dig into all the posts to find anything that might really be of interest to the user. Although most online networking sites provide search functions, the user need to know what to look for before searching. Therefore, it is desirous to have an online networking system where posts are displayed in a compact fashion with their contents easily identified.
Finally, with the increase in users' privacy awareness, users are intimidated to share posts and contents online because either the privacy settings are hard to understand or the privacy settings are not what they seem to be. For instance, even if a user shares with her “Friends Only” a post including a photograph on Facebook™, anyone tagged on that photograph, even if not a friend, can see the post. Though it purportedly protects the third person's privacy, the setting simply is not what it is supposed to be. Therefore, it is desirous to have an online networking system that provides easy-to-understand privacy settings—posts and contents shared with friends only remain accessible only to the friends and no one else.