Now you can search social networks to find background information on new friends or even old friends that you have befriended. The advent of social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, and others has made it easier than ever before for you to see what your friends are interested in.
Demographic information can be found on these sites as well. Examples of this include your friends’ taste in music, the types of food they like, where they were born, how many children they have, etc. It would help to know how social networks operate first in order to understand how this information can be pulled up.

In order to be friends with a person on a social networking website, you need to first put in a friend request to that individual. He or she then has to accept you as a friend. Once you are friends, you can access all of the information on that person’s page. In rare cases, some people do not put privacy setting on their pages, and thus, anyone can see their information. This is becoming less common, however, as social network site users become more concerned about privacy-related issues.

Once you are friends with a person on a social networking site, you can access a lot of information about him or her. This information falls into two main subgroups: interests and demographic information. It is as extensive as your friend makes it; he or she may in fact have no information at all about himself or herself on his or her social networking page. In the event that he or she does post personal material, you can find out where he or she was born; the town in which he or she currently lives; what his or her relationship status is; his or her religion and/or political party affiliation; if he or she has any children; what his or her job status is; and more. If you are looking to see what he or she is interested in, it is very possible that your friend may write a summary of what he or she enjoys doing where hobbies are concerned(ie cooking, reading, etc.) Another way of gaging what a friend on a social networking site is interested in is to see what groups he or she belongs to.

On social networking sites, people can join various groups and pages that are run by administrators. These divergent online forums can be about politics, foods, companies, parenting, and just about anything imaginable. By looking at the groups that a person belongs to, an individual can gage what a potential social networking friend is interested in.

It is of note that you may want to look up a person, from, for example, your high school years on a social networking site and reconnect after all these years. When you go to the site and do a search for the person, he or she will in fact come up (if he or she is a member of the site), as will a sampling of some of the groups that he or she belongs to. However, you will get the most extensive background information by becoming friends with him or her on the site if your friend request is accepted by that person.

Regarding privacy, you may be concerned about becoming a member of a social networking site yourself given how, as discussed above, it is easy to locate background information through such an online forum. These fears have been addressed by social networking companies via their giving users the ability to limit who can see their specific pages. To this end, most people place settings on their pages which only allows their friend circle on the social networking site to gain access to their information. If you are not friends with the person, then you can not see any of the personal material on their page. Also, if a person has a concern about any of the friends on his or her social networking list, the friends in question can be deleted at any time.

In conclusion, social networking sites have made it easy to find background information on people, including their demographic material and interests. People have to become friends with those whose information they wish to look up. Privacy settings can limit who sees a person’s profile on a social networking site.