Many social networking sites give each user a blog integrated into their online profile, enabling the user to easily add and log updates about their life, their work, and their online presence to their profile. Another common tool that many social networking sites integrate is discussion forums. What do blogs add to the social networking and community experience? Have blogs on social networking sites succeeded in the same ways as in blog sites? How have social networking sites utilized forum interfaces?

MySpace user blogs show up as a feed on the profile front page. Its users have a lot of formatting options on their blogs, and blog entries and comments link back to each user’s profile. Facebook’s forms of blogs are called Notes, an application that allow text editing and simple formatting. Facebook’s notes allow friend to be “tagged” in notes, meaning the note mentions the friend or is meant for the friend to read. Facebook also allows users to import external blogs from MySpace, Xanga, LiveJournal, and other sites into their notes, and in this regard Notes can act as either a blogging tool or a blog aggregator.

Both MySpace and Facebook offer forums within their site groups. All members of the group can post to the forum. MySpace also offers a standalone forum feature, which centers on a directory of topics and subtopics, such as region, lifestyles, and hobbies.

Forums in social networking sites are integrated into the networking features of the website, and thus every topic or post to a forum that a member writes is linked to the member’s profile. Unlike on some non-social-networking sites with forums, there is usually no way to make an anonymous post on a social networking site forum. While anonymity is often an effective feedback tool, the way social networking site forums are implemented prevents impersonation and misrepresentation on forums, as does happen on other sites. For example, the Stanford Daily’s website allows any visitor to comment on its news articles, and some malicious or humorous users put down the name of a university official or a celebrity as their display name, causing confusion.

Blog-oriented sites generally have more advanced blog editing tools. Some blog sites have formatting options that rival word processing applications. Users can upload videos and photos to easily insert in weblog entries. Also, users of blog sites can design the colors, layout, look and feel of their blogs and profile pages to a certain extent, unlike social networking sites which often have a very uniform look for profiles.

Blog sites also focus on finding new blogs and blog entries by keywords and topics. Blogger allows its users to tag weblog entries with its topics, such as “pets” or “dating” or “Iraq”, so later users can look up any blog entries of that topic by clicking any of a list of topic links on a blog main page. Xanga allows its users to put a search box on their blog page, so that visitors can search the blog for mention of keywords such as people or places.

Compared to blog sites’ freedom of formatting, layout and users’ abilities to search and find new content, social networking sites’ blog features are relatively simple and non-interactive. It is understandable that they have limited resource for development of a small interface or application of a larger social networking product compared to blog-focused sites. But additionally, social networking sites have chosen to keep their blog features less developed so that their interfaces are simple. Facebook’s help page on Notes states, “Why aren't notes called blogs? Because then you'd be a blogger. ;)”

Subcommunities of people on a common-interest forum or blogring often tend to group together by common race, religious views, or political views. A liberal uncertain of how to justify her political beliefs would be more comfortable in a community of fellow liberals rather than conservatives. It is for reasons like this that deliberating groups like these tend to shift towards a more extreme than moderate view most of the time, creating an opinion bubble that contrasting information can rarely enter. When groups’ views become more extreme, it becomes more difficult to trust or respect opposing sites. Because many social networking groups are public, groups of opposing nature can easily find each other’s content or attack. So, because of the nature of online groups, information, and opinions, groups and individuals with extreme views can legitimize their views among each other, find their opponents, and attack. On social networking sites, occurrences of hate speech, such as homophobia, racism, or anti-Semitism, is not unheard of. For the sites themselves, this means more work: having to moderate forums and uphold a standard policy on content deletion.

While blogging can be considered an especially valuable tool for self-expression and self-esteem, it has a controversial relation with the privacy risks of social networking sites. Some would consider it to be a valuable tool for children, but unsupervised child use of the Internet, such as revealing personal information, could be risky to the child’s safety or social development. One teacher and blogger expresses his opinion in favor of safe, monitored child blog use.