Taringa Social Network: Features, Impact, and Community Engagement

This report provides an overview of Taringa, a social network popular among the Spanish-speaking community, highlighting its origins, features, and impact. Founded in Argentina in 2004, Taringa functions as a platform where users can share and discuss various topics of interest. Key features include a personalized homepage, user-created communities, Bitcoin integration for content creators, and online games. The platform has also facilitated charitable activities and community support. The report concludes that Taringa has positively influenced the Spanish-speaking community through online interactions and community engagement, fostering growth and mutual support among its users.

Running head: SOCIAL RESEARCH
Social Research
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Institutional Affiliation

SOCIAL RESEARCH 2
Introduction
Taringa is a social network that primarily targets the Spanish speaking community. It was
created by Fernando Sanza, a cipher and launched in Argentina in 2004 (Biba & Katayama,
2012). It is an open platform that has an audience of 27 million registered users who can submit
and share their general interest topics and learn new ideas, information and knowledge. The
platform is mainly used in every Hispanophone countries, for example, Spain, Colombia, Chile,
Peru, Argentina, and the US Spanish speaking community (Fabre & Grumbach, 2016).
According to ComScore Statistics, it is the 4th most popular Latin American social network and
the 2nd one after Facebook in Argentina. Being a foreign site, it is listed as one of the social
networks to outshine Facebook (Biba & Katayama, 2012).
Particular Features
The platform has been described to be a combination of both Reddit and Facebook in that it
builds around user-generated content that is divided into topics (Gainous, Wagner, & Gray,
2016). It has different features that make the website interesting to use such as:
Homepage
This is the main page of the website. In this page, the posts are arranged in chronological order
and also shows the best content submitted by the community. It is important to note that each
country has its personalized homepage display whereby, the highly rated local issues at the time
are shown due to the géo-tracking feature. The homepage displays the posts which are content
created by the users in the form of links, images, text, and videos (Popper, 2015). When the posts
are submitted, they are reviewed through commenting, earnings points and shared to others. The
posts are categorized into three sections; highlights, emerging and the most recent posts.

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Source: Taringa.com website
Communities.
Taringa has created groups that are known as communities. These are spaces where people can
share their opinions, interest, and experiences. Registered users who become the moderator
creates them. The moderator is in charge of maintaining order in the community.
Bitcoins feature.
In 2015, Taringa collaborated with Xapos Bitcoin Wallet to create Taringa creators. This is a
program where users could earn and make purchases of consumer goods (Popper, 2015). Many
Latin Americans do not have bank accounts or credit cards, so the program was created to target
them specifically.
Games.
The site collaborated with a Spanish online game company, Akamon, in 2012. They were
promoting each other where Taringa brought users while Akoman brings in the games (Biba &
Katayama, 2012). The games are free, or the users can subscribe for premium games.
Figure 1: Taringa homepage

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Source: Taringa.com website
How the site has helped address specific gaps in the community.
A branch of Taringa in the site was responsible for community service and dedication to
promoting charitable activities. The users create awareness to support charity events and also
taking part by volunteering. In 2009 the website published a book that contained the valuable
posts in the site rated by the users. The revenue collected was donated to an NGO (Fabre &
Grumbach, 2016).
Conclusion
The social media platform has highly contributed to positively shaping the Spanish
community through the electronic-word of mouth, which includes comments, likes, and text post.
We begin to understand how powerful the platform is when you see the high rate of interaction
in the website daily. This has helped the Latin community grow and support each other.
Figure 2: Online games

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References
Biba, E., & Katayama, L. (2012, February 28). Bigger than Facebook. Foreign sites that
outshine the webs U.S Stars. Retrieved from Wired Ma:
https://www.wired.com/2012/02/st_internetoutliers/
Fabre, G., & Grumbach, S. (2013). The "Real Great Leap Forward." The debate, (1), 88-104.
Gainous, J., Wagner, K., & Gray, T. (2016). Internet freedom and social media effects:
democracy and citizen attitudes in Latin America. Online Information Review, 40(5),
712-738.
Popper, N. (2015). Can Bitcoin Conquer Argentina? The New York Times, April, 29.