Social network analysis explains why some sites succeed and others fail, how physical and online social networks differ and are alike, and attempts to predict how they will evolve.
ThE onLinE sociAL network seems like a new kid on the online block. Actually, the online social network stretches back years before the dot-com bust. The first major social network site, SixDegrees.com, launched in 1997. The rapid growth has come more recently—MySpace in 2003, Facebook in 2004, and Twitter in 2006—propelled by the ubiquity of broadband and cellular-messaging connections plus the golden touch of yet another Harvard dropout (Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook). Their expansion set off a secondary growth market in analyzing social network sites. Social network analysis (or social networking
analysis, take your pick) helps us understand why Facebook and Flickr succeeded while Friendster didn’t; shows how physical and online social networks can be alike and different; and attempts to predict how they’ll evolve and, for beneficiaries of the research, how someone might get rich off the next wave. There’s also a good deal of research about how honest people are in describing themselves online.
The sites differ in who can join, who can see your profile and how much of it is visible, and their openness to Web crawlers and other applications. The sites also differ in their suitability for use on a cell phone and whether they can be universally accessed among the
multitude of telecom companies. For instance, Twitter, the what-are-you-doing-now site, wouldn’t be a big hit if there wasn’t a mobile Web.
Online social networks also differ in size. Facebook’s magnitude, with 132 million unique visitors in June 2008, seems to fly in the face of the conventional wisdom that too much size makes a social networking site both impersonal and undesirable. (As Yogi Berra quipped, “Nobody goes there anymore; it’s too crowded.”) More than a few sites evolve in unpredictable ways, sometimes because their infrastructure couldn’t handle geometric growth or because their rules annoyed existing members. Some died
a detail from a painting of a flickr network, consisting only of people with at least 50 mutual contacts, which reveals four distinct clusters.
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