Technology | DOI: 10.1145/1400214.1400220
Bill Howard
analyzing online
social networks
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.
