"Knowledge is power"
- Sir Francis Bacon
or
"Knowledge is power if you know it about the right person."
- Ethel Mumford
or
"It's not what you know, it's who you know."
What is a social network?
A network is any group of interconnected things.
Computer networks
Road networks
Networks are often depicted visually by nodes and ties.
In the case of social networks, nodes are people and the ties represent the types of relations between people.
What is social network analysis?
Rather than observing the attributes of individuals, we focus on the relationships between actors in a network. By mapping how organizations of people are connected, researchers can reveal ways that networks influence the world.
Who knows who (video):
http://www.buddygraph.com/
Small world phenomenon
In 1967, Stanley Milgram made the famous “small world experiment” which claimed to prove that people in the world are separated by at most 6 links. While the experiment is considered to have many flaws, the notion of six degrees of separation has persisted in popular culture.
6 degrees of Kevin Bacon
http://oracleofbacon.org/index.html
What are weak ties? Why are they valuable?
In 1973 a sociologist named Mark Granovetter wrote a paper called "the Strength of Weak Ties". He studied how people get jobs and found that most frequently they got them from loose acquaintances (weak ties) rather than from people close to them.
Weak ties are a source of novel information and therefore incredibly valuable. Groups with close ties (families, friends) tend to have access to and recirculate the same information.
In this model, individuals with who can broker connections between social networks exercise influence (power).
Mark Lombardi
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Lombardi
http://www.pierogi2000.com/flatfile/lombardi.html
http://www.wburg.com/0202/arts/lombardi.html
Mapping terror networks
http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue7_4/krebs/
Musical affinities
http://www.liveplasma.com/
http://www.pandora.com/
Visualization
http://jheer.org/vizster/
Other social network projects
http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/search.cfm?input=social%20networks
Social Networking Websites
These are online services that attempt to enhance the abilities of communities of people who share common interests to create social networks.
The common features of these websites are the ability to construct an identity (profile) and then to publicly display your connections to other online identities. Users can subsequently traverse the resulting network.
1995
2002
2003
del.icio.us
2004
Who cares?
- the top 10 social networking sites (MySpace, Blogger, YouTube, Facebook) are attracting nearly 50% of all web users [article]
- Facebook may be valued at nearly $10 billion [article]
Issues and Directions
Privacy - where is the line between public and private. Is there even a line anymore?
Mobile social networks