Science and Industry

One thing I’ve been interested for some time is friendship in online environments. Services like Facebook or Twitter allow us to add friends or to follow, but what these actually mean is totally different discussion. I know, I’m not the viagra one doing this kind of things — actually, I’m behind the masters¹ in this area.

However every now and then you get interesting ideas that what could be done when data just emerges and you take a deeper look to it. The following is something Juuso Karikoski (Aalto University) and me have worked on and shall present in the IEEE Social Computing 2010 (stay tuned for a conference report), but I’ll make a human readable version out of here.

It’s even now possible to use one data source and try to understand structure in a service. Sometimes it’s unidirectional and sometimes the system allows you to weight this data. However, the problem is that it just shows one channel of communication, but we use several different kinds of channels: I communicate via IRC, Facebook, email etc. — and looking just one service gives us a limited view.

What we worked out was a solution to mash together two different kind of data sources: phone call log data and a data from an Internet service called OtaSizzle. Naturally, this view is still limited and our sample size was hilariously tiny (n << 100), but it’s more than nothing. What we basically show is difference in these two networks.

As you might guess, we are not the only ones who have this kind of results: Karien Van Cleenput has just shown similar thing using a survey, and with decent sample size too. She suggest that strong ties are maintained with full variety of communication where as weak ties are maintained using social networking sites and face to face as their means.

What these results mean for me at least then? By looking several data sources together, we can build superior experiences for the users, something that makes them smile every day. And we need to understand the complexity of human nature, how they communicate using variety of media…

1. For example, see Huberman et al (2009), Golder et al (2007) and Eagle et al (2009) for using online or mobile phones as data sources and making observations of the data and Donath et al (2004), Donath (2007) and Fono et al (2006) for explaining human behavior in online networks. [↩]

Tags: communication, social, social network

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 12th, 2010 at 12:09 pm and is filed under Helsinki Institute for Information Technology, Nokia. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.