Social media treats all users the same: trusted friend or total stranger, with little or nothing in between. In reality, relationships fall everywhere along this spectrum, a topic social science has investigated for decades under the theme of tie strength. Our work bridges this gap between theory and practice. In this paper, we present a predictive model that maps social media data to tie strength. The model builds on a dataset of over 2,000 social media ties and performs quite well, distinguishing between strong and weak ties with over 85 % accuracy. We complement these quantitative findings with interviews that unpack the relationships we could not predict. The paper concludes by illustrating how modeling tie strength can improve social media design elements, including privacy controls, message routing, friend introductions and information prioritization. Author Keywords Social media, social networks, relationship modeling, ties,

How does the Internet affect social capital? Do the communication possibilities of the Internet increase, decrease, or supplement interpersonal contact, participation, and community commitment? Our evidence comes from a 1998 survey of 39,211 visitors to the National Geographic Society website, one of the first large-scale web surveys. We find that people's interaction online supplements their face-to-face and telephone communication, without increasing or decreasing it. However, Internet use is associated with increased participation in voluntary organizations and politics. Further support for this effect is the positive association between offline and online participation in voluntary organizations and politics. Internet use is associated with a sense of online community, in general and with kin. Taken together, the evidence suggests that the Internet is becoming normalized as it is incorporated into the routine practices of everyday life.

A computer network is a social network The network revolution We find community in networks, not groups. Although people often view the world in terms of groups (Freeman, 1992), they function in networks. In networked societies: boundaries are permeable, interactions are with diverse others, connections switch between multiple networks, and hierarchies can be flatter and recursive. The change from groups to networks can be seen at many levels. Trading and political blocs have lost their monolithic character in the world system. Organizations form complex networks of alliance and exchange rather than cartels, and workers report to multiple peers and superiors. Management by multiply-connected network is replacing management by hierarchal tree and management by two-dimensional matrix (Berkowitz, 1982; Wellman, 1988; Castells, 1996). Communities are far-flung, loosely-bounded, sparsely-knit and fragmentary. Most people operate in multiple, thinly-connected, partial communities as they deal with networks of kin, neighbours, friends, workmates and organizational ties. Rather than fitting into the same group as those around them, each person has his/her own

www.ifsm.umbc.edu/onlinecommunities Little attention has focused so far on evaluating the success of online communities. This paper starts to identify some key determinants of sociability and usability that help to determine their success. Determinants of sociability include obvious measures such as the number of participants in a community, the number of messages per unit of time, members ’ satisfaction, and some less obvious measures such as amount of reciprocity, the number of on-topic messages, trustworthiness and several others. Measures of usability include numbers of errors, productivity, user satisfaction and others. The list is not exhaustive but it is intended to provide a starting point for research on this important topic that will lead to develop of metrics. To avoid creating false impressions it is advisable to use several measures and to triangulate with qualitative data, particularly from ethnographic studies. 1

This dissertation addresses the question, whatwill be the fate ofcommunityand social relations as a result of the growth of new home-based information and communication technologies? How have social networks, social capital and community involvement been affected by the rise of personal computers, the Internet and computer mediated communication (CMC)? Will the Internet reconnect the disaffiliated, or will CMC only contribute to a further disengagement of American community life? Survey and ethnographic data from along-term study of "Netville," a wired suburb near Toronto, are used to investigate the effects of advanced communication technology on social relationships. Netville was one of the first residential developments in the world to be built from the ground up with a broadband high-speed local computer network. Netville provided a unique opportunity to observe the effects of advanced information and communication technology on people's daily interactions with family, friends and neighbours. The "wired" residents of Netville are compared with a similar group of non-wired residents who lived in the same neighbourhood, but who were never connected to the local computer network. Greater involvement with friends, family and neighbours is linked to use of CMC. Internet use is associated with high levels of in-person and telephone contact, the exchange of support, the growth of personal network and increased community involvement.

Many authors have posited a social component in citation, the consensus being that the citers and citees often have interpersonal as well as intellectual ties. Evidence for this belief has been rather meager, however, in part because social networks researchers have lacked bibliometric data (e.g., pairwise citation counts from online databases) and citation analysts have lacked sociometric data (e.g., pairwise measures of acquaintanceship). In 1997 Nazer extensively measured personal relationships and communication behaviors in what we here call Globenet, an international group of 16 researchers from seven disciplines that was established in 1993 to study human development. Since Globenet's membership is known, it was possible during 2002 to obtain citation records for all members in databases of the Institute for Scientific Information. This permitted examination of how members cite each other in journal articles over the past three decades and in a 1999 book to which they all contributed. It was also possible to explore links between the intercitation data and the social and communication data. Using network-analytic techniques, we look at the growth of intercitation over time, the extent to which it follows disciplinary or interdisciplinary lines , whether it covaries with degrees of acquaintanceship , whether it reflects Globenet's organizational structure , whether it is associated with particular in-group communication patterns, and whether it is related to the cocitation of Globenet members. Results show cocitation to be a powerful predictor of intercitation in the journal articles, while being an editor or coauthor is an important predictor in the book. Intellectual ties based on shared content did better as predictors than content-neutral social ties like frien...

This paper identifies hyperlink network analysis (HNA) as a newly emerging methodology. It suggests that social (or communication) structures on the web may be analyzed based on the hyperlinks among websites. Hyperlink network analysis has advantages in describing emerging structures among social actors on the web. In order to examine what constitutes hyperlink network analysis, this paper reviews prior research on the topic. Further, it describes the data-gathering techniques for those interested in hyperlink network analysis.

The authors examine the experience of the residents of Netville, a suburban neighborhood with access to some of the most advanced new communication technologies available, and how this technology affected the amount of contact and support exchanged with members of their distant social networks. Focusing exclusively on friends and relativesexternal to the neighborhood of Netville, we analyze "community" as relations that provide a sense of belonging rather than as a group of people living near each other. Computer-mediated communication (CMC) is treated as one of several means of communication used in the maintenance of social networks. Contrary to expectations that the Internet encourages a "global village ," t hose ti es t hat previously were " jus t ou t of reac h" geographically, experience the greatest increase in contact and support as a result of access to CMC. Keywords: glob al v ill age, Netvil le, social networks, technology and society. American Behavioral Scientis...

This chapter introduces Semantic Association Networks (SANs), a novel means of using semantic web technology to tag and interlink scientific datasets, services (e.g., algorithms, techniques, or approaches), publications (e.g., papers, patents, grants), and expertise (i.e., author and user information) to improve scholarly knowledge and expertise management. Among other ends, the proposed SANs

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