Download Comparing Online Social Networks: Urban vs. Rural Communities and Age Variations and more Papers Computer Science in PDF only on Docsity! The Network in the Garden This was a fascinating paper, which explore the online social network community from the aspect of rural and urban communities. The paper found that many aspects of the offline world were replicated online. Friendship ties, online activity, and even friend-to- friend interaction were demonstrated to be different based on demographics. One of the greatest strengths of this paper was the breath of the population studied. The shear quantity of users allayed many of my concerns that would have been brought up in smaller N studies. Specifically that of fake profiles, and individuals who try to “have as many friends as possible.” Though not a flaw, and area this paper made me wonder about, was that of age. The paper touched on the differences between different age demographics, but did not link ages to usage. I would love to see further work examining how age differs in population, how age affects friend count (and the age of those friends), and activity. I would personally hypothesize that there are bumps of ages that are very active (very young and late middle age). But i have no idea what we would find as to who different ages (specifically older demographics) chose to associate with. A Familiar Face(book) This paper examined the type of information provided by individuals in their profile. Unlike the gilbert paper that attempted to gather conclusions of different communities, this paper looks at what people in a community are more will or less willing to share. In addition, this paper also looks and exploring the friends people have (numberers, different “networks”, etc). Though i REALLY like the approach and the different degrees on analysis... this paper glosses over one key aspect: strength of friendship. With online communities that are expressly social in nature (facebook, myspace, etc) the effort required to accept a friend is 1 click. That said, the fact that a user has many friends AND has a lot of information may only indicate that those friend numbers are indicative of their status, not of legitimate friendships. I believe that some of the conclusions drawn may be true if there was activity between those friends. Otherwise, i think their results may be more “possibilities” then conclusions. from personal experience, i have 177 friends at U of I, 170 at CMU, and 3 at IBM. Out of those, I probably contact 5 - 10 regularly. Therefore, I donʼt necessarily feel that my number of friends, and relative profile information is indicative of my interaction. I really like this paper, just i wish some friendship strength coefficient was collected.
