This article looks at an online social network, Club Nexus, at Stanford and explores how the profile personality of each member affects overall network properties.  It uses this online network to study and verify existing theories about social networks.   

First, it is established that there is a difference between the online social network and the actual social network underlying it.  The online network is merely a representation and often does not fully take into account all existing nodes and connections.  In this way, the users of the online network were able to control and specify what kind of person they are, how they want to be seen by other users, and what kind of other users they want to associate with.  The article goes on to describe the reinforcement of common stereotypes in the network, with examples including: weird people who have weird friends and stay at home doing nothing, successful people who are interested in romantic relationships and participate in lots of physical activities, as well as the skateboarders, erotic book readers, funk, reggae, trance music lovers who describe themselves as irresponsible.  There were also strong correlates between a student’s major or department and their listed personalities.

The study also used the online network to look at the tendency of people to share common interests with their social contacts.  This also supports the weak tie theory by Granovetter.  In this network, the dissimilar connections are the most important ones in creating cross community ties.  Finally, the article also looks at person similarity as a function of separation in the online network.  

http://72.14.205.104/search?q=cache:7kMMQjL2CtwJ:www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue8_6/adamic/+religion+and+small+world+phenomenon+social+networks&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=3&gl=us