Web 2.0 products try to offer a new dimension of the Internet besides the glossy buttons and big, clean fonts : social network that connects relationships. David Sacks, the founder and CEO of new start up Geni says in his article from TechCrunch that sharing information with others is an evolution from basic search. He also mentions Facebook’s new developer platform that allows users to “effortlessly access information that is comprehensive and personal to them.” What he means is that since your friends is likely to have common interests with you, their suggestions or information they provide are more likely to be useful and less time-consuming to find.

This article attracted many users with interesting comments. The first that strike me was that depending too much on the information from networking sites can limit your scope of information and dull your views about the world. For example, getting movie recommendations from your close friends could hinder you from checking out professional movie reviews from others and missing out other great movies that you might like.

Also, the Facebook is criticized for not reflecting the complex and multi-layered social networks that people build in real life. One would ask different people for different things because they excel in that area. Relationships can also be deep or thin-surfaced, personal or professional, and long-term or short-termed. You might want to show your Facebook profile to your friends, but not to your professor or your employer. Facebook does not yet understand the richness of social networks.

Relating Web 2.0 to INFO 204 Networks class, relationships on the web can be referred to as a social-affiliation network, since social networking sites tend to build on affiliated activities. Edges can form when there are two people with a friend in common, two people with an activity in common, or a person joining an activity that a friend already participates in. On the web, this definition of activity could apply broadly to news, photos, events, music, political campaigns- and the lists are growing faster.

What is interesting is that from this kind of network, is one more likely to build social relationships that would help them find information they need and advance in life or rather spend more time and energy swimming in a big pond of information? What would happen to the quality of incoming information if we expand these kinds of social networks and how would we deal with it? We learned in class that we are more likely to hear about a promising job opportunity from a person we are not that close to. To what extent would weak ties be useful to us and how can networks be structured so that weak ties on the web such as small information about the news shared through digg can be helpful to us and not harmful? Incorporating multi-dimensional nature of human relationships into networks will be challenging but it would be exciting to watch online social networks evolve and fulfill our social needs.