http://www.theage.com.au/news/web/facebook-the-future-for-social-networks/2007/04/24/1177180618008.html

There has always been a heated battle about whether Facebook or MySpace is the top social networking site, but according to Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia co-founder, Facebook will emerge on top.  So what makes Facebook so much better than the more veteran MySpace?  “It’s actually useful,” claims Wales.  While MySpace offered online social networking first, it is simply a social network for the sake of social networking.  Facebook, atleast originally, had a purpose to network college students with respect to relevant academic parameters like school, major and classes.  Though now its basic social networking capabilties are extended to pretty much anyone with an email address, its originally purpose is still its most popular.

So what makes MySpace for horrible?  The lack of a centralized purpose for one thing.  Wales also criticizes MySpace’s abuse of advertisements. Facebook, he claims, has a tasteful placement and appropriate amount of advertisements, while MySpace bombards its users with flashing ads. An interesting question remains, however.  How exactly did MySpace, the extremely popular and innovative social network become second rate to the newcomer, Facebook?  While ad frequency and placement certainly affected this shift, perhaps the more important difference is purpose. As mentioned above, Facebook had a distinct purpose, and this purpose attracted thousands of people whose primary interest wasn’t social networking but rather to learn more about their college.  Of course online network junkies from MySpace jumped on the Facebook bandwagon too, resulting in a rich and unique social networking experience. Mark Zuckerburg, the founder of Facebook, has declined offers of well over 900 million U.S. dollars for his site.  Clearly Facebook developers see a bright future for the site.

http://www.theage.com.au/news/web/facebook-the-future-for-social-networks/2007/04/24/1177180618008.html

There has always been a heated battle about whether Facebook or MySpace is the top social networking site, but according to Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia co-founder, Facebook will emerge on top.  So what makes Facebook so much better than the more veteran MySpace?  “It’s actually useful,” claims Wales.  While MySpace offered online social networking first, it is simply a social network for the sake of social networking.  Facebook, atleast originally, had a purpose to network college students with respect to relevant academic parameters like school, major and classes.  Though now its basic social networking capabilties are extended to pretty much anyone with an email address, its originally purpose is still its most popular.

So what makes MySpace for horrible?  The lack of a centralized purpose for one thing.  Wales also criticizes MySpace’s abuse of advertisements. Facebook, he claims, has a tasteful placement and appropriate amount of advertisements, while MySpace bombards its users with flashing ads. An interesting question remains, however.  How exactly did MySpace, the extremely popular and innovative social network become second rate to the newcomer, Facebook?  While ad frequency and placement certainly affected this shift, perhaps the more important difference is purpose. As mentioned above, Facebook had a distinct purpose, and this purpose attracted thousands of people whose primary interest wasn’t social networking but rather to learn more about their college.  Of course online network junkies from MySpace jumped on the Facebook bandwagon too, resulting in a rich and unique social networking experience. Mark Zuckerburg, the founder of Facebook, has declined offers of well over 900 million U.S. dollars for his site.  Clearly Facebook developers see a bright future for the site.

http://www.theage.com.au/news/web/facebook-the-future-for-social-networks/2007/04/24/1177180618008.html

There has always been a heated battle about whether Facebook or MySpace is the top social networking site, but according to Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia co-founder, Facebook will emerge on top.  So what makes Facebook so much better than the more veteran MySpace?  “It’s actually useful,” claims Wales.  While MySpace offered online social networking first, it is simply a social network for the sake of social networking.  Facebook, atleast originally, had a purpose to network college students with respect to relevant academic parameters like school, major and classes.  Though now its basic social networking capabilties are extended to pretty much anyone with an email address, its originally purpose is still its most popular.

So what makes MySpace for horrible?  The lack of a centralized purpose for one thing.  Wales also criticizes MySpace’s abuse of advertisements. Facebook, he claims, has a tasteful placement and appropriate amount of advertisements, while MySpace bombards its users with flashing ads. An interesting question remains, however.  How exactly did MySpace, the extremely popular and innovative social network become second rate to the newcomer, Facebook?  While ad frequency and placement certainly affected this shift, perhaps the more important difference is purpose. As mentioned above, Facebook had a distinct purpose, and this purpose attracted thousands of people whose primary interest wasn’t social networking but rather to learn more about their college.  Of course online network junkies from MySpace jumped on the Facebook bandwagon too, resulting in a rich and unique social networking experience. Mark Zuckerburg, the founder of Facebook, has declined offers of well over 900 million U.S. dollars for his site.  Clearly Facebook developers see a bright future for the site.

http://www.theage.com.au/news/web/facebook-the-future-for-social-networks/2007/04/24/1177180618008.html

There has always been a heated battle about whether Facebook or MySpace is the top social networking site, but according to Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia co-founder, Facebook will emerge on top.  So what makes Facebook so much better than the more veteran MySpace?  “It’s actually useful,” claims Wales.  While MySpace offered online social networking first, it is simply a social network for the sake of social networking.  Facebook, atleast originally, had a purpose to network college students with respect to relevant academic parameters like school, major and classes.  Though now its basic social networking capabilties are extended to pretty much anyone with an email address, its originally purpose is still its most popular.

So what makes MySpace for horrible?  The lack of a centralized purpose for one thing.  Wales also criticizes MySpace’s abuse of advertisements. Facebook, he claims, has a tasteful placement and appropriate amount of advertisements, while MySpace bombards its users with flashing ads. An interesting question remains, however.  How exactly did MySpace, the extremely popular and innovative social network become second rate to the newcomer, Facebook?  While ad frequency and placement certainly affected this shift, perhaps the more important difference is purpose. As mentioned above, Facebook had a distinct purpose, and this purpose attracted thousands of people whose primary interest wasn’t social networking but rather to learn more about their college.  Of course online network junkies from MySpace jumped on the Facebook bandwagon too, resulting in a rich and unique social networking experience. Mark Zuckerburg, the founder of Facebook, has declined offers of well over 900 million U.S. dollars for his site.  Clearly Facebook developers see a bright future for the site.

http://www.springerlink.com/content/4fjgx8c7m92nqe05/fulltext.pdf

Recent class discussion has focused on the idea that the social network of the world can be modeled as a “small world” in which any two individuals are connected by a surprisingly short path. The notion of “six degrees of separation” presented by Stanley Melgram’s famous experiment (as discussed in class) provides strong support for this idea. In her paper “The Small World Web” (hyperlinked above), author Lada A. Adamic proposes the idea that the Web can be similarly modeled. Observing the Web on the “site level,” that is, treating a multi-page conglomerate such as www.amazon.com as a single node, Adamic notes that the Web is organized into a multitude of strongly connected clusters, which are more sparsely connected to other such clusters across the Web. For example, a search for “Republican Party” returns a large number of websites referencing the Party, and in most cases, referencing each other. These sites form a cluster, in which any given site in the cluster is connected to any other site in the cluster by a short path. However, it is less likely that there will exist a short path between a site for the Republican Party and, say, an online dating website, as they exist in two different clusters. This is analogous in some ways to the Watts - Strogatz model discussed in class, in that the websites forming a cluster create the densely connected network within a short distance of a given node and the sparser links between clusters correlates with the random “long-distance” links in the model.

There are several problems with representing the Web in this manner. In the Watts - Strogatz model, it was assumed that any two nodes within a given distance of one another on the grid share an edge. However, since the Web has no “distance” in the spatial sense, the assignment of a critical proximity (within which all nodes are connected) is more difficult. For example, one might note that two similar sites (for example, www.amazon.com and www.barnesandnoble.com) share a topic (in this case, book sales) and hence should be connected in a cluster. Common sense dictates that this is not the case, since there is no motivation for Barnes and Noble to direct potential customers to the website of a competitor (and vice versa). So, these two sites are not directly connected, but may still be connected by a short path (the proverbial “six degrees” ) should both sites be referenced on a third page (perhaps a catalog of reliable online booksellers), thereby preserving the “small world” nature of the cluster.

The paper Authenticated Ad Hoc Routing at the Link Layer for Mobile Systems by Jim Binkley and William Trost describes the problems associated with ad-hoc wireless networks with mobile nodes. Because wireless network systems allow computers to move around geographically, it is much more difficult to determine which computers can access which other computers and to assess the connectivity of a wireless network. Computers in an overall network are broken down into individual subnets, where each subnet is administered by a router. If a node in a subnet physically moves and enters another subnet, the IP address, along with other identification information, must be transferred from one subnet to the next. Thus, there are a multitude of different protocols designed to address this issue, many of which focus primarily on security and connectivity.

An interesting problem regarding protocols that handle a multitude of subnets is that two nodes being in the same subnet does not imply that they can communicate with one another. For example, if there are 3 nodes, A, B and C, node A might be just within range of node B on the left, while node C might be just within range of node B on the right. B can communicate with both A and C, but the ranges of A and C do not encompass each other (A and C are on opposite sides of B). Therefore, even though A, B, and C might potentially all be in the same subnet, A cannot in fact communicate with C. Current protocols assume that nodes within the same subnet are capable of communicating with one another because wired networks have this transitive property. But wireless networks don’t share the same properties as wired networks; there are potentially more complications and more complex interactions among the nodes than what a wired network would encounter. In addition, with current communication protocols, there is no simple way for B to realize that it should help with the communication gap between A and C.

The paper addresses this problem by proposing that connectivity should not be determined merely by subnets, but that each node needs to emanate a beacon signal periodically. Although there are many security issues that must be addressed with this sort of communication scheme, the basic idea is that whichever beacon signals a computer receives indicate the computers that are within communication range. Thus, nodes that are in the same subnet do not necessarily assume that they can reach every other node in the same subnet. Furthermore, nodes that are not in the same subnet are also capable of communicating with one another, because the communication scheme bases connectivity on whether a beacon signal was received. Nodes from different subnets are capable of receiving each other’s beacon signals, and thus, more accurate information on connectivity is achievable by the wireless network as a whole.

This signal “hopping” and connectivity problem is similar to model discussed in class involving nodes with local connections along with random “long-range” connections. The “long-range” connections are produced by central wireless hubs which have a much farther range than the smaller nodes, while each small node is capable of communicating with its neighbors. Although there are some key differences between how ad-hoc wireless networks and people behave, the basic idea that information must be transferred indirectly to some particular target is inherent in both situations. In contrast to analyzing social networks, wireless networks can overcome these obstacles through communication protocols that are designed to yield the most effective results. But the same kinds of analysis are required to determine the effectiveness of such communication methods.

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 

Forgot the link. Sorry

http://www.uaf.edu/northern/big_world.html 

Forgot the link. Sorry

http://www.uaf.edu/northern/big_world.html 

Forgot the link. Sorry

http://www.uaf.edu/northern/big_world.html