Facebook partners with Skype: The Ultimate Triadic Closure
In early July 2011, Facebook announced it would be partnering with Skype to add the feature of video-calling to its ever-growing social networking company, now with over 800 million users. This partnership marks two of the most widely used companies coming together to capitalize on each of their specialties: accessibility to many people and video conferencing. As Philip Su wrote for the Facebook blog, “Video chat has been around for years now, but it’s still not an everyday activity for most people. Sometimes it’s too difficult to set up, or the friends you want to talk to are on different services.” However, by incorporating Skype with Facebook, it will be easier for friends to video chat since Facebook is so widely used.
This new partnership is a perfect example of triadic closures in the business world. Facebook is a very popular social networking website, thus we can say it has a strong tie with its users, or the population. Similarly, Skype is the one of the most popular video conferencing companies, thus we can say it has a strong tie with its users, which are also the population. With this arrangement, we can say that the users, or population, are the central node (A) who is strongly tied to both Facebook (B) and Skype (C). As friendships can also be viewed as business partnerships, in this situation, A and B have strong friendships while A and C have strong friendships. Based on the principle of triadic closure, “If two people in a social network have a friend in common, then there is an increased likelihood that they will become friends themselves at some point in the future.” This is exactly what has happened as Facebook and Skype have now become “friends” based on their common interest in the population, or node A. This three-way relationship fulfills the triadic closure principle, benefitting everyone involved. It is to the advantage of both Skype and Facebook to form a strong tie because of the trust that the population has in both companies, evident by their popularity and continuing success with online social networking.
Source:
http://venturebeat.com/2011/07/06/facebook-confirms-skype-powered-video-chat-launching-today/