Skip to main content



Online communities and Social Networks

Today, the entire start-up community seems to be crazy about building communities in the Web. Social networks and online communities are omnipresent in today’s digital age, yet people including myself sometimes get confused between the two concepts. This article that I came across earlier looked into their mechanisms and clarified the subtle difference between the two.

What happened is that social networks are formed by “pre-established interpersonal” relationships according to the author. Yet in online communities, people relate to each other over common interests and they don’t necessarily know each other. Relationships form the nucleus of social networks and online communities, and therefore we should look into how and to what extent relationships can be built in the two.

Below is a diagram of the life cycle of relationships, for us to understand how relationship occurs.

relationshipslifecylce

The author starts by performing a network analysis on online communities and social networks with respect to the different stages in the relationship life cycle. In the first stage, weak-ties are formed soon after the new member joined the online communities, and in those communities weak ties are shared in common among members. Weak-ties are formed in social networks along their degrees of separation; the idea of triadic closure would be an example of how ties may be formed here.  Although weak ties can wane easily, they are still as valuable as strong ties, especially in finding job opportunities.

In the second and third stage, tie strength is built and maintained. The author argues that corresponding communities are necessary to build and maintain the strong ties of relationships evident in social networks. Social networks such as Facebook and LinkedIn are good examples. Throughout their growing process, they started off in the communities of different universities, colleges and companies and later evolved into the global networks today. On the other hand, within those huge social networks there are also smaller communities like groups and fan pages. As mentioned before, they are essential for social network companies to increase tie strength among their users: as relationships build and mature inside those smaller communities, it merges with the individual’s social network.

The second part of the discussion is to what extent relationship can be formed in social networks and online communities. Theoretically there are no limits for social networks to expand, as long as necessary infrastructure presents. Yet for online communities, the author introduces the concept of “Evaporative cooling effect.” Originally a term in thermodynamics, it occurs when the most high value contributors to a community leave because the community can no longer serve their needs, and therefore the quality of the group is reduced. This phenomenon will happen recursively and eventually only the people who are unskilled and unaware remains, and the group would become a mediocre group. Comparing to the unlimited social networks, it is the Evaporative Cooling Effect that sets the limit of the expansion of online community, and thus it is really rare to see a global online community, but not the case for global social networks.

http://www.venkinesis.in/2014/09/social-network-101-communities-vs.html

Comments

Leave a Reply

Blogging Calendar

September 2015
M T W T F S S
 123456
78910111213
14151617181920
21222324252627
282930  

Archives