The Evolution of Friendships in Chinese Online Social Networks and the Strong Triadic Closure
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This article, titled “The Evolution of Friendships in Chinese Online Social Networks”, examines the evolution of friendships in a Chinese social network site called Douban, and finds out what factor causes strong friendships the most. The study looks at several factors, such as membership in the same discussion group, sharing common friends, and indicating interests in the same media. According to the study, being in the same discussion group facilitates making friends the most, and indicating interests in the same media is facilitates the least. At the first glance, the research results seem surprising, because one would expect sharing common friends to be the most important deciding factor whether or not two people would be friends. After all, according to the Strong Triadic Closure, if a node has strong ties to two neighbors then those two neighbors must have at least a weak bond between them.
However, after thinking about the results for a while, they are actually not that surprising for several reasons because they do not necessarily violate the Strong Triadic Closure. First, friends online are not likely to be strong ties unless they also know each other in real life. It is difficult for friends online to become very close friends because they cannot spend time with each other like friends in real life do. Therefore sharing common friends is not a good predictor if most of those ties are just weak ties. Moreover, among all the factors, it makes sense that that being in the same discussion group facilitates making friends the most because that activity allows interaction, which allows formation of stronger bonds. Therefore, if one person forms strong bond with two other people, we can predict, both from the results of this research and the Strong Triadic Closure, that those two other people will be friends online.