The Various Levels of Tie Strength on a Facebook Network
http://www.cnet.com/how-to/how-to-set-who-you-see-first-in-your-facebook-feed/
http://www.forbes.com/sites/larrymagid/2013/12/03/how-to-unfollow-someyet-yet-still-be-facebook-friends/
To say that the two months I spent interning at Facebook were informative would be an understatement. I learned so much about computer science and the company culture and, to this day, am still finding new uses for the knowledge I picked up on one of their campuses. However, my biggest regret is that I didn’t take this course last semester, so that I could interpret what I saw with a perspective influenced by at least a beginner’s understanding of network science.
Still, I have found use of the beginning material in breaking down the edges of my Facebook personal social network into ties of varying strength.
As you can see from my first link, Facebook recently released a feature that allows its users to prioritize twenty of their friends in their personal news feed. I find this particularly interesting because it forces users to acknowledge which of their ties are the strongest and explicitly denote them, thus creating a unique social hierarchy.
Of course, you have the friends you still follow and observe their posts on your news feed, but another recently released feature allows you to separate those you act friendly towards from those you actually share an amiable relationship. I’m talking, of course, about the feature that allows you to select whether you want to follow your Facebook friends or not. I think it is safe to assume that indicating a lack of interest in another person’s posts shows a weaker tie than leaving their profile on the default “following” setting. Of course, the fact that a user follows another does not necessarily imply a fairly strong social tie; this following may be done out of indolence and poor social profile maintenance.
Finally you have friends of friends as the weakest links any individual can be expected to consider worth monitoring. It’s been interesting observing how easily one can fill structural holes by linking to several different (but not necessarily opposing) groups through these yet-to-be-connected friends.
There are other special edges to consider, such as romantic relationships and family ties, but the above mentioned levels of tie strength can serve as a solid basis of analysis for just about any node in any social network on Facebook.