The Networks of Venmo
If you ask a teenager to name an online social network chances are one of the most popular responses will be Facebook, or maybe LinkedIn (if you are asking the college teenagers who are eagerly trying to replace their middle school online presence with something more professional). Both of these online networks are in the most literary sense “social” because they link friends, acquaintances, and employers with the purpose of sharing different aspects of life, whether baby photos or past job experiences. These networks are, like most of the networks we have studied, undirected because the edges go both ways. That is to say that when you are friends with someone on Facebook they are also friends with you. However, there is a new online social network that is quickly growing in popularity that works as both an undirected and a directed network. This network is Venmo, an app that allows fast and easy money transfers at the click of a few buttons.
(image from: http://mathinsight.org/network_introduction)
The social and financial aspects of Venmo create its dual nature as an undirected and directed network. The social aspects of Venmo, friends and the payment “newsfeed,” create the undirected network. When users sign up for Venmo they are automatically friends with people in their contacts who also have Venmo accounts. Additionally, if users link their Venmos to their Facebook accounts, then their Facebook friends who have Venmo accounts become their Venmo friends. This creates a social undirected network of friends. Within this network each user can see statuses from the users they are connected to (friends with) that explain the reasons for payments on the payment newsfeed. This “new type of social dialogue around payment transactions” that can be creative and often humorous is attributed to a small of the popularity and most of the fun of the app. As The Wire points out, what could be more intimate network information than knowing how your friends spend their money and who they spend it with.
(image from: http://thefinancialbrand.com/43203/paypal-venmo-social-mobile-payments/)
While the social side of Venmo might make it fun, the main purpose of Venmo is to pay people. The financial exchanges on Venmo create the more disguised directed network within the app. The nodes are still the users of the app but the edges, instead of representing social relationships or friendship, represent the financial transactions that are made in the app. These edges are directed because within each transaction there is a flow of money from one user A to another user B. The flow only goes from A to B not from B to A. This is comparable to the giant web network where links go from one page to another but not necessarily back. However, this directed network is different from the directed network of the web that we studied in class. The edges don’t just point from one node A to another node B but are in a sense transporting something from A to B, in this case money.
(image from: http://time.com/money/4041302/mobile-payment-apps-peer/)
There are questions about the Venmo networks that were not addressed in these articles but that we answered for all of the large networks that we looked at in class. First, is the directed network of Venmo one large component, like the global social network and Facebook, or do people interact with much smaller groups of people when it comes to money versus friendship? More broadly, do the same qualities that apply to the Global Social Network and the Giant Web Network also apply to the networks within Venmo? For now, these questions remain unsolved in publication.
Sources:
- http://thefinancialbrand.com/43203/paypal-venmo-social-mobile-payments/
- http://www.thewire.com/culture/2014/04/why-the-venmo-newsfeed-is-the-best-social-network-nobodys-talking-about/361342/
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