Multidimensional Network
With the plethora of social medias booming in the past decade, it’s difficult to keep track of all that’s going on within our friend groups. But Owlcast Creative, a small startup in Malvern Australia has been trying to bridge the gap between them all with a concise singular app to view all that people post. iSocial Network, as they call it, combines Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn and Tumblr in one app. It doesn’t necessarily combine the actual ‘networks’ of the social networks, but it makes it all a little more user friendly. But what if it actually did…?
What if there existed a social network that really did combine networks in this way: so that all nodes and edges were laid out on one dimension, rather than the way the app has it now (in five networks). Lets call it a multidimensional network. Would such a network violate the typical tendencies of a network? For example, imagine that user A has a strong tie with user B and user C. However, the tie with B is professional (like on LinkedIn) and the one with C is social (like on Facebook). In this case, though they are both strong ties, it is unlikely that B and C form a connection at all. So in this scenario, does user A violate Strong Triadic Closure Property? Or does it not apply because the connections are on different dimensions? In this way, defining what type of connection a tie is could improve a networks ability to suggest friends and connections.