New SNA researcher collection on Socialight.com

We – the Program on Networked Governance research team – created a new Social Networker/Google Maps Mash up on socialight.com. The channel name is “social_networks“. You can read more about it on our official blog on social networks and complexity at Harvard.

Feel free to join and let other Social Network researchers know where you are located in the world!

Networking and Personality Traits

I’m preparing a paper about how personality traits are influencing people’s networking behavior. The obvious hypothesis is, that extroverts are more open to make new contacts and introverts have a harder time to open up, initiate a contact on their own. I stumbled upon an interesting “how to network”-article for introverts on businesspundit.com this morning, that might be interesting for a lot of folks.

My other inclination is, that online social networking plattforms are making it easier for introverts to initiate contacts on their own and that personality traits might not have the same impact as in the offline world.

To be continued…

New article on Social Software in HMD magazine

We just published an article in HMD “Praxis der Wirtschaftsinformatik” in Germany. The title is “Privatsphaere versus Erreichbarkeit bei der Nutzung von Social Software” (in English: Privacy vs. Availability: Using Social Software”).

Together with my co-authors Shakib Manouchehri, Andreas Kuhlenkamp and Udo Winand from the University of Kassel, we looked at the discrepancy between the being available 24/7 and still keeping your privacy when using social software applications.

The paper is available in German only. Here is the abstract and table of content:

Privatsphaere versus Erreichbarkeit bei der Nutzung von Social Software

Andreas Kuhlenkamp, Shakib Manouchehri, Ines Mergel, Udo Winand

Zusammenfassung

Die Nutzung von Social Software kann dazu beitragen, Freundschafts- und Arbeitsbeziehungen auch virtuell aufrechtzuerhalten. Durch die Unterstützung der menschlichen Kommunikation und Kollaboration, und somit von sozialen Interaktionen, entsteht eine Art Social Awareness. Bei extensiver Nutzung von Social Software im unternehmerischen Umfeld kann es jedoch zu diversen Zielkonflikten kommen. Der vorliegende Beitrag befasst sich mit der Identifikation dieser Zielkonflikte und Ansätzen zu deren Lösung.

Inhaltsübersicht

1. Wachsende Mobilität und soziale Isolation
2. Zielkonflikte beim Einsatz von Social Software im Unternehmen
3. Existierende Ansätze und Techniken
4. Lösungsansätze zur kontextspezifischen Schaffung von Social Awareness
5. Literatur

HMD, Heft 252, Dezember 2006

INSNA 2007 – Call for Papers is out

The next annual conference of INSNA (International Network of Social Network Analysis) will be held in Corfu, Greece, in May 2007.

Submission deadline is January 30, 2007. You can find the website here.

What makes online ties sustainable? A research design proposal to analyze online social networks.

Recently we heard more and more that online social networking plattforms don’t really work – Alexa teaches us, that people tend to sign up for MySpace, Facebook or openBC, but plattform providers have the hardest time to keep the network alive: people tend to sign up, but don’t or only infrequently come back to their profile.

This made my co-author Thomas Langenberg, EPFL Lausanne in Switzerland, and me start to think about the question: What makes online ties sustainable? We came up with a reasearch design that looks at four different phases of a life cycle of online ties.

Here is the abstract of our paper:

“Recently, the Pew Internet & American Life Project published a study about the number of social relations people maintain online and the omnipresent question was raised again: are actual face-to-face contacts declining over time and are they replaced by online social interactions. Our virtual life is scattered in online profiles across sites such as openBC.com, Friendster.com, Match.com or MySpace.com. There are currently more than 400 different online social networking sites – with new sites popping up every day. Building on existing factors of persistence and sustainability of network ties in general, we address the key research questions: Which factors lead to the creation, maintenance, decay and reconnection of online network ties? Our research draws on prominent issues in the social network literature, which address the gap between research on offline and online social networks. We examine individual, dyadic, structural and content-related characteristics to understand how and why actors in different phases of their life cycle turn to online ties. Within the presented research framework, we derive propositions and develop a research design to collect and analyze qualitative and quantitative network data. The overall goal is to develop recommendations on how online social networks can become sustainable over time, and we develop questions and avenues for further research.“

We came up with the following typology of online vs. offline:

You can download the full paper on the Working Paper website of the Program on Networked Governance at Harvard.

Also: check out my entry on the Program on Networked Governance Blog.

Appendix:
Interesting post: “Why social networks fail” over at Tristan Louis’ weblog.