Profiles On Purpose: Service (Profiles On Purpose Series Book 1)

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The Work Of A Nation. The Center of Intelligence.

The ultimate collectors were fake profiles representing iconic fictional characters: While few people actually created Fakesters, many more enjoyed surfing Fakesters for entertainment or using functional Fakesters e. Many early adopters left because of the combination of technical difficulties, social collisions, and a rupture of trust between users and the site boyd, b.

However, at the same time that it was fading in the U. Rheingold, personal communication, August 2, help strangers connect based on shared interests. Care2 helps activists meet, Couchsurfing connects travelers to people with couches, and MyChurch joins Christian churches and their members. Furthermore, as the social media and user-generated content phenomena grew, websites focused on media sharing began implementing SNS features and becoming SNSs themselves. Examples include Flickr photo sharing , Last. FM music listening habits , and YouTube video sharing.

With the plethora of venture-backed startups launching in Silicon Valley, few people paid attention to SNSs that gained popularity elsewhere, even those built by major corporations. MSN Spaces also launched to lukewarm U. MySpace was begun in to compete with sites like Friendster, Xanga, and AsianAvenue, according to co-founder Tom Anderson personal communication, August 2, ; the founders wanted to attract estranged Friendster users T.

Anderson, personal communication, February 2, After rumors emerged that Friendster would adopt a fee-based system, users posted Friendster messages encouraging people to join alternate SNSs, including Tribe. Anderson, personal communication, August 2, One particularly notable group that encouraged others to switch were indie-rock bands who were expelled from Friendster for failing to comply with profile regulations.

While MySpace was not launched with bands in mind, they were welcomed. Indie-rock bands from the Los Angeles region began creating profiles, and local promoters used MySpace to advertise VIP passes for popular clubs. Intrigued, MySpace contacted local musicians to see how they could support them T.

Anderson, personal communication, September 28, Bands were not the sole source of MySpace growth, but the symbiotic relationship between bands and fans helped MySpace expand beyond former Friendster users. The bands-and-fans dynamic was mutually beneficial: Bands wanted to be able to contact fans, while fans desired attention from their favorite bands and used Friend connections to signal identity and affiliation.

Futhermore, MySpace differentiated itself by regularly adding features based on user demand boyd, b and by allowing users to personalize their pages. Teenagers began joining MySpace en masse in Unlike older users, most teens were never on Friendster—some joined because they wanted to connect with their favorite bands; others were introduced to the site through older family members. As teens began signing up, they encouraged their friends to join. Rather than rejecting underage users, MySpace changed its user policy to allow minors. As the site grew, three distinct populations began to form: By and large, the latter two groups did not interact with one another except through bands.

Afterwards, safety issues plagued MySpace. The site was implicated in a series of sexual interactions between adults and minors, prompting legal action Consumer Affairs, A moral panic concerning sexual predators quickly spread Bahney, , although research suggests that the concerns were exaggerated. While MySpace attracted the majority of media attention in the U. Additionally, previously popular communication and community services began implementing SNS features.

The Chinese QQ instant messaging service instantly became the largest SNS worldwide when it added profiles and made friends visible McLeod, , while the forum tool Cyworld cornered the Korean market by introducing homepages and buddies Ewers, Blogging services with complete SNS features also became popular. Alongside these open services, other SNSs launched to support niche demographics before expanding to a broader audience.

Unlike previous SNSs, Facebook was designed to support distinct college networks only. To join, a user had to have a harvard. Beginning in September , Facebook expanded to include high school students, professionals inside corporate networks, and, eventually, everyone. The change to open signup did not mean that new users could easily access users in closed networks—gaining access to corporate networks still required the appropriate.

Introduction

As of this writing, only membership in regional networks requires no permission. Unlike other SNSs, Facebook users are unable to make their full profiles public to all users. While most SNSs focus on growing broadly and exponentially, others explicitly seek narrower audiences. Some, like aSmallWorld and BeautifulPeople, intentionally restrict access to appear selective and elite. Others—activity-centered sites like Couchsurfing, identity-driven sites like BlackPlanet, and affiliation-focused sites like MyChurch—are limited by their target demographic and thus tend to be smaller.

Finally, anyone who wishes to create a niche social network site can do so on Ning, a platform and hosting service that encourages users to create their own SNSs. Currently, there are no reliable data regarding how many people use SNSs, although marketing research indicates that SNSs are growing in popularity worldwide comScore, This growth has prompted many corporations to invest time and money in creating, purchasing, promoting, and advertising SNSs.

At the same time, other companies are blocking their employees from accessing the sites. Congress has proposed legislation to ban youth from accessing SNSs in schools and libraries H.

User profile - Wikipedia

The rise of SNSs indicates a shift in the organization of online communities. While websites dedicated to communities of interest still exist and prosper, SNSs are primarily organized around people, not interests. The introduction of SNS features has introduced a new organizational framework for online communities, and with it, a vibrant new research context. Scholarship concerning SNSs is emerging from diverse disciplinary and methodological traditions, addresses a range of topics, and builds on a large body of CMC research.

The goal of this section is to survey research that is directly concerned with social network sites, and in so doing, to set the stage for the articles in this special issue. Like other online contexts in which individuals are consciously able to construct an online representation of self—such as online dating profiles and MUDS—SNSs constitute an important research context for scholars investigating processes of impression management, self-presentation, and friendship performance.

In one of the earliest academic articles on SNSs, boyd examined Friendster as a locus of publicly articulated social networks that allowed users to negotiate presentations of self and connect with others. While most sites encourage users to construct accurate representations of themselves, participants do this to varying degrees.

Another aspect of self-presentation is the articulation of friendship links, which serve as identity markers for the profile owner. Social network sites also provide rich sources of naturalistic behavioral data.

User profile

Profile and linkage data from SNSs can be gathered either through the use of automated collection techniques or through datasets provided directly from the company, enabling network analysis researchers to explore large-scale patterns of friending, usage, and other visible indicators Hogan, in press , and continuing an analysis trend that started with examinations of blogs and other websites.

For instance, Golder, Wilkinson, and Huberman examined an anonymized dataset consisting of million messages exchanged by over four million Facebook users for insight into Friending and messaging activities. Lampe, Ellison, and Steinfield explored the relationship between profile elements and number of Facebook friends, finding that profile fields that reduce transaction costs and are harder to falsify are most likely to be associated with larger number of friendship links. SNS researchers have also studied the network structure of Friendship.

Analyzing the roles people played in the growth of Flickr and Yahoo! Based on Orkut data, Spertus, Sahami, and Buyukkokten identified a topology of users through their membership in certain communities; they suggest that sites can use this to recommend additional communities of interest to users.

Finally, Liu, Maes, and Davenport argued that Friend connections are not the only network structure worth investigating. They examined the ways in which the performance of tastes favorite music, books, film, etc. Although exceptions exist, the available research suggests that most SNSs primarily support pre-existing social relations. Ellison, Steinfield, and Lampe suggest that Facebook is used to maintain existing offline relationships or solidify offline connections, as opposed to meeting new people.

These relationships may be weak ties, but typically there is some common offline element among individuals who friend one another, such as a shared class at school. Research in this vein has investigated how online interactions interface with offline ones. Likewise, boyd argues that MySpace and Facebook enable U. Researchers have investigated the potential threats to privacy associated with SNSs. In analyzing trust on social network sites, Dwyer, Hiltz, and Passerini argued that trust and usage goals may affect what people are willing to share—Facebook users expressed greater trust in Facebook than MySpace users did in MySpace and thus were more willing to share information on the site.

Survey data offer a more optimistic perspective on the issue, suggesting that teens are aware of potential privacy threats online and that many are proactive about taking steps to minimize certain potential risks. SNSs are also challenging legal conceptions of privacy. Hodge argued that the fourth amendment to the U. Constitution and legal decisions concerning privacy are not equipped to address social network sites.

For example, do police officers have the right to access content posted to Facebook without a warrant? In addition to the themes identified above, a growing body of scholarship addresses other aspects of SNSs, their users, and the practices they enable. Scholars are documenting the implications of SNS use with respect to schools, universities, and libraries. Charnigo and Barnett-Ellis found that librarians are overwhelmingly aware of Facebook and are against proposed U. This overview is not comprehensive due to space limitations and because much work on SNSs is still in the process of being published.

Additionally, we have not included literature in languages other than English e. The articles in this section address a variety of social network sites—BlackPlanet, Cyworld, Dodgeball, Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube—from multiple theoretical and methodological angles, building on previous studies of SNSs and broader theoretical traditions within CMC research, including relationship maintenance and issues of identity, performance, privacy, self-presentation, and civic engagement. These pieces collectively provide insight into some of the ways in which online and offline experiences are deeply entwined.

Using a relational dialectics approach, Kyung-Hee Kim and Haejin Yun analyze how Cyworld supports both interpersonal relations and self-relation for Korean users. Dara Byrne uses content analysis to examine civic engagement in forums on BlackPlanet and finds that online discussions are still plagued with the problems offline activists have long encountered. She looks at the ways in which networked communication is reshaping offline social geography. Other articles in this collection illustrate how innovative research methods can elucidate patterns of behavior that would be indistinguishable otherwise.

Existing theory is deployed, challenged, and extended by the approaches adopted in the articles in this section. Judith Donath extends signaling theory to explain different tactics SNS users adopt to reduce social costs while managing trust and identity. The articles in this collection highlight the significance of social network sites in the lives of users and as a topic of research. Collectively, they show how networked practices mirror, support, and alter known everyday practices, especially with respect to how people present and hide aspects of themselves and connect with others.

The fact that participation on social network sites leaves online traces offers unprecedented opportunities for researchers. The scholarship in this special theme section takes advantage of this affordance, resulting in work that helps explain practices online and offline, as well as those that blend the two environments. The work described above and included in this special theme section contributes to an on-going dialogue about the importance of social network sites, both for practitioners and researchers.

Vast, uncharted waters still remain to be explored. Although the situation is rapidly changing, scholars still have a limited understanding of who is and who is not using these sites, why, and for what purposes, especially outside the U. Such questions will require large-scale quantitative and qualitative research.

We hope that the work described here and included in this collection will help build a foundation for future investigations of these and other important issues surrounding social network sites. We are grateful to the external reviewers who volunteered their time and expertise to review papers and contribute valuable feedback and to those practitioners and analysts who provided information to help shape the history section.

Thank you also to Susan Herring, whose patience and support appeared infinite. Her research focuses on how people negotiate mediated contexts like social network sites for sociable purposes. Her research explores issues of self-presentation, relationship development, and identity in online environments such as weblogs, online dating sites, and social network sites. Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide.

Sign In or Create an Account. Close mobile search navigation Article navigation. A History of Social Network Sites. Overview of This Special Theme Section. Definition, History, and Scholarship danah m. Abstract Social network sites SNSs are increasingly attracting the attention of academic and industry researchers intrigued by their affordances and reach. View large Download slide. Awareness, information sharing, and privacy on the Facebook. Group formation in large social networks: Membership, growth, and evolution.

Friends, Friendsters, and MySpace Top 8: Writing community into being on social network sites. Exposure, invasion, and social convergence. This information can be exploited by systems taking into account the persons' characteristics and preferences. User profiles can be found on operating systems , computer programs , recommender systems , or dynamic websites such as online social networking sites or bulletin boards. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. For Wikipedia's guideline on its own user pages, see Wikipedia: This article needs additional citations for verification.

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Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. September Learn how and when to remove this template message. Social network analysis software Diaspora software Web 2. Social network advertising Social network hosting service Online dating service comparison Mobile. Privacy issues User gender difference Use in investigations. Small-world experiment Small-world network Social network Cybersectarianism Panopticon.

Social networks and social media. City Personal Professional Sexual Value. Distributed social network list Enterprise social networking Mobile social network Personal knowledge networking.

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