Full Circle Associates

The term "social networking" applied to sites, just like the much abused word, "community" is worth clarifying. danah boyd's piece apophenia: social network sites: my definition, does just that. I've copied the definition, but the really interesting stuff comes after where danah looks at the "edge cases." And of course, I always think the interesting things happen on the edges!

I would like to offer my working definition of 'social network sites' per confusion over my request for a timeline.

A 'social network site' is a category of websites with profiles, semi-persistent public commentary on the profile, and a traversable publicly articulated social network displayed in relation to the profile.

To clarify:

1. Profile. A profile includes an identifiable handle (either the person's name or nick), information about that person (e.g. age, sex, location, interests, etc.). Most profiles also include a photograph and information about last login. Profiles have unique URLs that can be visited directly.

2. Traversable, publicly articulated social network. Participants have the ability to list other profiles as 'friends' or 'contacts' or some equivalent. This generates a social network graph which may be directed ('attention network' type of social network where friendship does not have to be confirmed) or undirected (where the other person must accept friendship). This articulated social network is displayed on an individual's profile for all other users to view. Each node contains a link to the profile of the other person so that individuals can traverse the network through friends of friends of friends....

3. Semi-persistent public comments. Participants can leave comments (or testimonials, guestbook messages, etc.) on others' profiles for everyone to see. These comments are semi-persistent in that they are not ephemeral but they may disappear over some period of time or upon removal. These comments are typically reverse-chronological in display. Because of these comments, profiles are a combination of an individuals' self-expression and what others say about that individual.

This definition includes all of the obvious sites that i talk about as social network sites: MySpace, Facebook, Friendster, Cyworld, Mixi, Orkut, etc. Some of the obvious players like LinkedIn are barely social network sites because of their efforts to privatize the articulated social network but, given that it's possible, I count them (just like i count MySpace even when the users turn their profiles private)."