Facebook - the bling of social capital?

November 19, 2007 at 1:05 pm · Filed under Network analysis, New media, Systems Theory

After an irresistible surge of peer pressure I finally gave in and created a facebook profile this weekend. My initial resentment towards putting too much energy into maintaining yet another web 2.0 profile was spawned by the seeming lack of a shared theme or, in the parlour of computer science, a shared object like music on mySpace.com, communication on kommunikationsforum.dk or growing up rural on bondeknold.com. Normally I would expect every self-organizing web community to be exclusively differentiated and organized around a relatively narrow thematic code, but facebook doesn’t seem to work that way. Or does it?

Where other 2.0 apps organize around differentated themes, they don’t show off the users’ social capital to users that are not a part of your immidiate network. An intriguing paper in the Journal of Computer Mediated Communication by Nicole Ellison et al. show that there is a connection between facebook use and social capital among students at the Michigan State University. Ellison’s study reveals a crucial clue to understanding what facebook does for me: it shows off my social capital (friendly connections) to a wide audience.

Facebook is to social capital what bling is to money. In stead of showing off your riches, it shows off how well connected you are. They even made little accessory apps to put on your profile to add a little extra ice. My favorite is called the ‘Friend Wheel‘ and it shows acircular ego network model as proposed by Duncan Watts and Steven Strogatz in Watts’ now infamous book ‘Six Degrees - The Science of a Connected Age‘. Here is my current friend wheel bling:

Blue: People I grew up with
Turquoise: High School friends
Green University alumni
Yellow: Work colleagues
Red: Miscellaneous aquantances

Your friends are iced out bling and chrome rims on a big ass SUV!

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2752 nodes of complexity in the K-profil network

November 15, 2007 at 8:53 am · Filed under Complexity theory, Network analysis

When browsing the litterature on Social Network Analysis (SNA) most actual analyses contain only very few nodes, like 20-100 at most. While these analyses inform the methodology of SNA they do not tell us much about complex networks. 100 nodes can only reproduce so much complexity, so my friend and colleague Timme and I want to do better. We want to do a SNA of a network of 2752 nodes in the K-profil network. Now that’s complexity. But also it proves a huge challenge.

Lesson #1: Complexity is really complex

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Social Network Analysis of WC Football

November 1, 2007 at 3:18 am · Filed under Network analysis

I just stumbled across this snappy poster by the boys at FAS.research in Austria (Harald Katzmair & Helmut Neundlinger) showing the 2006 world cup match between Germany and Sweeden in terms of Social Network Analysis. The connections represent the passes, and, surprisingly enough, it gives a great overview of which players delivered a good game and who were invisible on the court. Judge for yourself:

Actually it should be relatively simple: a football team network has relatively low degree of complexity, and the analysis is pretty straight forward once you have the passing statistics. What could be really interesting to the coaches is to make a network analysis of each team including goals as a node, lost balls a red aura etc. That way the analysis could relatively easily be applied as a decision-making instrument on the sidelines.

I wonder if there are any other unlikely domains out there just waiting to be modelled.. Any suggestions?

Network Analysis everywhere!

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