Blog task Week 5
Posted by vyf693 on May 1, 2010
Filed under Uncategorized
What is the impact of the networked environment on your social relationships, how do your online and offline “friend” practices and relationships differ – how might you record, interpret and visualise the qualitative information of your profile, or your entire social network?
The concept of a network economy implies that it is better to be connected to a bigger network than a smaller one, as the benefits of connecting to a network display an increasing function for the number of other people connected to it (Pol & Carroll, 2007, pg 142).
With Facebook reaching over 400 million users who are spending over 500 billion minutes per month on the network (Facebook, 2010), the level of communication and ability to interact with such a sizeable population is quite phenomenal. This greatly benefits me, (and probably other Facebook users) as Facebook has a huge impact on my, and many others, social relationships (see blog STORY TIME LOLZ !!!). Without it, I wouldn’t even know or have contact with a second cousin in Spain (seriously), I wouldn’t keep in touch with more than half the people I know from school, and, due to the “events” application, I wouldn’t have very a social lifestyle.
Facebook is my main source of communication and maintaining contact. Majority of my friends and I converse over Facebook chat, rather than speaking on the phone or face-to-face.
For my real “friends”, the online / offline friendship remains the same, if not better, because Facebook can inform me of things like when their birthday is 
. However, I wont deny that some of my 653 “friends” are people I’ve never met. And its always going to be awkward when I walk past someone who’s classified as a”friend” on Facebook, but ignored in reality.
Using Facebook search, I typed in things like “mutual friend mapping”, “analyse”, “friend statistics” and found some useful applications that allowed me to navigate through my profile and friends and put together the below visualizations that emphasize the relationships between myself and my Facebook “friends”.
Accessing all the photos my friends have "tagged" me in
Friend Explorer, 2010, date accessed: 12/05/2010, http://apps.facebook.com/friends-explorer/
the people who are online come to the front, if you scroll the mouse over picture it appears with their details and latest post someones, displays whos birthdays are coming up, can organize by location etc
Friend Explorer, 2010, date accessed: 12/05/2010, http://apps.facebook.com/friends-explorer/
Links all the mutual friends between myself and one of my chosen friends; in this case, I do actually not know him, yet we are connected by several different people
Tools to visualise your Facebook network, 2009, date accessed: 12/05/2010, http://group8020.com/social-media/facebook-visualization-2034/
Attempts to plot the location of all 653 of my Facebook friends, as well as linking mutual friends
Social graph, 2009, date accessed: 12/05/2010, http://apps.facebook.com/socgraph/?ref=appd_my_recent&fa=0
Friend Statistics, 2010, date accessed: 12/05/2010, http://apps.facebook.com/friendstatistic/?ref=appd_my_recent&fa=0
Friend Statistics, 2010, date accessed: 12/05/2010, http://apps.facebook.com/friendstatistic/?ref=appd_my_recent&fa=0
Friend Statistics, 2010, date accessed: 12/05/2010, http://apps.facebook.com/friendstatistic/?ref=appd_my_recent&fa=0
Reference
Facebook, 2010, date accessed: 12/05/2010, http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics
Pol, E & Carroll, P 2007, An Introduction to the Creative Economy 2nd Ed., McGraw Hill Custom Publishing, Australia
Constellation Framework, 2008, date accessed: 12/05/2010, http://danielmclaren.net/node/77
Tools to visualise your Facebook network, 2009, date accessed: 12/05/2010, http://group8020.com/social-media/facebook-visualization-2034/
Friend Statistics, 2010, date accessed: 12/05/2010, http://apps.facebook.com/friendstatistic/?ref=appd_my_recent&fa=0
Social graph, 2009, date accessed: 12/05/2010, http://apps.facebook.com/socgraph/?ref=appd_my_recent&fa=0
Friend Explorer, 2010, date accessed: 12/05/2010, http://apps.facebook.com/friends-explorer/
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