Paper #6: Talking in Circles: Selective Sharing in Google+

Summary

Sanjay Kairam, Michael J. Brozowski, and David Huffaker take a look at social networking, Google+ specifically, to analyze how users choose to share and organize information. They conducted studies using both computers and people and found that social networking actively engage in selective social networking and create and manage inter-personal relationships with varying levels of strength which have differing levels of social conduct.

Related Works Not Referenced Paper

• Users of the world, unite! The challenges and opportunities of Social Media
• Predicting tie strength with social media
• Community structure in social and biological networks
• Information flow through strong and weak ties in intraorganizational social networks
• Cognitive social structures
• Social Networks and Status Attainment
• Role-based access control models
• Role-Based Access Controls: Status, Dissemination, and Prospects for Generic Security Mechanisms
• logit models for social networks
• Centrality  in Social Networks:II. Experimental  Results*

I'd imagine that Social Networks are a trending topic right now, that being said, the studies and ideas in my paper have been done before and my paper therefore, isn't very novel. They do however study exclusivity and how people categorize their friends, which was unique.

Evaluation

The whole paper is basically a large evaluation, and they approach their studies from several different angles. To begin they gather a large set of data from Google ( users remain anonymous) and sort it ways to objectively and quantitatively look at organizational habits of social media users. The paper is covered in charts so I don't want to go into specifics, but they used this quantitative / objective data and analyzed. And from that they drew subject/Qualitative conclusions on peoples habits.

Discussion

So, I try to put a positive spin on all my blog entry's, even the one's i didn't like ( there's 3 total! ) but this was really uninteresting to me. I feel like they used math to reach a conclusion that can be considered common sense aka " People don't want their boss to have complete access to their personal life". So, I'm a little disappointed. I think the evaluation was appropriate though, it may be useful to have these numbers on hand for other studies.