Piaras Kelly PR - Public Relations in Ireland

It seems like every day a new social network is born. Now thanks to Ning, you can create your own network for your friends or people with common interests to connect. Ning has been getting a hype on the Internet of late, but as Stephen Davies points out, it is only one of countless other sites to have emerged of late. What will be interesting to see is how the proliferation of social networking sites affects their popularity.

Malcolm Gladwell tells us in the Tipping Point that the average human being is only able to sustain 100 relationships. I used to wonder whether social networking sites would make relationships easier to manage, but it seems that they are only slightly more effective than having people’s numbers on your mobile phone - just because you’re connected, doesn’t mean that you’ll actually communicate with each other. As Scott Golder, Dennis Wilkinson and Bernardo A. Huberman show in their paper ‘Rhythms of Social Interaction: Messaging within a Massive Online Network‘, online relationships suffer from the same constraints as traditional relationships:

Most messages are sent to friends. However, most friend pairs do not exchange messages, suggesting it’s easier to have lots of friends than lots of message partners. Since messaging requires an investment of time and energy on the part of the sender, it evinces social interaction in a way that friend links do not.

In effect, it is easier to manage relationships with a friend or family member on the Internet despite geographical constraints because they are already active. The Net also serves as a tool to form new friends with common interests. But by and large, if you sign up acquaintances as friends on sites like Bebo, you’re not suddenly going to become best buddies.

Metcalfe’s Law is due a revision. It currently dictates that the value of a network is determined by the amount of users of that network - “A single fax machine is useless, but the value of every fax machine increases with the total number of fax machines in the network, because the total number of people with whom each user may send and receive documents increases.”

In the past the value of your network depended on how many people owned a fax machine. Today, however, Metcalfe’s Law should take account of how many people send faxes to each other. The value of the network also depends on the level of activity in it. While some social networks may not reach the same scale as Bebo or MySpace, they will remain very valuable to their users due to an active community.

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