A little bit of this and that on social network sites and communities

Profiling Social Network Users in Europe (Forrester Research). Executive summary (full report costs almost $300) - interesting statistics on SNS use in Europe back in 2006.

Catherine Dwyer et al has done an interesting comparative study of MySpace and Facebook and privacy issues, Trust and privacy concern within social networking sites: A comparison of Facebook and MySpace in which they observe that Facebook users are more trusting than MySpace users when it comes to the information they disclose, but MySpace users make more new friends!

Both I - and my students - sometimes have difficulties in distinguishing between what is the difference between social networks and communities? In a recent issue of the American Behavioral Scientist, that question is actually the topic of several articles discussing primarily offline communities, but you need to pay to get to read them. This question is also discussed in a lenghty blogpost at Collaboration loop: social networks vs. online communities, referring to a distinction made originally on the ManyToMany blog by Ross Mayfield, way back in 2004: The Difference between Communities and Networks.

The Collaboration loop posts cites a distinction made by community designer Amy Jo Kim (author of Community Building on the Web) that I still find very useful as a guideline: A network is composed of loose ties, often the focus is on a topic or particular type of content or behavior. A community may have the same focus but the ties are stronger. No one misses you in a network; they might if you’re a popular and vocal member of a community. I.e. you can remove your profile (if possible) from Facebook and no-one apart from perhaps the friends you often interact with will miss you, but not Facebook as such. If you are a member of a closely knit community and withdraw, people will notice your absence.

This distinction could lead to another conclusion, that I have also seen presented (but I cant find that slide…): that social network sites themselves are not communities, but communities may arise within these networks, for instance communities centered round a politician, a cause or a group - with the group, fandom etc providing the common interest around which the community comes together.

One might also posit that communities are based on the sharing of one common interest in one place (if that still holds true?!: Nancy Baym, for instance, points to the emergence of distributed communities in a recent article in First Monday: The New Shape of Online community), whereas a social network site is based on individual profiles, that are not necessarily bound to this one place (ie you could port the profile more or less to somewhere else, and it wouldnt make a difference either). However, this is just my own observations, there must be loads of academic literature outthere on the topic as well - I’d love to get hold of some more references.