Is Twitter a Complex Adaptive System. I’ve seen a bunch of posts bubble up over the past few days that are really sparking my curiousity about what is really going on with Twitter, so I need to do a little brain dump. Bear with me. Insight #1 An article by Rosabeth Moss Kanter was just published today on the Harvard Business Review website, titled On Twitter and in the Workplace, It’s Power to the Connectors. In it, she highlights the fact that there is an organizational trend moving away from the hierarchical networks of the 20th century, and towards complex, distributed, non-hierarchical structures of business organization and leadership.
She also points out that success today is based on a person’s ability to leverage power and influence within their social networks, to act as “connectors” between people and information, and in turn build social capital. She leaves the evaluation of the significance of Twitter open-ended, but she lays out a few characteristics of Twitter that I found most interesting: Insight #2 Insight #3. Why Your Friends Have More Friends Than You Do | Psychology Toda. One of my all-time favorites among all the scientific papers that I have ever read in my life is “Why your friends have more friends than you do,” published in the in 1991 by my old sociology friend Scott L. Feld, who is now Professor of Sociology at Purdue University. The title of Feld’s paper says it all, and here’s a little demonstration you can do to confirm his conclusion. List all of your friends.
Then ask each of your friends how many friends they have. No matter who you are, whether you are a man or a woman, where you live, how many (or few) friends you have, and who your friends are, you will very likely discover that your friends on average have more friends than you do. But how can this be? Friendships are bilateral (unless you are a stalker): If X is friends with Y, then Y is friends with X. Feld demonstrates (and explains) the seeming paradox with a simple example in his paper. Early Tremors: Is It Time for Another Social Network Shakeout? - Faint rumblings have begun in the social networking landscape. Facebook acquired smaller rival FriendFeed in August. Friendster, viewed as an also-ran in the U.S., has refocused its operations on the Asia-Pacific region, where it is among the leaders in traffic.
News Corp., owner of MySpace, has reshuffled executives and restructured the unit as traffic growth slows. Experts at Wharton say that these moves and others may be the first hints of a shakeout in the social networking market. Social networking sites allow individuals to connect online and share content like photos and video. When Knowledge@Wharton wrote about social networking sites back in 2006, experts noted that some high-fliers may go from “hot” to “not” quickly. What’s unclear is where social networking goes from here. For instance, Facebook’s acquisition of FriendFeed revolved largely around a talent and technology grab. Multipurpose Sites with Scale However, these market dynamics may take time to play out. News Corp. 33 Bits of Entropy. JCMC Vol 13 Issue 1. Introduction to Social Network Methods: Chapter 4: Visualizing. Introduction to social network methods 4.
Working with NetDraw to visualize graphs This page is part of an on-line text by Robert A. Hanneman (Department of Sociology, University of California, Riverside) and Mark Riddle (Department of Sociology, University of Northern Colorado). Feel free to use and distribute this textbook, with citation. Your comments and suggestions are very welcome. Send me e-mail. Contents of this chapter: Introduction: A picture is worth... As we saw in chapter 3, a graph representing the information about the relations among nodes can be an very efficient way of describing a social structure.
A good drawing can also help us to better understand how a particular "ego" (node) is "embedded" (connected to) its "neighborhood" (the actors that are connected to ego, and their connections to one another) and to the larger graph (is "ego" an "isolate" a "pendant"?). There is no single "right way" to represent network data with graphs. Table of contents Node attributes. Do companies benefit from social networking?