Wondering what's a social network?
According to Dana Boyd and Nicole B. Ellison in Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship
We define social network sites as web-based services that allow individuals to (1) construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system, (2) articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection, and (3) view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system. The nature and nomenclature of these connections may vary from site to site.
Read their article for a wonderful overview of social networks, their roots and some recent research. What's not discussed in much detail but deserves attention too is how much social networks get influenced by one another. Features present on social network quickly gravitate to the next. We're going to see a lot more of this if OpenSocial takes off and lots of applications are developed using it.
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» Social Networking Sites from Social Networking Sites
I wonder if the omission of LiveJournal is because it' However, both the New Scientist story and muc Read More
» Friends social networking from Friends social networking
It can sometimes become burdensome to divide the good English language social networking work from the poor. Read More
Here is a social graph of an actual on-line social network of about 2500 members...
http://www.orgnet.com/community.html
This network was focused on a specific affiliation.