2012年9月24日星期一

some understanding of social network


This course helps me to know social networking systematically and comprehensively. So, in this blog, I want to talk some understanding, some questions, some findings and so on.
What is social networking? As prof. Chan said, a social network is a social structure made up of individuals or organizations called “nodes”,which are tied by one or more specific types of interdependency. The interdependency includes friendship, financial exchange, knowledge and so on. So, social network focus on the process of building relationship over the web. Yeah, we can take some examples, you know social facebook, weibo are connected by friendship; some forum such as tianya, maopu aim to answer questions and know more knowledge; the shopping website such as taobao, ebay, Amazon are built for financial exchange. So you will find these social networking has begun to change our life here and there. So, why it developed so quickly and has so great influence? Beside the fast development of social computing and technology, maybe we can talk something from psychology. You know the founder of facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, one of his majors is psychology.  Figure1  shows social networking websites comparisons and ranking. If you are careful, you will find most of the top 10 websites are about friendship. People can find friends here and share something and so on. Of course you know, everybody belongs to social. We hope to be concerned, to be known and to be loved and so on. Yeah, my major is not psychology, I don’t know much about it, but I believe there must be something from psychology to analyze people’s needs and behavior, which may be the potential business opportunity. If you know more detail, you can leave some message. Haha~

Figure1
On the other hand, can we know more social people behavior psychology from social networking? Yeah, of course, we can. You know, from research of weibo, we can find what time is high tide and what time is low tide for people to scan weibo, and from the time, we also know the behavior more. So, maybe you can give me more examples about it.
So, social networking has changed our life, our communication style. Then, does it have some shortcoming? Now, we can just stay in front of computer, then we can talk with friends, share some information with others, even buy something from network. So, it may reduce normal communication in face to face. Do you have the similar situation where you can talk more with a person in network than in face to face? I have a friend, he can talk many topic even make some joke with me in QQ, but ,when we talk with each other in face to face, he cannot talk much. Maybe he is nervous. So, it is a case.
Ok, that’s all~