ASIS&T Annual Meeting Blog

Fun with Blogs

November 7th, 2006 david.talley

Another thought from the Monday session on Virtual Communities and Social Networks: Professor Hawamdeh talked about the importance of valid user accounts for credibility and user safety in online communities, citing MySpace and Friendster as subjects of his studies. He also talked about the emergence of community supported by communication tools attached to online games.

Both are excellent points, and it’s interesting the way they overlapped in Friendster’s early days, when users made a sort of game out of creating silly fake user profiles, and then creating enormous friend networks between the accounts. The number of friend connections reported on the site provided a scoreboard. Friendster didn’t appreciate the site being hijacked in this way, and the bogus accounts were deleted in waves for a while. But it kept some smart people happily engaged for several months.

And on the gaming networks: We would do well to pay attention to multiple tiers of networking. My own sons participate heavily in online games, including the community tools where their characters interact with others. But they always have backchannel conversations going via IM, phone call, and text messages between the two of them and a couple of real-life friends.

They tell me they use the alternative channels to plot how the friends will interact within the larger online team, as its members plot together how to defeat the opposing team(s). I have no idea how they keep track of all those layers of allegiance and collaboration, but it’s clear that the interconnections run deeper than they appear.

Entry Filed under: ASIST2006