ABSTRACT
Let's delve deeper into the latter half of our definition and investigate what we mean by an external social network. What qualifies as a social network?
“Facebook” would be an obvious answer. Facebook provides a medium through which a meaningful percentage of the Earth's population can communicate, organized loosely around the idea of mutually approved connections between friends. Sociologists will have a field day dissecting the way the concept of a “friend” has changed since the advent of Facebook, and those who study human intimacy would be well served to ponder the phrase “in a relationship” as a socially acceptable euphemism for “is having sex with.” Tragically, we'll have to leave these sorts of delightful navel-gazing exercises to the academics for now. Facebook may be our canonical social network, but as we'll show later, there are dozens of similar sites that cater to different markets, to users with slightly different needs. The organization of each of these sites (i.e., sites that focus on “friend” relationships, as opposed to group membership, geographical location, or hierarchical status) greatly affects their suitability for different types of social interaction. This suitability, in turn, has significant
Is a forum hosted on a website a social network? As you'll read in several of our interviews, forums are a common way for gamers to interact with one another and to form social bonds outside of the game but within the context of the broader game community. Hear a description of Pocket Legend 's dedicated community of nurturing fans, and it's hard to not want to include forums as social networks. They allow people to virtually congregate in groups based around subjects of mutual interest, and exchange information. Yet might this not be a little bit like proclaiming a treehouse hidden in the woods to be a Boy Scout recruitment center? It may be a place for people who already know about nature to further advance their understanding of woodcraft, or to meet with others who are already in the know. But if you wanted to bring in new disciples to Baden Powell's cause, you might be better served to build a mock tree-fort in the air-conditioned byways of a local mall.
