The Early Years
According to the definition above, the first recognizable social network site launched in
1997. SixDegrees.com allowed users to create profiles, list their Friends and, beginning in
1998, surf the Friends lists. Each of these features existed in some form before SixDegrees,
of course. Profiles existed on most major dating sites and many community sites. AIM and
ICQ buddy lists supported lists of Friends, although those Friends were not visible to
others. Classmates.com allowed people to affiliate with their high school or college and
surf the network for others who were also affiliated, but users could not create profiles or
list Friends until years later. SixDegrees was the first to combine these features.
SixDegrees promoted itself as a tool to help people connect with and send messages to
others. While SixDegrees attracted millions of users, it failed to become a sustainable
business and, in 2000, the service closed. Looking back, its founder believes that
SixDegrees was simply ahead of its time (A. Weinreich, personal communication, July 11,
2007). While people were already flocking to the Internet, most did not have extended
networks of friends who were online. Early adopters complained that there was little to do
after accepting Friend requests, and most users were not interested in meeting strangers.
From 1997 to 2001, a number of community tools began supporting various combinations
of profiles and publicly articulated Friends. AsianAvenue, BlackPlanet, and MiGente
allowed users to create personal, professional, and dating profiles—users could identifyFriends on their personal profiles without seeking approval for those connections (O.
Wasow, personal communication, August 16, 2007). Likewise, shortly after its launch in
1999, LiveJournal listed one-directional connections on user pages. LiveJournal's creator
suspects that he fashioned these Friends after instant messaging buddy lists (B. Fitzpatrick,
personal communication, June 15, 2007)—on LiveJournal, people mark others as Friends
to follow their journals and manage privacy settings. The Korean virtual worlds site
Cyworld was started in 1999 and added SNS features in 2001, independent of these other
sites (see Kim & Yun, this issue). Likewise, when the Swedish web community
LunarStorm refashioned itself as an SNS in 2000, it contained Friends lists, guestbooks,
and diary pages (D. Skog, personal communication, September 24, 2007).
The next wave of SNSs began when Ryze.com was launched in 2001 to help people
leverage their business networks. Ryze's founder reports that he first introduced the site to
his friends—primarily members of the San Francisco business and technology community,
including the entrepreneurs and investors behind many future SNSs (A. Scott, personal
communication, June 14, 2007). In particular, the people behind Ryze, Tribe.net, LinkedIn,
and Friendster were tightly entwined personally and professionally. They believed that
they could support each other without competing (Festa, 2003). In the end, Ryze never
acquired mass popularity, Tribe.net grew to attract a passionate niche user base, LinkedIn
became a powerful business service, and Friendster became the most significant, if only as
"one of the biggest disappointments in Internet history" (Chafkin, 2007)
The Rise (and Fall) of Friendster
Friendster launched in 2002 as a social complement to Ryze. It was designed to compete
with Match.com, a profitable online dating site (Cohen, 2003). While most dating sites
focused on introducing people to strangers with similar interests, Friendster was designed
to help friends-of-friends meet, based on the assumption that friends-of-friends would
make better romantic partners than would strangers (J. Abrams, personal communication,
March 27, 2003). Friendster gained traction among three groups of early adopters who
shaped the site—bloggers, attendees of the Burning Man arts festival, and gay men (boyd,
2004)—and grew to 300,000 users through word of mouth before traditional press
coverage began in May 2003 (O'Shea, 2003).
As Friendster's popularity surged, the site encountered technical and social difficulties
(boyd, 2006). Friendster's servers and databases were ill-equipped to handle its rapid
growth, and the site faltered regularly, frustrating users who replaced email with
Friendster. Because organic growth had been critical to creating a coherent community, the
onslaught of new users who learned about the site from media coverage upset the cultural
balance. Furthermore, exponential growth meant a collapse in social contexts: Users had to
face their bosses and former classmates alongside their close friends. To complicate
matters, Friendster began restricting the activities of its most passionate users.
The initial design of Friendster restricted users from viewing profiles of people who were
more than four degrees away (friends-of-friends-of-friends-of-friends). In order to view
additional profiles, users began adding acquaintances and interesting-looking strangers to
expand their reach. Some began massively collecting Friends, an activity that was
implicitly encouraged through a "most popular" feature. The ultimate collectors were fake
profiles representing iconic fictional characters: celebrities, concepts, and other such
entities. These "Fakesters" outraged the company, who banished fake profiles and
eliminated the "most popular" feature. While few people actually created
Fakesters, many more enjoyed surfing Fakesters for entertainment or using functional
Fakesters (e.g., "Brown University") to find people they knew.
The active deletion of Fakesters (and genuine users who chose non-realistic photos)
signaled to some that the company did not share users' interests. Many early adopters left
because of the combination of technical difficulties, social collisions, and a rupture of trust
between users and the site (boyd, 2006). However, at the same time that it was fading in
the U.S., its popularity skyrocketed in the Philippines, Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia
(Goldberg, 2007).
SNSs Hit the Mainstream
From 2003 onward, many new SNSs were launched, prompting social software analyst
Clay Shirky (2003) to coin the term YASNS: "Yet Another Social Networking Service."
Most took the form of profile-centric sites, trying to replicate the early success of
Friendster or target specific demographics. While socially-organized SNSs solicit broad
audiences, professional sites such as LinkedIn, Visible Path, and Xing (formerly openBC)focus on business people. "Passion-centric" SNSs like Dogster (T. Rheingold, personal
communication, August 2, 2007) help strangers connect based on shared interests. Care
helps activists meet, Couchsurfing connects travelers to people with couches, and
MyChurch joins Christian churches and their members. Furthermore, as the social media
and user-generated content phenomena grew, websites focused on media sharing began
implementing SNS features and becoming SNSs themselves. Examples include Flickr
(photo sharing), Last.FM (music listening habits), and YouTube (video sharing).
With the plethora of venture-backed startups launching in Silicon Valley, few people paid
attention to SNSs that gained popularity elsewhere, even those built by major corporations.
For example, Google's Orkut failed to build a sustainable U.S. user base, but a "Brazilian
invasion" (Fragoso, 2006) made Orkut the national SNS of Brazil. Microsoft's Windows
Live Spaces (a.k.a. MSN Spaces) also launched to lukewarm U.S. reception but became
extremely popular elsewhere.
Few analysts or journalists noticed when MySpace launched in Santa Monica, California,
hundreds of miles from Silicon Valley. MySpace was begun in 2003 to compete with sites
like Friendster, Xanga, and AsianAvenue, according to co-founder Tom Anderson
(personal communication, August 2, 2007); the founders wanted to attract estranged
Friendster users (T. Anderson, personal communication, February 2, 2006). After rumors
emerged that Friendster would adopt a fee-based system, users posted Friendster messages
encouraging people to join alternate SNSs, including Tribe.net and MySpace. Because of this, MySpace was able to grow
rapidly by capitalizing on Friendster's alienation of its early adopters. One particularly
notable group that encouraged others to switch were indie-rock bands who were expelled
from Friendster for failing to comply with profile regulations.
While MySpace was not launched with bands in mind, they were welcomed. Indie-rock
bands from the Los Angeles region began creating profiles, and local promoters used
MySpace to advertise VIP passes for popular clubs. Intrigued, MySpace contacted local
musicians to see how they could support them. Bands were not the sole source of MySpace growth, but the
symbiotic relationship between bands and fans helped MySpace expand beyond former
Friendster users. The bands-and-fans dynamic was mutually beneficial: Bands wanted to
be able to contact fans, while fans desired attention from their favorite bands and used
Friend connections to signal identity and affiliation.
Futhermore, MySpace differentiated itself by regularly adding features based on user
demand (boyd, 2006) and by allowing users to personalize their pages. This "feature"
emerged because MySpace did not restrict users from adding HTML into the forms that
framed their profiles; a copy/paste code culture emerged on the web to support users in
generating unique MySpace backgrounds and layouts (Perkel, in press).
Teenagers began joining MySpace en masse in 2004. Unlike older users, most teens were
never on Friendster—some joined because they wanted to connect with their favorite
bands; others were introduced to the site through older family members. As teens began signing up, they encouraged their friends to join. Rather than rejecting underage users,
MySpace changed its user policy to allow minors. As the site grew, three distinct
populations began to form: musicians/artists, teenagers, and the post-college urban social
crowd. By and large, the latter two groups did not interact with one another except through
bands. Because of the lack of mainstream press coverage during 2004, few others noticed
the site's growing popularity.
Then, in July 2005, News Corporation purchased MySpace for $580 million (BBC, 2005),
attracting massive media attention. Afterwards, safety issues plagued MySpace. The site
was implicated in a series of sexual interactions between adults and minors, prompting
legal action (Consumer Affairs, 2006). A moral panic concerning sexual predators quickly
spread (Bahney, 2006), although research suggests that the concerns were exaggerated.
A Global Phenomenon
While MySpace attracted the majority of media attention in the U.S. and abroad, SNSs
were proliferating and growing in popularity worldwide. Friendster gained traction in the
Pacific Islands, Orkut became the premier SNS in Brazil before growing rapidly in India
(Madhavan, 2007), Mixi attained widespread adoption in Japan, LunarStorm took off in
Sweden, Dutch users embraced Hyves, Grono captured Poland, Hi5 was adopted in smaller
countries in Latin America, South America, and Europe, and Bebo became very popular in
the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and Australia. Additionally, previously popular
communication and community services began implementing SNS features. The Chinese
QQ instant messaging service instantly became the largest SNS worldwide when it added
profiles and made friends visible (McLeod, 2006), while the forum tool Cyworld cornered
the Korean market by introducing homepages and buddies (Ewers, 2006).
Blogging services with complete SNS features also became popular. In the U.S., blogging
tools with SNS features, such as Xanga, LiveJournal, and Vox, attracted broad audiences.
Skyrock reigns in France, and Windows Live Spaces dominates numerous markets
worldwide, including in Mexico, Italy, and Spain. Although SNSs like QQ, Orkut, and
Live Spaces are just as large as, if not larger than, MySpace, they receive little coverage in
U.S. and English-speaking media, making it difficult to track their trajectories.
Expanding Niche Communities
Alongside these open services, other SNSs launched to support niche demographics before
expanding to a broader audience. Unlike previous SNSs, Facebook was designed to
support distinct college networks only. Facebook began in early 2004 as a Harvard-only
SNS (Cassidy, 2006). To join, a user had to have a harvard.edu email address. As
Facebook began supporting other schools, those users were also required to have university
email addresses associated with those institutions, a requirement that kept the site
relatively closed and contributed to users' perceptions of the site as an intimate, private
community.Beginning in September 2005, Facebook expanded to include high school students,
professionals inside corporate networks, and, eventually, everyone. The change to open
signup did not mean that new users could easily access users in closed networks—gaining
access to corporate networks still required the appropriate .com address, while gaining
access to high school networks required administrator approval. (As of this writing, only
membership in regional networks requires no permission.) Unlike other SNSs, Facebook
users are unable to make their full profiles public to all users. Another feature that
differentiates Facebook is the ability for outside developers to build "Applications" which
allow users to personalize their profiles and perform other tasks, such as compare movie
preferences and chart travel histories.
While most SNSs focus on growing broadly and exponentially, others explicitly seek
narrower audiences. Some, like aSmallWorld and BeautifulPeople, intentionally restrict
access to appear selective and elite. Others—activity-centered sites like Couchsurfing,
identity-driven sites like BlackPlanet, and affiliation-focused sites like MyChurch—are
limited by their target demographic and thus tend to be smaller. Finally, anyone who
wishes to create a niche social network site can do so on Ning, a platform and hosting
service that encourages users to create their own SNSs.
Currently, there are no reliable data regarding how many people use SNSs, although
marketing research indicates that SNSs are growing in popularity worldwide (comScore,
2007). This growth has prompted many corporations to invest time and money in creating,
purchasing, promoting, and advertising SNSs. At the same time, other companies are
blocking their employees from accessing the sites. Additionally, the U.S. military banned
soldiers from accessing MySpace (Frosch, 2007) and the Canadian government prohibited
employees from Facebook (Benzie, 2007), while the U.S. Congress has proposed
legislation to ban youth from accessing SNSs in schools and libraries.
The rise of SNSs indicates a shift in the organization of online communities. While
websites dedicated to communities of interest still exist and prosper, SNSs are primarily
organized around people, not interests. Early public online communities such as Usenet
and public discussion forums were structured by topics or according to topical hierarchies,
but social network sites are structured as personal (or "egocentric") networks, with the
individual at the center of their own community. This more accurately mirrors unmediated
social structures, where "the world is composed of networks, not groups" (Wellman, 1988). The introduction of SNS features has introduced a new organizational framework
for online communitie.
According to the definition above, the first recognizable social network site launched in
1997. SixDegrees.com allowed users to create profiles, list their Friends and, beginning in
1998, surf the Friends lists. Each of these features existed in some form before SixDegrees,
of course. Profiles existed on most major dating sites and many community sites. AIM and
ICQ buddy lists supported lists of Friends, although those Friends were not visible to
others. Classmates.com allowed people to affiliate with their high school or college and
surf the network for others who were also affiliated, but users could not create profiles or
list Friends until years later. SixDegrees was the first to combine these features.
SixDegrees promoted itself as a tool to help people connect with and send messages to
others. While SixDegrees attracted millions of users, it failed to become a sustainable
business and, in 2000, the service closed. Looking back, its founder believes that
SixDegrees was simply ahead of its time (A. Weinreich, personal communication, July 11,
2007). While people were already flocking to the Internet, most did not have extended
networks of friends who were online. Early adopters complained that there was little to do
after accepting Friend requests, and most users were not interested in meeting strangers.
From 1997 to 2001, a number of community tools began supporting various combinations
of profiles and publicly articulated Friends. AsianAvenue, BlackPlanet, and MiGente
allowed users to create personal, professional, and dating profiles—users could identifyFriends on their personal profiles without seeking approval for those connections (O.
Wasow, personal communication, August 16, 2007). Likewise, shortly after its launch in
1999, LiveJournal listed one-directional connections on user pages. LiveJournal's creator
suspects that he fashioned these Friends after instant messaging buddy lists (B. Fitzpatrick,
personal communication, June 15, 2007)—on LiveJournal, people mark others as Friends
to follow their journals and manage privacy settings. The Korean virtual worlds site
Cyworld was started in 1999 and added SNS features in 2001, independent of these other
sites (see Kim & Yun, this issue). Likewise, when the Swedish web community
LunarStorm refashioned itself as an SNS in 2000, it contained Friends lists, guestbooks,
and diary pages (D. Skog, personal communication, September 24, 2007).
The next wave of SNSs began when Ryze.com was launched in 2001 to help people
leverage their business networks. Ryze's founder reports that he first introduced the site to
his friends—primarily members of the San Francisco business and technology community,
including the entrepreneurs and investors behind many future SNSs (A. Scott, personal
communication, June 14, 2007). In particular, the people behind Ryze, Tribe.net, LinkedIn,
and Friendster were tightly entwined personally and professionally. They believed that
they could support each other without competing (Festa, 2003). In the end, Ryze never
acquired mass popularity, Tribe.net grew to attract a passionate niche user base, LinkedIn
became a powerful business service, and Friendster became the most significant, if only as
"one of the biggest disappointments in Internet history" (Chafkin, 2007)
The Rise (and Fall) of Friendster
Friendster launched in 2002 as a social complement to Ryze. It was designed to compete
with Match.com, a profitable online dating site (Cohen, 2003). While most dating sites
focused on introducing people to strangers with similar interests, Friendster was designed
to help friends-of-friends meet, based on the assumption that friends-of-friends would
make better romantic partners than would strangers (J. Abrams, personal communication,
March 27, 2003). Friendster gained traction among three groups of early adopters who
shaped the site—bloggers, attendees of the Burning Man arts festival, and gay men (boyd,
2004)—and grew to 300,000 users through word of mouth before traditional press
coverage began in May 2003 (O'Shea, 2003).
As Friendster's popularity surged, the site encountered technical and social difficulties
(boyd, 2006). Friendster's servers and databases were ill-equipped to handle its rapid
growth, and the site faltered regularly, frustrating users who replaced email with
Friendster. Because organic growth had been critical to creating a coherent community, the
onslaught of new users who learned about the site from media coverage upset the cultural
balance. Furthermore, exponential growth meant a collapse in social contexts: Users had to
face their bosses and former classmates alongside their close friends. To complicate
matters, Friendster began restricting the activities of its most passionate users.
The initial design of Friendster restricted users from viewing profiles of people who were
more than four degrees away (friends-of-friends-of-friends-of-friends). In order to view
additional profiles, users began adding acquaintances and interesting-looking strangers to
expand their reach. Some began massively collecting Friends, an activity that was
implicitly encouraged through a "most popular" feature. The ultimate collectors were fake
profiles representing iconic fictional characters: celebrities, concepts, and other such
entities. These "Fakesters" outraged the company, who banished fake profiles and
eliminated the "most popular" feature. While few people actually created
Fakesters, many more enjoyed surfing Fakesters for entertainment or using functional
Fakesters (e.g., "Brown University") to find people they knew.
The active deletion of Fakesters (and genuine users who chose non-realistic photos)
signaled to some that the company did not share users' interests. Many early adopters left
because of the combination of technical difficulties, social collisions, and a rupture of trust
between users and the site (boyd, 2006). However, at the same time that it was fading in
the U.S., its popularity skyrocketed in the Philippines, Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia
(Goldberg, 2007).
SNSs Hit the Mainstream
From 2003 onward, many new SNSs were launched, prompting social software analyst
Clay Shirky (2003) to coin the term YASNS: "Yet Another Social Networking Service."
Most took the form of profile-centric sites, trying to replicate the early success of
Friendster or target specific demographics. While socially-organized SNSs solicit broad
audiences, professional sites such as LinkedIn, Visible Path, and Xing (formerly openBC)focus on business people. "Passion-centric" SNSs like Dogster (T. Rheingold, personal
communication, August 2, 2007) help strangers connect based on shared interests. Care
helps activists meet, Couchsurfing connects travelers to people with couches, and
MyChurch joins Christian churches and their members. Furthermore, as the social media
and user-generated content phenomena grew, websites focused on media sharing began
implementing SNS features and becoming SNSs themselves. Examples include Flickr
(photo sharing), Last.FM (music listening habits), and YouTube (video sharing).
With the plethora of venture-backed startups launching in Silicon Valley, few people paid
attention to SNSs that gained popularity elsewhere, even those built by major corporations.
For example, Google's Orkut failed to build a sustainable U.S. user base, but a "Brazilian
invasion" (Fragoso, 2006) made Orkut the national SNS of Brazil. Microsoft's Windows
Live Spaces (a.k.a. MSN Spaces) also launched to lukewarm U.S. reception but became
extremely popular elsewhere.
Few analysts or journalists noticed when MySpace launched in Santa Monica, California,
hundreds of miles from Silicon Valley. MySpace was begun in 2003 to compete with sites
like Friendster, Xanga, and AsianAvenue, according to co-founder Tom Anderson
(personal communication, August 2, 2007); the founders wanted to attract estranged
Friendster users (T. Anderson, personal communication, February 2, 2006). After rumors
emerged that Friendster would adopt a fee-based system, users posted Friendster messages
encouraging people to join alternate SNSs, including Tribe.net and MySpace. Because of this, MySpace was able to grow
rapidly by capitalizing on Friendster's alienation of its early adopters. One particularly
notable group that encouraged others to switch were indie-rock bands who were expelled
from Friendster for failing to comply with profile regulations.
While MySpace was not launched with bands in mind, they were welcomed. Indie-rock
bands from the Los Angeles region began creating profiles, and local promoters used
MySpace to advertise VIP passes for popular clubs. Intrigued, MySpace contacted local
musicians to see how they could support them. Bands were not the sole source of MySpace growth, but the
symbiotic relationship between bands and fans helped MySpace expand beyond former
Friendster users. The bands-and-fans dynamic was mutually beneficial: Bands wanted to
be able to contact fans, while fans desired attention from their favorite bands and used
Friend connections to signal identity and affiliation.
Futhermore, MySpace differentiated itself by regularly adding features based on user
demand (boyd, 2006) and by allowing users to personalize their pages. This "feature"
emerged because MySpace did not restrict users from adding HTML into the forms that
framed their profiles; a copy/paste code culture emerged on the web to support users in
generating unique MySpace backgrounds and layouts (Perkel, in press).
Teenagers began joining MySpace en masse in 2004. Unlike older users, most teens were
never on Friendster—some joined because they wanted to connect with their favorite
bands; others were introduced to the site through older family members. As teens began signing up, they encouraged their friends to join. Rather than rejecting underage users,
MySpace changed its user policy to allow minors. As the site grew, three distinct
populations began to form: musicians/artists, teenagers, and the post-college urban social
crowd. By and large, the latter two groups did not interact with one another except through
bands. Because of the lack of mainstream press coverage during 2004, few others noticed
the site's growing popularity.
Then, in July 2005, News Corporation purchased MySpace for $580 million (BBC, 2005),
attracting massive media attention. Afterwards, safety issues plagued MySpace. The site
was implicated in a series of sexual interactions between adults and minors, prompting
legal action (Consumer Affairs, 2006). A moral panic concerning sexual predators quickly
spread (Bahney, 2006), although research suggests that the concerns were exaggerated.
A Global Phenomenon
While MySpace attracted the majority of media attention in the U.S. and abroad, SNSs
were proliferating and growing in popularity worldwide. Friendster gained traction in the
Pacific Islands, Orkut became the premier SNS in Brazil before growing rapidly in India
(Madhavan, 2007), Mixi attained widespread adoption in Japan, LunarStorm took off in
Sweden, Dutch users embraced Hyves, Grono captured Poland, Hi5 was adopted in smaller
countries in Latin America, South America, and Europe, and Bebo became very popular in
the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and Australia. Additionally, previously popular
communication and community services began implementing SNS features. The Chinese
QQ instant messaging service instantly became the largest SNS worldwide when it added
profiles and made friends visible (McLeod, 2006), while the forum tool Cyworld cornered
the Korean market by introducing homepages and buddies (Ewers, 2006).
Blogging services with complete SNS features also became popular. In the U.S., blogging
tools with SNS features, such as Xanga, LiveJournal, and Vox, attracted broad audiences.
Skyrock reigns in France, and Windows Live Spaces dominates numerous markets
worldwide, including in Mexico, Italy, and Spain. Although SNSs like QQ, Orkut, and
Live Spaces are just as large as, if not larger than, MySpace, they receive little coverage in
U.S. and English-speaking media, making it difficult to track their trajectories.
Expanding Niche Communities
Alongside these open services, other SNSs launched to support niche demographics before
expanding to a broader audience. Unlike previous SNSs, Facebook was designed to
support distinct college networks only. Facebook began in early 2004 as a Harvard-only
SNS (Cassidy, 2006). To join, a user had to have a harvard.edu email address. As
Facebook began supporting other schools, those users were also required to have university
email addresses associated with those institutions, a requirement that kept the site
relatively closed and contributed to users' perceptions of the site as an intimate, private
community.Beginning in September 2005, Facebook expanded to include high school students,
professionals inside corporate networks, and, eventually, everyone. The change to open
signup did not mean that new users could easily access users in closed networks—gaining
access to corporate networks still required the appropriate .com address, while gaining
access to high school networks required administrator approval. (As of this writing, only
membership in regional networks requires no permission.) Unlike other SNSs, Facebook
users are unable to make their full profiles public to all users. Another feature that
differentiates Facebook is the ability for outside developers to build "Applications" which
allow users to personalize their profiles and perform other tasks, such as compare movie
preferences and chart travel histories.
While most SNSs focus on growing broadly and exponentially, others explicitly seek
narrower audiences. Some, like aSmallWorld and BeautifulPeople, intentionally restrict
access to appear selective and elite. Others—activity-centered sites like Couchsurfing,
identity-driven sites like BlackPlanet, and affiliation-focused sites like MyChurch—are
limited by their target demographic and thus tend to be smaller. Finally, anyone who
wishes to create a niche social network site can do so on Ning, a platform and hosting
service that encourages users to create their own SNSs.
Currently, there are no reliable data regarding how many people use SNSs, although
marketing research indicates that SNSs are growing in popularity worldwide (comScore,
2007). This growth has prompted many corporations to invest time and money in creating,
purchasing, promoting, and advertising SNSs. At the same time, other companies are
blocking their employees from accessing the sites. Additionally, the U.S. military banned
soldiers from accessing MySpace (Frosch, 2007) and the Canadian government prohibited
employees from Facebook (Benzie, 2007), while the U.S. Congress has proposed
legislation to ban youth from accessing SNSs in schools and libraries.
The rise of SNSs indicates a shift in the organization of online communities. While
websites dedicated to communities of interest still exist and prosper, SNSs are primarily
organized around people, not interests. Early public online communities such as Usenet
and public discussion forums were structured by topics or according to topical hierarchies,
but social network sites are structured as personal (or "egocentric") networks, with the
individual at the center of their own community. This more accurately mirrors unmediated
social structures, where "the world is composed of networks, not groups" (Wellman, 1988). The introduction of SNS features has introduced a new organizational framework
for online communitie.
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