The early data (about 200 respondents from 30+ countries) I've got in a survey underway looking at friending on Last.fm suggests that there are important differences in how people view their friends in different social network sites and what information they want to share. This does not seem to be site-specific so much as person-specific (for instance, while one person may say "I know all my MySpace friends f2f but will friend anyone on Last.fm," others will say the opposite.) There are also differences in what is even perceived as a social networking site in the first place. To my surprise, a number of people have commented in the last.fm forums in response to my survey that they never thought of Last.fm as a social networking site because of its central focus on music. From a definitional perspective, however, it has all the hallmarks of a social networking site (i.e. personal profile + friends list visible to others). At the same time, I think the proliferation of these sites is increasingly problematic. I see the solution as involving at least in part the ability to import and export things from one site to another without reentry. So, for instance, I think it's a huge step forward that Facebook applications now let people import information from other social network sites (Flickr, Last.fm...) into FB. Though, as yet, the reverse is not happening.
I am hesitant to say 'yes' to the suggestion there should be a way to aggregate social networking sites. I think it would lead to homogenization of practices for the user, who is currently having a 'multi-cultural' experience interacting with others in various online spaces. For example, the culture of Facebook is similar, but also different, than what one might expect hanging out in MySpace or other product that enables networking with others. This approach to aggregating processes is also one that decontextualizes information that is extracted from other souces, as opposed to allowing the user to interact in an environment where the information would be contextualized. There would be advantages and drawbacks to this approach. Depending on the knowledge and expertise of the people developing the aggregator, the program could be great or not so great for the end user.
/Gail
--------------------------------------- Gail D. Taylor, M.Ed. University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Human Resource Education Ph.D. Student Educational Psychology Teaching Assistant Library & Information Science Research Assistant
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