Facebook is superior to Twitter when it comes to building strong relationships and communities online, according to a study from Emilio Ferrara, post-doctoral research fellow at Indiana University. He mined data about public profiles and came up with complex algorithms tracking users’ interactions with others. This led to a mapping of those networks.
“We discovered that the average degree of communities and their size put into evidence the tendency to self-organization of users into small- or medium-size communities well-connected among each other,” the report says. In particular, Facebook users are motivated by the network’s structure to form many small communities that reside within Facebook.
“Large groups containing a majority of users are a rarity, but that doesn’t mean that each group of friends exists in its own bubble — instead, the smaller communities are highly interconnected in a way that two people with nothing in common are often connected by short, easily traversable paths of communication,” Lindsay Abrams of The Atlantic explains. Connections on Twitter are weaker because information can be broadcast via tweets without any interactions. Also, Twitter users likely have more connections on Twitter than on Facebook, but the users you follow on Twitter don’t always follow you back, unlike the two-way connections required on Facebook. All this supports the social theory of the “strength of weak ties,” which says secondary connections are the greatest source of information and ideas. (Mashable, The Atlantic)
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