Communities

By reading about communities I realise that Facebook in itself is not a community. It's basic function is providing the users with the tools to create and maintain their own custom, ever changing, communities. These books are not recent though, and they talk about older forms of internet activities: newsgroups, forums etc. Recent evolutions, of which Facebook is part of, incorporate a lot more information about the identity of each individual user. While years ago you might have been talking to a mere nickname, now you talk to a 'real' person, of which you can see a lot of information.

From personal experience I think that these online social networking sites try to combine the online and face-to-face relationships to another level. All the people in my own friends list I actually know, and have met troughout time. For me it's a way to keep in contact with those people that are not close to me in terms of geography. In the last couple of years, by studying abroad, I have met a lot of different people from all over the world. The fact that we have added each other as friends on Facebook has made it easier for me to keep contact with them. At the same time the system provides me with updates if my friends add pictures, comments, change their profile etc ... so I'm constantly up to date with the current affairs.

One drawback I see so far is that it requires time to update your profile. So I only know a lot of those people who regularly update their information and share that information with the rest of the people they know. It's the user who has to update his profile for the system to spread out.

Relationships can be divided in being weak ties, and being strong ties. Social software like Facebook makes it easier to collect the weak ties, and keep them in your friends list, and also keep updating the strong ties, making it harder for them to disappear.