Is a friend a friend?: investigating the structure of friendship networks in virtual worlds

Authors:
Brooke Foucault Welles;Anne Van Devender;Noshir Contractor
Affiliations:
Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA;Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA;Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA
Venue:
CHI '10 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Year:
2010

Citing 3
Cited 4

Information revelation and privacy in online social networks

Proceedings of the 2005 ACM workshop on Privacy in the electronic society
The demographics, motivations, and derived experiences of users of massively multi-user online graphical environments

Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments - Special issue: Virtual heritage
Technical opinion: Falling into the net: main street America playing games and making friends online

Communications of the ACM - The Status of the P versus NP Problem

Characterizing interactions among members of deaf communities in orkut

INTERACT'11 Proceedings of the 13th IFIP TC 13 international conference on Human-computer interaction - Volume Part III
A space efficient streaming algorithm for triangle counting using the birthday paradox

Proceedings of the 19th ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining
Why do simple algorithms for triangle enumeration work in the real world?

Proceedings of the 5th conference on Innovations in theoretical computer science
Decompositions of triangle-dense graphs

Proceedings of the 5th conference on Innovations in theoretical computer science

Quantified Score

Hi-index	0.00

Visualization

Abstract

In this paper, we examine online friendships at a network level. We focus on three structural signatures: network size, balance (triangles), and age homophily in the friendship ego-networks of 30 users of the virtual world Second Life. In relation to previous findings from studies of offline friendship networks, our results reveal that online networks are similar in age-homophily, but significantly different in size and balance.