Are you smiling in Your Social Network Photos?
Friday, January 16, 2009

According to this ReadWriteWeb Article, "researchers Nicholas Christakis and James Folwer recently published a paper in the British Medical Journal where they examined how a person's happiness is related to the happiness of their friends in their offline social networks. To follow up that study, they examined those same happiness clusters in online networks like MySpace and Facebook. Their conclusion? Happier people tend to have more friends and are more central to the network when compared with their more sullen friends."

In the Facebook study, "they took note of the students' profiles and who their friends were. They also noted whether the profile photos contained a smiling face. Next, the researchers looked at the other photos found in the students' Facebook albums, this time paying careful attention to who "tagged" who in the photos. This was important because the people who take the trouble to be in the same place, take a photograph together, upload the photograph, and label ("tag") it, almost always have a closer relationship with each other than they do with the rest of the "friends" found on people's profile pages. These "photo friends" tend to represent a person's real-life friends. In fact, the average student in the study had over 110 friends on Facebook, but they had an average of only six of these "photo friends" (close friends)."

The article & research goes on to summarise that those who smiled were also more likely to be at the center of the network when compared to those who don't.

Food for thought next time I am having my photo taken!

And whilst I'm on a Facebook topic, I thought I'd share how I'm doing with my friends review.

Today's Facebook friends = 238, down on the 262 previously reported. Good progress assisted by moving work colleagues I'm not actually "friends" with to Linked In.

Today's Linked In contacts = 482, up on the 351 previously reported. No concerns here as Linked In is for contacts I want to have, rather than "friends" I want to see socially.

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posted by Lee Gale @ 6:09 AM,

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