Dimension to analyze strength of the relationship

As a grad student I read many publications, and as requirement for one of my grad class, I read a paper published by University of Chicago urbana-champaign. The title of the paper was Predicting Tie Strength With Social Media . It was very interesting and I was fascinated by how social media can use (to some extend) to predict the strength of the relationship. But I do have my opinion on this paper and here it is,

Finding a dimension to analyze strength of a relationship is not an easy task. Human behavior and human thought process is very complicated. Emotions and feelings are two things that changes in a rapid pace. It would have been nice to identify the status of the users mood while they were answering because that can have an effect on emotions and feeling which may change the strength of the relationship.

Until the results sections I was questioning this paper with respect to how would they determine a relationship between a couple, most interestingly a relationship between husband and wife. They could very well open Facebook account and never communicate via Facebook. But results sections really answered my questions because they identify outliers seems to have higher strength in the relationship. I think this is a reasonable argument where I find its very true. It did fascinate me how these outliers very much could represent the married, engaged or people who are in a relationship. So can we identify relationship status based on strength of the relationship between each other.

I don’t agree how they used education as a social distance variable. I don’t think that can be used as measurement of the relationship. In real world people don’t become friends with each other by asking level of person’s education. Prime example for this is Asymmetric Friendship that they have identified. Most grad students end up having great friendship with their advisor and continue through life time. Now they may end up with a PhD later in their life upon graduation but not necessarily.

But overal this paper was really interesting. It also reminded me the The Social Network movie. According to the movie, Facebook was started based by ranking pictures of friends. This research is not that far from it.

Moving out from MovableType to WordPress

For last five years I had a good time with MoveableType blog that I hosted under University of Minnesota UThink blog Server. But now that I have my own domain its time for me to move from UThink to WordPress. Plus I wanted to customize my blog with Facebook Connect, not having access to root level of the UThink was bit hard to get a good customization. So I have decided to install wordpress and also plan to heavily customize it by using fbconnect.

One other thought, I have seen the Google’s approach of open social and so far I have only took peek at it, and first thing I realized is that it has way better documentation that facebook.

In face if you would like to move out from MoveableType here is the link that might help you.