Abstract
Some social connections are stronger than others. People have not only friends, but also best friends. Social scientists have long recognized this characteristic of social connections and researchers frequently use the term tie strength to refer to this concept. We used online interaction data (specifically, Facebook interactions) to successfully identify real-world strong ties. Ground truth was established by asking users themselves to name their closest friends in real life. We found the frequency of online interaction was diagnostic of strong ties, and interaction frequency was much more useful diagnostically than were attributes of the user or the user’s friends. More private communications (messages) were not necessarily more informative than public communications (comments, wall posts, and other interactions).
Highlights
Some social connections are stronger than others
Social scientists have long recognized this characteristic of social connections and researchers frequently use the term tie strength to refer to this concept [1,2]
The probability generated by these models can be interpreted as the probability that the two persons in the dyad are closest friends. We view this value as a good estimate of tie strength – higher probabilities correspond to closer ties and lower values correspond to weaker ties
Summary
Social scientists have long recognized this characteristic of social connections and researchers frequently use the term tie strength to refer to this concept [1,2]. Online friendships (as defined by social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter) are often considered to either exist or not exist and the continuum of tie strength is ignored [3,4,5]. One’s best friend and a long-forgotten, one-time classmate are grouped together under one ambiguous label of ‘‘friend.’’ The ability to determine which online friends represent strong ties in real, faceto-face relationships; which represent weak ties; and to know which measurements are successful proxies for such real-world tie strength could enable researchers to use online data to study faceto-face social networks [6]. This, in turn, would help social scientists and other practitioners to delve deeper into the vast quantities of data generated by the social web [7]
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