Community vs. Social Network

Hello Maxim,

Ah, I see. You are talking about social netowrking platforms, which is not necessarily a realistics reflection of our physical social network in the real world. The key importance about how much value a social network can give you is completely unrelated to the number of people who are in the network, rather it is the connection and interaction between them. In social network analysis terms: the nodes doesn't matter, it is the edges that matter. Moreover, the edges has to reflect true relationship in the real world. Otherwise, the network has limited or no value.

Vk.com may be the biggest Russian social network, in terms of it's member, but that is irrelevant. This social network has no value if it does not reflect the connections between those 100 M users in the physical world. You can have a email database of every person on this planet, but if they are not connected by real relationships, and they don't interact, its value is very limited, because it is not really a network anymore. That is the same reason that Facebook is so much more sticky than Twitter, because the connection on Facebook reflects the real connection between individuals in the real world, whereas Twitter doesn't (or at least to a much lesser extent).

If the social networking platform is not reflective of the real human social network, then it certainly won't extent to the entire world. Just imagine, if you have every single person on the earth get on a social network, if no one connects with anyone else, then there is no network. It doesn't extent beyond yourself. That is probably why Vk.com has a much longer chain than real social networks in the physical world. No only the users are fake accounts, the connections may even be fake. That is not to blame Vk.com, because it is not easy to build realistics social networks the reflect true relationships in the physical world. Twitter has the same problem.

The 6 degrees of separation has been tested in very large (almost planetary scale). You can take a look at the academic paper by Jure Leskovic here: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1367620. The average path length between 2 IM users is about 6.6 very short chain.

So if you don't have a realistic network, then you can't really talk about value yet. If you do, then you can address the question about value. And I wrote about it in the following posts. I recommed you take a look at these:

1. Virtual vs. in Real Life: The Value of Relationship Perspective
2. The Social Dynamics of Facebook Fan Pages
3. The True Marketing Power of Facebook: Sociology Perspective
4. Still Fishing Where the Fish Are?

Alright, I hope I've address your question. It is a very deep subject. And without rigorous analysis, it is very easy to come to the wrong conclusion. So we have to be very careful about what we read out there.

OK, thank you again for the discussion. See you next time.