Social Networks Sites (SNS) are attracting a lot of public and academic interest. However, despite an increasing uptake of Information and Communication Technologies amongst the older population, very little is known about how older people use popular SNS, such as Facebook. We focus on older people‟s use of SNS with the aim of gaining an understanding on how they can be used to foster involveme...

Textual information exchanged among users on online social network platforms provides deep understanding into users’ interest and behavioral patterns. However, unlike traditional text-dominant settings such as offline publishing, one distinct feature for online social network is users’ rich interactions with the textual content, which, unfortunately, has not yet been well incorporated in the ex...

It is important for mobile service providers to be aware of user contexts and to provide contextually relevant mobile services to users. Thereby, in this paper, we propose a novel mechanism for integrating online social networks, which are regarded as an important channel for exchanging and propagating contexts. To efficiently discover personal contexts of certain users, the contexts of their n...

Despite the growing importance of online communities in creating knowledge and facilitating collaboration, there has been limited research examining the role of leaders in such settings. In this paper, we propose a framework that integrates behavioral and structural approaches to explore the antecedents of leadership in online communities focused on knowledge work. Specifically, we propose that...

All major on-line social networks, such as MySpace, Facebook, LiveJournal, and Orkut, are built around the concept of friendship. It is not uncommon for a social network participant to have over 100 friends. A natural question arises: are they all real friends of hers, or does she mean something different when she calls them “friends?” Speaking in other words, what is the relationship between o...

The increasing amount of information flowing through commercial social networks offers clear advantages for companies who can take a valuable feedback from community actions. In particular, the identification of influential users in on-line social network can support companies in designing and targeting marketing campaigns, as influential gate-keepers and diffusers of information can ignite epi...

This paper compares offline friendships of preadolescents and adolescents with and without a social network site (SNS) account, and for those who reported having an SNS account, it compares their offline and online friendships. The sample consisted of 1,890 preadolescents and adolescents aged 10 to 18 years, 72.1% of them with an SNS account. All participants had to describe a good friend whom ...

Many studies have investigated social networks. So far little work has been done to explore the virtual identity construction in social network communities. The virtual identity that an individual constructed in the social network community may not be exactly same as his/her identity in the physical world. Using self-discrepancy theory and social capital theory as theoretical foundations, this ...

The growth of social media and on-line social networks has opened up a set of fascinating new challenges and directions for researchers in both computing and the social sciences, and an active interface is growing between these areas. We discuss a set of basic questions that arise in the design and analysis of systems supporting on-line social interactions, focusing on two main issues: the role...

This study attempts to investigate how culture plays a role in influencing peers’ online shopping intentions in social commerce, conducted in Facebook – a social network site in a cross-national settings. We are interested in studying the moderating effects of the culture factor on the relationship between social interaction and social commerce purchasing intention, and trust; and the mediating...