Brief report about the paper titled "Tastes, ties, and time: A new social network dataset using Facebook.com"

1. Tastes, ties, and time: A new social network dataset using Facebook.com Lewis, K., Kaufman, J., Gonzalez, M., Wimmer, A. & Christakis, N. Tastes, ties, and time: A new social network dataset using facebook.com. Social Networks In Press, Accepted Manuscript (2008). URL http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.socnet.2008.07.002

3. Features of this dataset

4. Descriptive findings from this dataset (actually early findings...)

7. Has profile creation and network articulation as primary community tasks (Lampe et al., 2007)

8. Facebook communities generally correspond to existing offline network membership (Lampe et al., 2007)

9. Provides users with standardized profile templates

11. A Familiar Face(book): Profile Elements as Signals in an Online Social Network (Lampe et al., 2007)

12. State of the art Past research has tended to draw upon only a very small portion of the wealth of data available on Facebook. Most focused only on profile data, ignoring network ties between users: no study made use of data on user tastes

14. Complete network data

15. Longitudinal data (analysis replied for 4 years)

16. Data on multiple social relationships (three measures of relationships)

17. Cultural data (Facebook profiles contains open-ended spaces for respondents -> tastes!)

18. Three measures of relationships Network size (degree centrality) histograms for Facebook friends, picture friends, and housing groupmates. Note : students with no photo albums (zero outgoing ties) are omitted from outgoing picture friend histogram.

19. Dataset All explanatory variables are inferred or directly drawn from students' Facebook profiles (e.g. Sex, Home Town, …) Race/ethnicity and socioeconomic status (SES) retrieved with more elaborate procedures (photo albums, socioeconomic national data, ..)

21. Methodology Network properties as size, density and betweenness centrality calculated using UCINET Network ethno-racial diversity calculated using IQV (index of qualitative variation). It measures the heterogeneity of ego’s network independent of the race/ethnicity of ego

22. Methods Used OLS regression (multivariables regression) to see how gender, race/ethnicity, SES, and online activity are associated with our network variables of interest

23. Culture Compiled three spreadsheets of data (on for each kind of taste) with the data retrieved from students' Facebook profile linking the student to their cultural preferences Calculated the proportion of taste overlap for every possible dyads

25. Note : p -values determined by MRQAP. All coefficients reported in percentages (%).

26. * p < .05; ** p < .01; *** p ≤.001.

28. Starting point to future social network research involving cultural preferences as well as social, socioeconomic and demographic aspect.