presentation for the Co-Production of Knowledge Conference - York 18-20 July 2012

1. NICHE ONLINE NETWORKS
IS NOW THE TIME WHEN LESS IS MORE?
Carlos Osorio
Newcastle University Business School
The Co-productions of Knowledge . 2012

2. MOTIVATIONS
 Increment of new users and new Social Network Sites (SNS)
 Investment on SNS related start-ups (Arthur,2012)
 i.e. Facebook bought Instragram for $1.000.000
 Who is next? Pinterest, Spotify, Path?
 Trend related with personalization/customization features of
SNS: i.e. Close friends in FB, circles in Google + or promoted
post and twits.
 Uncertainty about success likelihood of SNS initiatives
 Previous research consider all SNS in a single category to find
patterns, but ignoring the differences can be dangerous
(Wilson et al. 2012).
Are we in a SNS bubble similar to the “.com” in
the early 2000‟s?

3. WEB 2.0
 Web 2.0 as a platform. (O'Reilly, 2005)
 Creation of communities based on users continued interaction
 “Is about „transforming monologue (one-to-many) into dialog
(many-to-many)‟ ” (Hansen et al., 2010, P. 12)
Online vs Offline communities Attributes
 Aspatial  Purpose
 Asynchronous  Place: chat, SNS, virtual world, etc
 Acorporal  Platform: Synchronous, non-
 Bandwidth synchronous
 Astigmatic  Population: (1) small group, (2)
 Anonymous
network (3) publics
(Smith, 1992)  Profit model
(Porter, 2004):

4. SOCIAL NETWORK SITES (SNS)
 Social Network is a set of nodes (can be people,
organizations, enterprises) connected through a series of ties,
generating patterns (Wellman, 2003).
 Focus on structural issues Social Network Analysis (SNA),
Divorce between sociological
meaning and computer science
 Boyd and Ellison (2008) defines a Social Network Site as
meaning (Quan,2009)
 “Web-based services that allow individuals to
 Construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system
 Articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection
 View and traverse their list of connections and those made by
others within the system”.

5. NICHE SNS
 Contrast between general purpose and niche SNS
(Boyd and Ellison, 2008; Goldbeck,2007; Quan,2009;
Hansen et al. 2010),
 Research consider all SNS in a single category to find
patterns, but ignoring the differences can be dangerous
(Wilson et al. 2012)
 Niche SNS looks to narrow audiences through the focus
on
 Characteristics of the population: aSmallworld or Beautiful
people
 Activities: Coachsurfing and wayn
 Identity: Blackplanet and Cafemom
 Affiliations: Mychurch
 Dependency: Standalone or secondary feature in a website
(Goldbeck,2007; Quan,2009)

6. RESEARCH IN SNS
 Structural approach dominance
 Try to explain and predict the interaction between
network members, based on patterns found in the ties
(Oinas-Kukkonen et al., 2010). i.e. Homophily and
Triadic closure
 Focus:
 General-purpose SNS:
 large data available
 public character of the information*
 Comparison of the network characteristics(structural
and operational approach)
 Take all networks as if they were from same category
regardless the size and /or purpose

7. RESEARCH AIMS
 Understand why a user would prefer to join an
independent Niche SNS over a general purpose
group.
 What are the main factors that drive a user to join an
independent niche SNS?
 Independent vs Dependent

8. USES AND GRATIFICATIONS THEORY
 Highly used to understand users‟ choices (Lee, et al
2009 )
 Assumptions:
 a) Communication behaviour is goal-directed, purposive, and
motivated,
 b) people select media,
 c) many factors guide our media selection,
 d) media compete with other channels for messages
 e) people are typically more influential than media

9. GRATIFICATIONS
Socialising Information seeking
Networking Social support Information sharing and seeking
Privacy and Innovativenes
Identity Learning
security s
Social Network
Sites Uses and
Gratifications
Entertainment Convenience
Pleasurable way to spend time Covenience Market
Boredom relief Channel use profile
Figure 1 SNS Uses and Gratifications

10. NICHE THEORY
 Interest in explaining “how organisms that consume
similar resources and perform similar functions in
an environment compete and coexist” (Feaster,
2009, P.967).
 Dimmick (1993) propose an adaptation of the
biological formulas, following the Hutchinson
approach of n-dimensions, in which the factors
identified trough factor analysis become the
resources that the species will be competing for.

11. MEASURES
 Niche breadth measures the degree of
specialization of a niche regarding the dimension or
gratifications that fulfil. A general medium can fulfil a
wide range of dimensions, whereas a specialist will
fulfil a narrow spectrum (Dimmick et al., 2000;
Nyland, 2007).
 Niche overlap measures the similarity in the
resources used. Hence, a big overlap means that
the populations are competing for the same
resources.
 Niche superiority as its name indicates, will
measure which media is superior to the other
regarding the dimensions considered by media.