A UK-based online questionnaire investigating aspects of usage of user-generated media (UGM), such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, attracted 587 participants. Results show a high degree of engagement with social networking media such as Facebook, and a significant engagement with other media such as professional media, microblogs and blogs. Participants who experience information overload are those who engage less frequently with the media, rather than those who have fewer posts to read. Professional users show different behaviours to social users. Microbloggers complain of information overload to the greatest extent. Two thirds of Twitter-users have felt that they receive too many posts, and over half of Twitter-users have felt the need for a tool to filter out the irrelevant posts. Generally speaking, participants express satisfaction with the media, though a significant minority express a range of concerns including information overload and privacy.
LinkedIn capitalises on its status as a permission-requiring social-graph medium in that it presents itself as a professional introductions service. The site encourages strictly professional information to be shared, and tends to attract older professionals @cite_0 . In their review of social and professional media in the workplace context, Skeels and Grudin @cite_0 find tension around privacy in social media use. However, they also report rapid adoption, as numerous benefits are found. They found, as will be echoed in our own findings, that users post more frequently to Facebook than LinkedIn, demonstrating a particular degree of attraction to that medium. Though users report great value to LinkedIn, they do not seem driven to visit the site so often. Our own investigation supports this observation; reasons for this will be explored later in the paper. LinkedIn usage seems limited to the professional context, whereas Twitter seems broadly undifferentiated in that regard, and a certain amount of Facebook usage will tend to be professional; for example, Facebook allows businesses to create pages on which they may publicise themselves.
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This paper intends to provide some insights of a scientific problem: how likely one's interests can be inferred from his her social connections -- friends, friends' friends, 3-degree friends, etc? Is "Birds of a Feather Flocks Together" a norm? We do not consider the friending activity on online social networking sites. Instead, we conduct this study by implementing a privacy-preserving large distribute social sensor system in a large global IT company to capture the multifaceted activities of 30,000+ people, including communications (e.g., emails, instant messaging, etc) and Web 2.0 activities (e.g., social bookmarking, file sharing, blogging, etc). These activities occupy the majority of employees' time in work, and thus, provide a high quality approximation to the real social connections of employees in the workplace context. In addition to such "informal networks", we investigated the "formal networks", such as their hierarchical structure, as well as the demographic profile data such as geography, job role, self-specified interests, etc. Because user ID matching across multiple sources on the Internet is very difficult, and most user activity logs have to be anonymized before they are processed, no prior studies could collect comparable multifaceted activity data of individuals. That makes this study unique. In this paper, we present a technique to predict the inference quality by utilizing (1) network analysis and network autocorrelation modeling of informal and formal networks, and (2) regression models to predict user interest inference quality from network characteristics. We verify our findings with experiments on both implicit user interests indicated by the content of communications or Web 2.0 activities, and explicit user interests specified in user profiles. We demonstrate that the inference quality prediction increases the inference quality of implicit interests by 42.8 , and inference quality of explicit interests by up to 101 . The introduction of a social networking site inside of a large enterprise enables a new method of communication between colleagues, encouraging both personal and professional sharing inside the protected walls of a company intranet. Our analysis of user behavior and interviews presents the case that professionals use internal social networking to build stronger bonds with their weak ties and to reach out to employees they do not know. Their motivations in doing this include connecting on a personal level with coworkers, advancing their career with the company, and campaigning for their projects. We measure users' attitudes toward interpersonal privacy concerns on Facebook and measure users' strategies for reconciling their concerns with their desire to share content online. To do this, we recruited 260 Facebook users to install a Facebook application that surveyed their privacy concerns, their friend network compositions, the sensitivity of posted content, and their privacy-preserving strategies. By asking participants targeted questions about people randomly selected from their friend network and posts shared on their profiles, we were able to quantify the extent to which users trust their "friends" and the likelihood that their content was being viewed by unintended audiences. We found that while strangers are the most concerning audience, almost 95 of our participants had taken steps to mitigate those concerns. At the same time, we observed that 16.5 of participants had at least one post that they were uncomfortable sharing with a specific friend---someone who likely already had the ability to view it---and that 37 raised more general concerns with sharing their content with friends. We conclude that the current privacy controls allow users to effectively manage the outsider threat, but that they are unsuitable for mitigating concerns over the insider threat---members of the friend network who dynamically become inappropriate audiences based on the context of a post. Previous research has shown a relationship between use of social networking sites and feelings of social capital. However, most studies have relied on self-reports by college students. The goals of the current study are to (1) validate the common self-report scale using empirical data from Facebook, (2) test whether previous findings generalize to older and international populations, and (3) delve into the specific activities linked to feelings of social capital and loneliness. In particular, we investigate the role of directed interaction between pairs---such as wall posts, comments, and "likes" --- and consumption of friends' content, including status updates, photos, and friends' conversations with other friends. We find that directed communication is associated with greater feelings of bonding social capital and lower loneliness, but has only a modest relationship with bridging social capital, which is primarily related to overall friend network size. Surprisingly, users who consume greater levels of content report reduced bridging and bonding social capital and increased loneliness. Implications for designs to support well-being are discussed.