IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/spr/infosf/v16y2014i2d10.1007_s10796-013-9453-6.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

BFF: A tool for eliciting tie strength and user communities in social networking services

Author

Listed:
  • Ricard L. Fogués

    (Universitat Politècnica de València)

  • Jose M. Such

    (Lancaster University)

  • Agustin Espinosa

    (Universitat Politècnica de València)

  • Ana Garcia-Fornes

    (Universitat Politècnica de València)

Abstract

The use of social networking services (SNSs) such as Facebook has explosively grown in the last few years. Users see these SNSs as useful tools to find friends and interact with them. Moreover, SNSs allow their users to share photos, videos, and express their thoughts and feelings. However, users are usually concerned about their privacy when using SNSs. This is because the public image of a subject can be affected by photos or comments posted on a social network. In this way, recent studies demonstrate that users are demanding better mechanisms to protect their privacy. An appropriate approximation to solve this could be a privacy assistant software agent that automatically suggests a privacy policy for any item to be shared on a SNS. The first step for developing such an agent is to be able to elicit meaningful information that can lead to accurate privacy policy predictions. In particular, the information needed is user communities and the strength of users’ relationships, which, as suggested by recent empirical evidence, are the most important factors that drive disclosure in SNSs. Given the number of friends that users can have and the number of communities they may be involved on, it is infeasible that users are able to provide this information without the whole eliciting process becoming confusing and time consuming. In this work, we present a tool called Best Friend Forever (BFF) that automatically classifies the friends of a user in communities and assigns a value to the strength of the relationship ties to each one. We also present an experimental evaluation involving 38 subjects that showed that BFF can significantly alleviate the burden of eliciting communities and relationship strength.

Suggested Citation

  • Ricard L. Fogués & Jose M. Such & Agustin Espinosa & Ana Garcia-Fornes, 2014. "BFF: A tool for eliciting tie strength and user communities in social networking services," Information Systems Frontiers, Springer, vol. 16(2), pages 225-237, April.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:infosf:v:16:y:2014:i:2:d:10.1007_s10796-013-9453-6
    DOI: 10.1007/s10796-013-9453-6
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10796-013-9453-6
    File Function: Abstract
    Download Restriction: Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1007/s10796-013-9453-6?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Gajendra Sharma & Ye Qiang & Sun Wenjun & Lu Qi, 2013. "Communication in virtual world: Second life and business opportunities," Information Systems Frontiers, Springer, vol. 15(4), pages 677-694, September.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Matteo Manca & Ludovico Boratto & Salvatore Carta, 0. "Behavioral data mining to produce novel and serendipitous friend recommendations in a social bookmarking system," Information Systems Frontiers, Springer, vol. 0, pages 1-15.
    2. Raed S. Algharabat & Nripendra P. Rana, 0. "Social Commerce in Emerging Markets and its Impact on Online Community Engagement," Information Systems Frontiers, Springer, vol. 0, pages 1-22.
    3. Ricard L. Fogues & Jose M Such & Agustin Espinosa & Ana Garcia-Fornes, 2018. "Tie and tag: A study of tie strength and tags for photo sharing," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 13(8), pages 1-22, August.
    4. Hershkovitz, Arnon & Hayat, Zack, 2020. "The role of tie strength in assessing credibility of scientific content on facebook," Technology in Society, Elsevier, vol. 61(C).
    5. Raed S. Algharabat & Nripendra P. Rana, 2021. "Social Commerce in Emerging Markets and its Impact on Online Community Engagement," Information Systems Frontiers, Springer, vol. 23(6), pages 1499-1520, December.
    6. Matteo Manca & Ludovico Boratto & Salvatore Carta, 2018. "Behavioral data mining to produce novel and serendipitous friend recommendations in a social bookmarking system," Information Systems Frontiers, Springer, vol. 20(4), pages 825-839, August.
    7. Juan M. Alberola & Vicent Botti & Jose M. Such, 2014. "Advances in infrastructures and tools for multiagent systems," Information Systems Frontiers, Springer, vol. 16(2), pages 163-167, April.
    8. Kawaljeet Kaur Kapoor & Kuttimani Tamilmani & Nripendra P. Rana & Pushp Patil & Yogesh K. Dwivedi & Sridhar Nerur, 2018. "Advances in Social Media Research: Past, Present and Future," Information Systems Frontiers, Springer, vol. 20(3), pages 531-558, June.
    9. Zamudio, César & Anokhin, Sergey & Kellermanns, Franz W., 2014. "Network analysis: A concise review and suggestions for family business research," Journal of Family Business Strategy, Elsevier, vol. 5(1), pages 63-71.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Yan Mandy Dang & Yulei Gavin Zhang & James Morgan, 0. "Integrating switching costs to information systems adoption: An empirical study on learning management systems," Information Systems Frontiers, Springer, vol. 0, pages 1-20.
    2. Ajaya Kumar Swain & Ray Qing Cao, 2019. "Using sentiment analysis to improve supply chain intelligence," Information Systems Frontiers, Springer, vol. 21(2), pages 469-484, April.
    3. Yulei Gavin Zhang & Mandy Yan Dang & Hsinchun Chen, 2020. "An Explorative Study on the Virtual World: Investigating the Avatar Gender and Avatar Age Differences in their Social Interactions for Help-Seeking," Information Systems Frontiers, Springer, vol. 22(4), pages 911-925, August.
    4. Hatice Kizgin & Ahmad Jamal & Bidit Lal Dey & Nripendra P. Rana, 2018. "The Impact of Social Media on Consumers’ Acculturation and Purchase Intentions," Information Systems Frontiers, Springer, vol. 20(3), pages 503-514, June.
    5. Yan Mandy Dang & Yulei Gavin Zhang & James Morgan, 2017. "Integrating switching costs to information systems adoption: An empirical study on learning management systems," Information Systems Frontiers, Springer, vol. 19(3), pages 625-644, June.
    6. Ioannis Krasonikolakis & Adam Vrechopoulos & Sergios Dimitriadis & Nancy Pouloudi, 2021. "User perceptions of 3D online store designs: an experimental investigation," Information Systems and e-Business Management, Springer, vol. 19(4), pages 1321-1354, December.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:spr:infosf:v:16:y:2014:i:2:d:10.1007_s10796-013-9453-6. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.