Interesting discussion of the strength of social ties in social software systems by Paul Adams. He talks of strong, weak and temporary ties and notes the design issues are different for each (and provides some useful insights on ways of trust-building for those temporary ties, many of which are collective-based).
The strong vs weak/temporary separation maybe reflects the division of groups and networks that some of us like to use, but the weak/temporary is a useful further subdivision of networks. It may be that some groups, especially in education, might fall into the ‘temporary’ category too, which suggests that we might have some interestingly different design problems if we try to form strong but temporary formalised groups.
Address of the bookmark: http://boxesandarrows.com/view/designing-for-social
