LAB: Making your own social network

A social network is a social structure made of nodes conducted by individuals or groups. They start up different ways of interdependency, such as values, interests, financial exchange, etc. The resulted structure becomes in several levels of complexity. The most common labels for this social relationship is nodes and ties.

Nodes are individual actors within the networks and ties are the relationship between the actors. You can find a huge range of ties between the nodes. One person can establish several and interconnected ties: familiar, friendship, academic, professional, business, etc. 

The importance of this new ways of relation and collaboration has been labeled in the term social capital which is a concept emerged in business, economic and political science that refers to connections within and between social networks. Just for the purpose of this course, we will focus social capital as the main characteristic related to networks. 

Myspace and Facebook are the the most popular social networks, but you can also check some other sites, such as Wiggio or Ning. Here you have some video tutorials about how to start up with them:

Wiggio

Ning 

The most popular social networks are, as you know, Facebook and MySpace. But you can also start up your professional profile in Linkedin. Do you know any other social network around the world? Take a look to virb.