Boyd & Ellison Article : Social Networking Sites

http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/boyd.ellison.html

This article is basically the history of social network sites. The article charts the history of SNS from sixdegrees.com to facebook and how SNS's have evolved over the last 10 or so years.

The article demonstrates how SNS's are opening up niche groups to a braoder audience and changing the way people socialize with each other.

SNS's offer a variety of services including blogs and IM's to help people communicate with each other and share their interests.

SNS's are used more to connect with people users have an "offline" connection with moreso than to connect with strangers

What I found most interesting was the section on privacy issues. Most people are under the impression that SNS are not safe for teenagers to be on, but research shows that the occurance of teenagers being in danger due to sharing too much information online is quite low, which I found surprising.
There is also a legal debate as to whether the information posted to SNS's like facebook can be considered private, (can the police search your facebook profile without a warrant)for legal matters. I find this issue interesting because it is hard to debate that the information is private when the user posted it for the whole world to see, but on the other hand the user only expected a select few people in their "network" to see it.