"Tell me what I want to know!": the effect of relationship closeness on the relevance of profile attributes

ABSTRACT

The growing amount of personal information on the web raises increasing concerns about what and with whom we share information online. Nevertheless, little effort has been made in determining the relevance of the information shared with us or in filtering it accordingly. We conducted a study to identify the most relevant characteristics when seeking information about people and to scrutinize their differences among relationship types. To achieve that, we asked users to describe people (friends, acquaintances and famous people). Afterwards, we asked them to rate the perceived relevance of a carefully pre-determined set of attributes for each type. Results showed that their relevance varied depending on the relationship. As an outcome, we present the most relevant attributes when seeking information about friends, acquaintances and famous people and the major differences among them. We conclude suggesting how our findings may influence the design of interactive systems where such data is paramount.

References

1. Fogel, J. and Nehmad, E. Internet social network communities: Risk taking, trust, and privacy concerns, Computers in Human Behavior 25-1, (2009) 153--160.
2. Guerreiro, J. and Gonçalves, D. Visualiz'em: "Show me more about him". In Proceedings of the International Working Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces (AVI '12), ACM, New York, NY, USA (2012), 445--448.
3. Guerreiro, J. and Gonçalves, D. "Ten things I want to know about you": Unveiling Friends' Attribute Relevance. In Proc. of European Conference on Cognitive Ergonomics (ECCE'12), (2012).
4. Joinson, A. N. Looking at', "Looking up" or "Keeping up with" People? Motives and Uses of Facebook. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI'08). ACM, New York, NY, USA (2008), 1027-1036.
5. Kelley, P. G., Brewer, R., Mayer, Y., Cranor, L., & Sadeh, N. An Investigation into Facebook Friend Grouping. In Proceeding of Human-Computer Interaction--INTERACT (2011), 216--233
6. Lampe, C., Ellison, N. and Steinfield, C., A familiar Face(book): profile elements as signals in an online social network. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI'07). ACM, New York, NY, USA (2007), 435--444.
7. Ozenc, F. K. and Farnham, S. D. Life "modes" in social media. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI'11). ACM, New York, NY, USA (2011), 561--570.
8. Spink, A., Jansen, B. J., Pedersen, J. Searching for people on web search engines. Journal of Documentation 60 (2004).
9. Stecher, K., & Counts, S. Thin Slices of Online Profile Attributes. In Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM'08). AAAI Press, (2008), 127--135.
10. Wagner, D., Lopez, M., Doria, A., Pavlyshak, I., Kostakos, V., Oakley, I., & Spiliotopoulos, T. Hide and seek: location sharing practices with social media. In Proceedings of the 12th international conference on Human computer interaction with mobile devices and services (MobileHCI '10). ACM, New York, NY, USA (2010), 55--58.
11. Zhou, M., Zhang, W., Smith, B., Varga, E., Farias, M. and Badenes H.. Finding someone in my social directory whom I do not fully remember or barely know. In Proceedings of the 2012 ACM international conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI '12). ACM, New York, NY, USA (2012), 203--206.

Index Terms

• Human-centered computing