Because of both the content that people upload and the behavioral traces that they leavebehind, social network sites have unprecedented quantities of data concerning humaninteraction. This presents unique opportunities and challenges. On one hand, SNSs offera vibrant “living lab” and access to behavioral data at a scale inconceivable to manysocial scientists. On the other, the data that are available present serious research ethicsquestions and introduce new types of biases that must be examined (boyd and Crawford2012)

For those of us who believe that social network sites are socio-technical systems, in whichsocial and technical factors shape one another, failing to describe the site under studyignores the fact that the technological constraints and affordances of a site will shapeuser practices and that social norms will emerge over time. Not including informationabout what the feature set was at the time of data collection forecloses the possibility ofidentifying patterns that emerge over time and through the accumulated scholarshipacross a range of sites and user samples. Unfortunately, because they have no knowledgeabout how things will continue to evolve and which features will becomeimportant to track, researchers may not be able to identify the salient features to reportand may struggle with devoting scarce publication space to these details, but this doesn’tundermine the importance of conscientious consideration towards describing the artifactbeing analyzed.

In order to produce scholarship that will be enduring, the onus is on social mediaresearchers to describe the technological artifact that they are analyzing with as muchcare as survey researchers take in describing the population sampled, and with as muchdetail as ethnographers use when describing their field site. This is not to say thatresearchers must continue to describe technologies as if no one knows what they are—weare beyond the point where researchers must explain how electronic mail or “email” islike or unlike postal mail. But, rather, researchers must clearly describe the socio-technical context of the particular site, service, or application their scholarship isaddressing. In addition to attending to the technology itself, and the interchange betweentechnical and social processes, we believe SNS researchers should make a concertedeffort to include the date of data collection and to describe the site at the moment of datacollection and the relevant practices of its users. These descriptions will enable laterresearchers to synthesize across studies to identify patterns, much in the same wayreporting exact effect sizes allows for future meta-analyses

One key challenge of studying social media is that designers of these tools are innovatingat a very rapid timeframe and often with little advance notice. Given the rapidly changinginfrastructure and the timeframe of academic publishing, the site at the time of datacollection is likely to be very different from its incarnation at the point of publication.

Because of howpeople's position within the SNS shapes their experiences of it, activity-centric analysesrequire contextualization and translation, not unlike what social scientists studyingdiffering cultural practices have had to do for decades.

What oneexperiences on SNSs and the content to which one is exposed differs depending on thestructure of one's network, a user's individual preferences and history, and her activitiesat that moment.

By far the most pressing challengefor SNS scholars lies in the rapid pace at which innovations and technical changes areimplemented in this space. For scholarship in this arena to develop, SNS researchersneed to be mindful of the ways in which these sites evolve over time and the effects thismay have on the interpersonal, psychological, and sociological processes they arestudying.

What makes “social media” significant as a category is not the technology, butrather the socio-technical dynamics that unfolded as millions of people embraced thetechnology and used it to collaborate, share information, and socialize. Popular genres ofsocial media integrated the public nature of interest-driven CMC with the more intimatedynamics of interpersonal CMC.

All SNSs support multiple modes of communication: one-to-many and one-to-one,synchronous and asynchronous, textual and media-based

Many of the weak tie relationships articulatedon SNSs would fade away were it not for the ease with which people can communicate,share, and maintain simple connections. For this reason, this new definition positionssocial network sites first and foremost as a communication platform, while alsohighlighting the importance of sharing content, typically consumed through a stream.

A social network site is anetworked communication platformin which participants1) haveuniquely identifiable profilesthat consist of user-supplied content, contentprovided by other users, and/or system-level data; 2) canpublicly articulateconnectionsthat can be viewed and traversed by others; and 3) can consume,produce, and/or interact withstreams of user-generated contentprovided by theirconnections on the site.

As social network sites have become mainstream, traversing the connections betweenpeople to view profiles is no longer the sole—or, even primary—way of participation.Content is surfaced through streams, and each piece of content is embedded withnumerous links to other content nuggets.

Yet, one significant shift has unfolded: the traversability ofconnections has become more important for machines than users. As APIs make thesocial graph available to broader audiences, algorithms are being designed to traversethe graph and learn about the individual nodes’ relationship to one another.

The ability to see—andtraverse—others’ contact lists was innovative and important in several ways. From anadoption perspective, it enabled users to find shared contacts easily, thus lowering thebarriers to initiating contact with other users and enabling users to harness networkeffects more easily. From a social perspective, it allowed people to easily see therelationships between others, to reconnect with old friends and acquaintances, and totravel through the network in a way that enhanced social interactions.

The rise of open APIs and developer platforms meant that these collections of articulatedcontacts became valuable in contexts outside that particular SNS. Engineers andentrepreneurs alike began talking about the “social graph”—the global network oflinkages between all individuals within a system (Fitzpatrick and Recordon2007). Thislanguage emerged at a time when commercial entities began to believe that the socialgraph hadvalue beyond the individual's relationship with a given social networksite.

As SNSs became more popular with a wider range ofindividuals, many individuals’ contact lists became more diverse as these users Friendedpeople representing a range of contexts (family, professional contacts, church members,etc.). This growing diversity has contributed to cases of “context collapse,” whichdescribes the ways in which individuals that we know from different social contexts cometogether in SNSs in potentially uncomfortable ways (Marwick and boyd2011)

For users, these connections represent what sociologistsrefer to as a person'ssocial network—the collection of social relations of varyingstrengths and importance that a person maintains

Earlier communication tools enabled individuals to create a private list ofcontacts (for instance a buddy list on instant messaging), to establish a group of contactsthat were shared by others (such as a listserv membership list), or to publish a list ofrelated links (such as a blogroll), but SNSs extended the practice of creating a publiclyvisible, personally curated list of contacts and made it a mainstream practice.

Streams of quotidian,ephemeral content encourage people to participate more in that they provide an initialartifact around which others can engage. Features that support actions associated withstatus updates—the ability to post comments to, share, or register interest in an update—also encourage a stream of activity that is prompted by an update but often takes on a lifeof its own in the central stream. Today's SNSs are more like news aggregators than theyare like profile-based contexts, even if the algorithm for displaying content is quiteobfuscated.

In boyd and Ellison (2007), we attempted to stabilize the discussion by offeringa definition of social network sites:web-based services that allow individuals to (1) construct a public or semi-publicprofile within a bounded system, (2) articulate a list of other users with whom theyshare a connection, and (3) view and traverse their list of connections and thosemade by others within the system.