Keeping up with the information glut by visualizing patterns of posting by friends on Facebook

Abstract

Users of social networks, such as Facebook, are becoming increasingly overwhelmed by the growing number of "friends" that they are connected to and the "tsunami" of updates generated by them. It is very easy to miss potentially interesting updates, if one does not frequently check her news feed. Also it is hard to get a sense of which friends are active and especially, which are passive or completely gone. Awareness of friends and friends' activities is one of the utmost importance for a user to build trusted social networks. However, current online social networks provide only very limited clues to support these two kinds of awareness. Therefore, I propose a method to visualize the activity level of friends. It creates a time- and an activity-pattern awareness for the user, as well as an awareness of the lurkers. It also offers options to filter activity streams regarding particular time periods/friends.