Hogg, Tad, et al. "Multiple Relationship Types in Online Communities and Social Networks." AAAI Spring Symposium: Social Information Processing. 2008.

This empirical study investigates an online political forum, examining how users engage through content creation, voting, discussion, and forming explicit connections via three types of relationships (friend, fan, colleague). It finds a strong correlation between network participation and site activity, with users adhering to the intended semantics of these relationships. The study reveals significant structural differences among the networks, suggesting diverse uses for each relationship type. Despite the potential of social networking features to promote new content, their impact in this context was moderate. The findings suggest that incorporating multiple relationship types could be beneficial for other web communities, given their typical usage and social networking patterns.