Expand The Network Of People Still Maintain Relationships

In the past few years, the Social Network Site (SNS for short) has become the most popular concept during Web 2.0. Originated from "the Theory of Six Degrees", SNS is supposed to help people maintain and meanwhile to expand their own social circle, thus enabling the establishment of a wide range of "weak links", however whether it can really work out like that still needs more researches. This paper adopts the perspective of Social Capital Theory to analyze the current interactions on SNS and how it can help users maintain and expand their social circles.In this paper, case studies and empirical research methods are adopted to look into SNS. Basically, this paper draws on previous researches achieved by others to make and perfect its scale design for both the SNS usage and social network maintenance and expansion.Five chapters are included in this paper. The introductory part at the very beginning serves to clarify the concept of SNS and then put forward the questions that the paper is going to answer. The first chapter outlines the current status of research progresses on on-line interactions and SNS from the point of which this paper made its own progress. The second chapter provides the origin and development of SNS at both home and abroad. In chapter 3, the author carries out the case study on renren.com which is one of the most popular domestic social network sites from both perspectives of the user experience and site products. The fourth chapter focuses on the empirical investigation in which the paper conducted a survey on the relations between SNS and users' social network. At last, some critical thoughts and suggestions are presented in the last chapter.The major findings of this paper can be listed as below. First of all, today's mainstream websites which provides social network services are actually full of various "homogeneous interactive behaviors". Those behaviors enable users to better maintain their social network, which is supported by the correlation tests done by this paper. Secondly, "heterogeneity interaction" is not promoted in these websites and it's found out that there is a now significant correlation between SNS usage and the expansion of social network.