Web 2.0 social networks have now some many years with us, since they were
established between 1995 with Classmates.com and in 1998 with Open Diary. Information
scientists are more often doing research around them. From an information science
perspective, they are information systems and as such one of the relevant approaches we can
use to study them is by analyzing their users’ information behavior. As it will be stated in the
literature review of this thesis, information behavior is a well established research field in
library and information science (LIS). Web 2.0 social networks inherit some of the issues that
have characterized human interaction with other information structures and media throughout
the history, like libraries, scientific literature and the Internet. Some of these issues are: trust,
decision making, users’ satisfaction, information overload, quality control, loss of identity,
permanence, repackaging and privacy. The current thesis explores how these issues are present
on social networks and how users’ confront them.
The main motivation for developing this study is that I am an “old user” of the Web,
since around 1997-1998. As such, I am very fond of the Internet, how it has developed, its
freedom, its general neutrality and the ethical ideals some of its communities maintain.
However, even with this background, sometimes I don’t understand the nature of some of the
conflicts that can occur between people when one has to resort to distance communication
1
with friends and relatives. Another motivation from the academic side is that I feel the need to
analyze this phenomenon of social networks, one of the last manifestations of the web, from
an information science perspective.