Tad Hogg, Gabor Szabo, Dennis M. Wilkinson, and Michael J. Brzozowski 2008-01-12 0:00:00 Traditionally, online social network sites like Facebook and MySpace allow people to form links to "friends" but do little to qualify the semantic meaning of the friendship. As a result, many users "collect" friends on these sites, conflating "acquaintances" with "friends". Essembly, a "fiercely non-partisan social network", on the other hand, lets its users enrich the meaning of their relations to others by explicitly labeling them "friends", "allies", or "nemeses". Essembly then allows its members to post resolves reflecting controversial opinions on political issues. As a defining activity on the site, members can vote on these resolves on a four-point scale ranging from complete agreement to full opposition. We examined how the uncommon link semantics affects users in casting their votes. In particular, Essembly prominently highlights the activities of users' acquaintances, and the question arises if this makes them more likely to participate, and if so, how this information affects votes. It is widely assumed that social networks enhance, if not drive, the popularity of online services; what does an additional layer of link classification add to them? Papers appeared at CHI 2008 and AAAI Spring Symposium on Social Information Processing 2008. http://www.hpl.hp.com/research/idl/papers/essembly Examines the usefulness of distinguishing between friends and similar/dissimilar users in propagating new content in an online social network, and suggests resulting design implications for social content aggregation services and recommender systems. social networks voting essembly influence CHI