The Taxonomy of Facebook

Taxonomy

A taxonomy is a scheme of classification. Many social platforms use taxonomies as a way of categorising media.

As a group we explored taxonomies within Facebook.

Below is an illustrated taxonomy for when it comes to using the Facebook search engine in order to find people. When searching for somebody new Facebook finds the people based on location and mutual friends.

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Below is an example of the categorisation system Facebook uses when it comes to searching for a user.

Facebook also uses a variety of taxonomies when it comes to categorising information/media it does this using groups, #hashtags, likes, shares, pages, interests and ‘trending topics’ and of course the public timeline.

Folksonomy

A folksonomy is a user-generated system of classifying and organizing online content into different categories. The best example of a folksonomy when using Facebook is a hashtag, hashtags are created by members of Facebook and within the hashtag contains relevant subject matter. Hashtags are a useful way of targeting/finding a selected audience or a selected subject matter.

Folksonomies are also found within Facebook through ‘likes’ ‘groups’ and ‘pages’. For example members of the public who share an interest in say ‘Leeds United Football Club’ can join these pages and groups and interact between their shared interests.

clarasantos

Reece Junjuha

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