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Social network sites (SNSs) provide a new way to organize and navigate an egocentric social network. Are they a fad, briefly popular but ultimately useless? Or are they the harbingers of a new and more powerful social world, where the ability to maintain an immense network-a social ''supernet''-fundamentally changes the scale of human society? This article presents signaling theory as a conceptual framework with which to assess the transformative potential of SNSs and to guide their design to make them into more effective social tools. It shows how the costs associated with adding friends and evaluating profiles affect the reliability of users' self-presentation; examines strategies such as information fashion and risk-taking; and shows how these costs and strategies affect how the publicly-displayed social network aids the establishment of trust, identity, and cooperation-the essential foundations for an expanded social world.

Visualizations of the patterns in email archives are powerful catalysts for personal storytelling. As part of a long-term investigation into visualizing email, we have created two visualizations of email archives.One highlights social networks while the other depicts the temporal rhythms of interactions with individuals. In our interviews with users of these systems, one of the most striking and not entirely expected comments was that using the applications triggered recall of many personal events and that the visualizations motivated retelling stories from the users' pasts. In this paper, we discuss the motivation and design of these projects and analyze their use as catalysts for personal narrative and recall.

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Visualizing patterns in online conversations give participants a better grasp of their cyber environment and their fellow inhabitants.