Evaluation of automated friend grouping in online social networks.

Managing friendship relationships is challenging due to the growing number of people in online social networks (OSNs). While grouping friends sometimes mitigates this challenge, the burden of manual grouping still prevents OSNs users to create groups widely for privacy control, selective sharing and filtering. In this paper, we present an automated friend grouping tool which utilizes three different clustering algorithms to create groups from Facebook friendship networks. By conducting 18 semi-structured interviews, we investigated the advantages and disadvantages of automated friend grouping in OSNs.