New form of social interactions

This post from the Facebook Data Team presents and quantifies a new form of ties in online social networks. In traditional social networks ties are either strong (people you constantly communicate with) or extremely weak (people you knew at some point of time but you have no communication with whatsoever). However, online social media allow for passive engagement, where people can passively follow the news of old friends or simply people the used to know or met at some point in time. Tools such as news feed or microblogging (e.g., Twitter) have realized this new form of communication. I found these data extremely interesting.