The growing use of social media means that an increasing amount of people's lives are visible online. We draw from Goffman's theatrical metaphor and Hogan's exhibition approach to explore how people manage their personal collection of social media data over time. We conducted a qualitative study of 13 participants to reveal their day-to-day decision-making about producing and curating digital traces on Facebook. Their goals and strategies showed that people experience the Facebook platform as consisting of three different functional regions: a performance region for managing recent data and impression management, an exhibition region for longer term presentation of self-image, and a personal region for archiving meaningful facets of life. Further, users' need for presenting and archiving data in these three regions is mediated by temporality. These findings trigger a discussion of how to design social media that support these dynamic and sometimes conflicting needs.

Previous research has revealed the following three challenges for knowledge sharing: awareness of expertise distribution, motivation for sharing, and network ties. In this case study, we examine how different generations of information and communication technologies (ICTs), ranging from e‐mail to micro‐blogging, can help address these challenges. Twenty‐one interviews with employees from a multinational company revealed that although people think social media can better address these challenges than older tools, the full potential of social media for supporting knowledge sharing has yet to be achieved. When examining the interconnections among different ICTs, we found that employees′ choice of a combination of ICTs, as affected by their functional backgrounds, could create “technological divides” among them and separate resources. This finding indicates that having more ICTs is not necessarily better. ICT integration, as well as support for easy navigation, is crucial for effective knowledge search and sharing. Adaptation to local culture is also needed to ensure worldwide participation in knowledge sharing.

Romantic partners face issues of relational development including managing information privacy, tension between individual and relational needs, and accountability to existing friends. Prior work suggests that affordances of social media might highlight and shape these tensions; to explore this, we asked 20 people to reflect daily for two weeks on feelings and decisions around their own and others' Facebook use related to their relationships. Most generally, we find that tensions arise when romantic partners must manage multiple relationships simultaneously because Facebook audiences are so present and so varied. People also engage in subtle negotiation around and appropriation of Facebook's features to accomplish both personal and relational goals. By capturing both why people make these decisions and how Facebook's affordances support them, we expect our findings to generalize to many other social media tools and to inform theorizing about how these tools affect relational development.

Inspired by conversational visualization tools and the increasing enactment of relationships in social media, we examine how people reflect on friendships and how social data and conversation may affect this. We asked 28 people to reflect on their relationship with a close friend either alone, alone but with access to Facebook's "See Friendship" page, or with the friend using their See Friendship page. Observation and interviews revealed a rich array of practices around why, when, and how people reflect on friendships; that both friends and data make reflection more positive, more focused, and more fun; that those are not necessarily good things; and that third parties are a common theme. These findings suggest a number of design considerations, including supporting different types of reflection, aligning the interface with important moments and content useful for reflection, and carefully considering the fidelity of the visualization and data presented.

In the current study, we explored Twitter as a useful and practical extension to a wiki-based collaborative work space. A two-week experiment and a survey study shed some light on the potential benefits of integrating Twitter, or other existing social networking tools with a formal collaborative work space in encouraging meta-data level communication and promoting informal awareness.