PBase.com: Strength of Weak Ties

Weak Ties
PBase supports many weak ties as a large majority of users do not meet face to face and instead facilitate and develop relationships online. Geographic distance, safety, and lack of interest are the likely causes of the prevalence of weak ties as opposed to strong ones. In any case, weak ties can become very close with many users addressing fellow users by their first names and referring to happenings in their life outside of the Internet.

According to "Internet and Everday Life" in a study by Kakuko Myata, weak ties actually "serve as information bridges across clusters of strong ties". This can occur when a user is referred to the site by a friend or passes information found on the site to one of their strong ties in real life.

Weak ties are limited though since community members are not "embedded in the same day-to-day" environment." In addition, many international users face the difficulty of maintaining a real-time conversation in instant messenger due to conflicting time zones. Therefore, PBase has chosen to only provide a forum and not a chat room atleast for now.

Strong Ties

In some cases, however, PBase has served as a means of creating strong ties between people that live in the same area.  Users have organized meetups in cities around the world including London, Bristol, Toronto and San Diego. At these meetups, users bring their cameras and explore and area and take photos throughout the day. The photos are uploaded and often publicized in the Show and Tell forum as a means for garnering more users to the next event. Most recently, users organized a meetup in Bristol and posted the images.