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Social Networks

Stefan Decker

Digital Enterprise Research Institute

NUI Galway, Ireland

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Social Networking Sites: Making Social Connections Explicit

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Social Networking Sites

• Virtual Communities:– FOAF (the original – Semantic Web Origin – community

driven)– Friendster – http://www.friendster.com ($13 million venture

funding, Oct. 2003)– LinkedIn - http://www.linkedin.com ($4.7 million Venture

Funding, Nov. 2003)– http://www.ryze.com– http://www.tribe.net ($6.3 million in venture funding)– http://www.orkut.com (in affiliation with Google (in reality

one guy at Google in his free time))

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For Business Purposes: LinkedIn.com

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For Social Purposes

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Browsing a Network: LinkedIn

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LinkedIn: Search Results for Venture Capitalist

I didn’t even knowthese people existed…

Good technology idea to pitch?

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Browsing a Social Network: Orkut.com

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Community Building

Create a new Community(Ontology Term)

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Orkut.com: Example of a Online Community

Send Message

Discussion Board

Events

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Tribe.net: Communities

Create a new Tribe(Ontology Term)

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A Tribe.net Community

Discussion Board

Events Listing

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Privacy Issues: Orkut.com

• “We may share both personally identifiable information about you and aggregate usage information that we collect with Google Inc. and agents of orkut in accordance to the terms and conditions of this Privacy Policy. We will never rent, sell, or share your personal information with any third party for marketing purposes without your express permission.”

• Targeted Advertisements anyone?

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Variation: wordofmouth

•Idea: make background knowledge available

•Connections remain anonymous

• Not based on inivitation

•Did make me very nervous (and caused me to pay $20)

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Applications: Connecting University Alumni

– “In just three months, we received over 8,000 updates to alumni contact information, 2,000 new online alumni members, and over 150,000 connections between alumni. [Social Networking] is helping us realize a dream we have held for years -- a virtual community of Stanford alumni.”

Howard Wolf, president of the Stanford Alumni Association

(October 22, 2003)

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Poor Collaboration Facilities –the next step: BSCW

•Document storage, organization, and versioning

•Various document metadata

•Synchronous and asynchronous communication

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The Next Step after that: The Networked Social Network

Desktop•The desktop and the network becomes one

•Document exchange and collaboration

•Collarborative ontology and metadata creation and sharing

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A Vision for Ireland: A Social Network for the irish People