lecture 1: social web introduction (2012)

Social WebLecture 1

Organization & IntroductionWhat IS the Social Web

Lora AroyoThe Network Institute

VU University Amsterdam

Monday, February 27, 12

Course Organization

Image source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Old_book_-_Timeless_Books.jpgMonday, February 27, 12

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Old_book_-_Timeless_Books.jpg

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Old_book_-_Timeless_Books.jpg

Goals of the course

• understand & try how the Social Web works

• What IS the Social Web & Social Computing?

• What people DO on the Social Web?

• How is DATA on the Social Web ACCESSED?

• How is DATA on the Social Web STUDIED?

• What are typical Social Web APPLICATIONS?

• What are CHALLENGES on the Social Web?


You will learn about

• data formats

• social web platforms

• data mining, analysis, visualization & reuse across applications

• user-generated content

• personalization in Social Web applications

• interdisciplinary research

• critical thinking


Format of the course

• Lots of WORK, but also lots of FUN

• Lots of different interaction

• post a question or a discussion point by Sunday 17:00

• vote on questions from Sunday 17:00 till Monday 10:00

• discuss on selected topics during lectures on Monday

• group work during hands-on sessions

• presentations of final assignments

• Use your own name or VUNetID for identification on the website postings


How does it work

• Before the Lectures: do the required reading & assignments

• Assignments & Hands-on: done in groups

• use Skype, Dropbox, Google Docs to organize&plan your work

• state who did what in the “Acknowledgements” section

• document template: ACM SIG proceedings style; in PDF

• name of the file: [group#]_[handson#]; [group#]_[assignment#]

• include the names of all group members & group# on the title page of your reports


http://www.skype.com/

http://www.skype.com/

http://www.dropbox.com/

http://www.dropbox.com/

http://docs.google.com/

http://docs.google.com/

Schedule

• Interactive Lectures: Mondays 1:30-3:15

• assignments & hands-on are introduced during lecture

• Hands-on Sessions: Thursdays 11:00-12:45

• practical exercises & work on assignments

• hand in your hands-on reports by Friday 5:30pm

• Final Presentations: in week 12


Grading

• Assignment 1 (15%)



• Final Assignment: application & presentation (15%)

• Final Assignment: individual report (30%)

• Questions/Discussion (10%)


Can you imagine ...

image source: http://dusanwriter.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/2521824681_532cfcb749.jpgMonday, February 27, 12

How many hours we spend watching TV?


How much content is consumed & created

every second?


Current record:

• 10.000 tweets/s in the last 3 min of Super Bowl

• 8000 tweets/s during Madonna’s performance

Previous records:

• 9000 tweets/s during MTV Video Music Awards (Beyonce pregnant)

• 7200 tweets/s before the end of the WC for womens football (Japan beats US), july 2011


http://www.fastcodesign.com/1664377/infographic-of-the-day-the-alchemy-behind-facebook-and-youtube


http://royal.pingdom.com/2012/01/17/internet-2011-in-numbers/




What do those numbers mean?

Image source: http://clareactman22.blogspot.com/2010/06/meaning-of-life.htmlMonday, February 27, 12

Our goal is to ...

understand the practices, implications, culture, & meaning of the sites, as well as

users' engagement with them

include this understanding as part of software engineering for the new social world


How did it all start?


Some Historical Facts• Before 1997: AIM, ICQ,

Classmates.com

• 1997: SixDegrees.com - combining all in one (2000 the service went offline) - not enough user base, not enough interaction

• 1997 - 2001: AsianAvenue, BlackPlanet, MiGente, LiveJournal, Cyworld (Korean), LunarStorm (Swedish)

• 2001: professional networks - Ryze.com (San Francisco business and technology community), Tribe.net, LinkedIn


2002: Rise & Fall• Friendster - a social complement to

Ryze to compete with Match.com - online dating site

• early adopters: bloggers, attendees of the Burning Man arts festival & gay men

• 300,000 users in 2003 and it couldn’t handle its rapid growth

• started restricted access to profiles, e.g. not more than four degrees away

• "Fakesters": fake profiles representing iconic fictional characters: celebrities, concepts

• popularity in Philippines, Singapore, Malaysia & Indonesia


2003: Mainstream• YASNS: "Yet Another Social

Networking Service." (Clay Shirky)

• professional: LinkedIn, Visible Path, Xing (formerly openBC)

• passion-centric: Dogster (dogs), Care2 (activists), Couchsurfing (travel), MyChurch (christian), Flickr (photos), Last.FM (music), YouTube (video)

• failures: Google's Orkut failed & Microsoft's Windows Live Spaces (a.k.a. MSN Spaces)

• MySpace to compete with Friendster, Xanga, AsianAvenue; 2004 massive popularity (bands, teenagers); 2005 News Corporation purchase for $580


The Big Ones


2001: Wikipedia

2000: Nupedia - articles written by experts licensed as free contentfounded by Jimmy Wales with Larry Sanger (editor-in-chief)

2001: Wikipedia - a side-project of Nupedia, to allow collaboration on articles prior to entering the peer-review process

19,700 articles in 2002 3,865,279 articles in 2012Monday, February 27, 12

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nupedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nupedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_content

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_content

Issues

Community-based Systems

• Participation vs. lurking• Social capital• Social networking• Trust and reputation• Privacy and presence

1!

10!Synthesizers!

100!consumers!

creators!

Peter Brusilovsky, Social Web Course, University of PittsburghMonday, February 27, 12

2004: Facebookdistinct college networks only

(Harvard-only SNS)


2005: Facebookincluding other universities, high school students, professionals inside corporate

networks, and, eventually - everyone

ability for outside developers to build "Applications"


2007: Facebook APIPlatform that consists of

a Facebook variant of HTML = Facebook Markup Language (FBML)

a Facebook variant of SQL = FQL (Facebook Query Language)

not based on open standardssites support: Bebo & Meebo


2010: Facebook Open Graph


2012: Facebook Goes Public

"We cannot assure you that we will effectively manage our growth." "... it hopes to raise $5 billion in its

IPO. That would be the most for an Internet IPO since Google Inc. and its early backers raised $1.9 billion in 2004."

“ ... eight years after its computer-hacking CEO Mark Zuckerberg started the service at Harvard University."


Social Computing• interdisciplinary study

• social structure where technology puts power in communities (not institutions)

• internet provides a good platform for emerging social structures

• manifestos of social computing, e.g. social networks, blogs, podcasting, tagging, meet-ups, mash-ups, social search, user-generated-content, wikis, P2P content distribution, RSS, open source software, etc.*

* Forrester Research (2008), http:// wwwforrester.com/ResearchThemes/SocialComputing


* Julita Vassileva (2009), Social Computing Course, University of Saskatchewan, Canada

• way of interacting and collaborating on the Web (computer science)

• observing social phenomena & analyzing the interactions in communities (social science)

• behavioral economics, e.g. money-economy vs. social norms, why people behave irrationally/altruistically?

* Dan Ariely (2007). Predictably Irrational

Interdisciplinary


“Tenets of Social Computing”*

• innovation will shift from top-down to bottom-up

• value will shift from ownership to experience

• power will shift from institutions to communities

* Charlene Li (2006), http://www.socialcustomer.com/2006/02/the_forrester_s.html


http://www.socialcustomer.com/2006/02/the_forrester_s.html

http://www.socialcustomer.com/2006/02/the_forrester_s.html

Social Webdefines

forIndividual users

BusinessesGovernment


New Means of Communication

• beyond email, text messaging, and mobile phone

• asynchronous (not requiring real-time response)

• a lot of the communication seems irrelevant & trivial

• some can be helpful & interesting

• many people (especially the teenagers) addicted to this new mode of communication

• celebrities & organizations use it to communicate with their fan bases & audience for self-promotion


New Form of Communities

• Social Web sites are in essence online communities

• Groups around a number of natural attributes of the members, e.g. schools attended, employers, cities of residence.

• Groups around any type of interest, hobby, or cause, where people can help one another with information, advice, and personal networks

Example: the role of communities in “the Arab Spring”Monday, February 27, 12

New Source of Knowledge

• beyond what search engines can dig into

• people can dig into their network of connections to find answers to questions

• folklore knowledge

• friends-based news updates

• friends-based serendipity

• ‘‘worldwide directories’’ of people


New Source of Entertainment

• Most people need to entertain themselves to enjoy life, to recharge themselves, and to pass the time

• That’s why people have accounts on several social Web sites, and visit them rather diligently and regularly

• People got catapulted to worldwide fame after they appeared on YouTube


New Venue for Self-expression

• a surprisingly large number of people have had a strong desire for self-expression and desire for self-satisfaction that comes from helping others

• a major reason for the Wikipedia success, where more than 10 mil articles have been contributed by thousands of volunteers without financial incentives

• the personal posting many people do appears to help them to derive a sense of ‘self-assurance and belonging’


Social Web Sites

• People: users of the open Internet or those who belong to a particular organization (corporation, university, professional society, etc.)

• Community: network of offline friends, online acquaintances, interest groups (based on school attended, hobby, interest, cause, profession, ethnicity, gender, age, group, etc.).

• User-created content (UCC): photos, videos, bookmarks, user profiles, activity updates, text, (blog, microblog, and comments), etc.

• Sharing of UCC: posting, viewing, and commenting of UCC; also voting on, saving, and re-transmitting of the UCC.

On social Web sites, Won Kima, Ok-Ran Jeong, Sang-Won Lee, Information Systems 35 (2010) 215–236

Social web sites: web sites that allow people to form online communities, and share user-created content.


Social web sites =

social networking sites +

social media sites


Social Networking Sites

• integrated into daily practices

• web-based services allowing individuals to:

• construct a (semi-)public profile

• articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection

• view & traverse connections

Majority of Facebook’s 845 million users are womenWomen are also its most engaged users


Social Media Sites

• Web sites that allow people to share user-created content

• Most users are teens or those in early twenties

• males and female how are they represented?

Sandberg: women drive 62% of Facebook activity (e.g. status updates, messages & comments); 71% of daily fan activity; have 8% more Facebook friends than men; spend more time on the site.

In Facebook’s early days, women were first to upload photographs, join groups and post to walls.

A way to involve more women with technology?


Social Sites Categories

• Social networking sites (open vs. closed)

• General-purpose, e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn

• Vertical, e.g. Dogster, Couchsurfing

• Social media sites (open vs. closed)

• Media types, e.g. Flickr (photos), Last.FM (music), YouTube (video)

* Won Kim, Ok-Ran Jeong, Sang-Won Lee (2010). On social Web sites. Information Systems 35, 215–236


Diversity in Cultures• MySpace - US & abroad

• Friendster - Pacific Islands

• Orkut - Brazil, India

• Mixi - Japan

• LunarStorm - Sweden

• Hyves - the Netherlands

• Grono - Poland

• Hi5 - Latin & South America, Europe

• Bebo - UK, New Zealand & Australia

• QQ - China

• Cyworld - Korea

• Skyrock - France

• Windows Live Spaces - Mexico, Italy, and Spain


2011: FB vs. Orkut in Brazil

http://mashable.com/2012/01/17/facebook-beats-orkut-brazil/Monday, February 27, 12

http://mashable.com/2012/01/17/facebook-beats-orkut-brazil/

http://mashable.com/2012/01/17/facebook-beats-orkut-brazil/

Diversity in Activities• aSmallWorld & BeautifulPeople

intentionally restrict access to appear selective and elite

• Couchsurfing: activity-centered

• BlackPlanet: identity-driven

• MyChurch: affiliation-focused

• niche social network on Ning - a platform & hosting service for users to create their own SNSs

• Usenet & public discussion forums - structured by topics or topical hierarchies

• "egocentric" - social network sites are structured as personal networks - individual at the center of their own community

• accurately mirrors unmediated social structures: "the world is composed of networks, not groups"


SNS: Features• Personal profiles

• Establishing online connections

• Participating in online groups

• Communicating with online connections

• Sharing user generated content

• Expressing opinions

• Finding information

• Retaining users


Personal profiles

• Most sites have members create and manage personal profiles

• Differences in types of information in profiles, ways to control access (privacy)

• Archived memories

• Impress others

• Aggregators, e.g. klout.com

Compare Twitter profile with Facebook profile


Establishing online connections

• discover connection (‘‘friend’’) candidates from existing members

• automatic discovery of members from address books, browsing of groups, friend-recommendation, or keyword-based search

• some friend relationships require consent by both members, some don’t

How do you find friends on different networks?

What are pros & cons of (a)symmetry of friendship?Monday, February 27, 12

• form new groups, and/or join them

• members & non-members could both view all the user-created content, only members may post content

• sense of belonging

• being where many other people are

Participating in online groups

How does LinkedIn facilitate the forming & joining of groups?


How do Twitter, Facebook and Flickr differer in terms facilitating communication?

Communicating with online connections

• Ambient intimacy - “...that you wouldn’t usually have access to, because time & space”

• Emotional support

• Hanging out virtually


Sharing User-created Content

• members post various types of user-created content, e.g. blogs, microblogs, photos, images, music, video, bookmarks, and text

• friends view & re-share

• social media sites provide richer facilities for sharing content than social networking sites

How often do you experience problems of duplication of content shared across different sites?


Expressing Opinions

• Allowing members to leave comments on the content, voting by ranking (3 out of 5 stars), or marking as ‘‘favorite,’’ flagging as spam/inappropriate

• Sites use different ways to present and organize those comments (hierarchical, timestamping, counting, etc.)

Why there is no ‘DISLIKE’ button in FB? Should there be?

For example, Digg has two buttons, ‘‘digg it’’ and ‘‘bury’’


Finding Information• search engines: looking for names of people, names of groups, and

particular content

• browsing: done on selected groups and content in a particular category

• Most sites provide categories for the content stored, to support browsing. Can be rich / simple

• through timelines and archives of memories

• social voyerism

For example, Digg has 8 categories: technology, world & business, science, gaming, lifestyle, entertainment, sports, and offbeat. Further organized in terms of most recent, top in 24h, 7, 30, and 365 days


Retaining Users• Various features designed to have the users spend a long

time on the sites & have them return frequently

• For example,

• display data related to the data the users specifically seek

• special designations, such as ‘‘popular’’ and “recent,’’ to attract those not searching for it

• special interest pages

• making them addicted to games, etc.

What examples at YouTube, Facebook or Flickr?Monday, February 27, 12

Where do YOU come in

understand the practices, implications, culture & meaning of the sites, as well as

users' engagement with them

learn how to use this knowledge in designing successful social web applications


Peter Brusilovsky, Social Web Course, University of Pittsburgh

The New Web: The Web of People


Web 1.0 vs Web 2.0Semantic Web & Social Web

Web 1.0 Web 1.0

Web 2.0

Semantic Web

User Centric

Data Centric

Social Web Web 2.0

Something funny: http://youtube.com/watch?v=XPYLn2QblNI

Peter Brusilovsky, Social Web Course, University of PittsburghMonday, February 27, 12

Hands-on Teaser

• first (basic) taste of social web data analysis & visualization

• some Python & command line experience

• Twitter data

• check out on the website the software you will be working with

• check out the exercises in the book

• Mining the Social Web, by Matthew A. Russell

image source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/bionicteaching/1375254387/


http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920010203.do#tab_04

http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920010203.do#tab_04

http://www.flickr.com/photos/bionicteaching/1375254387/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/bionicteaching/1375254387/

lecture 1: social web introduction (2012)

Technology

social web social computing

social web lecture

social web works

social complement

social networking service

new social worldmonday

group work

final assignment