Transcript Social Networks

Social Networks
Systems Reading Group
Jay Chen
10/25/06
Social Relationships
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Psychologists have studied how communication
context changes social relationships
Social relationships maintained through different
media grow at different rates and to different
depths
No clear consensus as to whether one modality
is better than another (email vs phone etc)
However, they do know of some correlations…
Ability to Build and Maintain
Relationships Related to…
Cost
 Geographic distance
 Time spent
 Synchrony vs. asynchrony
 Awareness
 Media richness
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Why the Internet is an Interesting
Medium for Social Relationships
The Internet is powerful because it bridges
distance at a low cost
 When people first meet online they tend to
“like” each other more
 Less stressful than face-to-face meeting
 Superficialities aside people focus on
communicating their “selves”
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Social Networks
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Not a new concept, (6 degrees of separation)
People typically maintain 10-20 close
relationships among thousands of
acquaintances
Metcalf’s Law – value of a network increases n2
to # of participants
 Not
exactly, but in theory.
 Dependent upon interaction model
Social Networks on the Internet
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Not a new concept
 BBS/Usenet
 Web/Email
 Chat
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/ Video conferencing
What is “new” are
 “Weblogs”
or “blogs”
 Social Networking Websites
Why Are Social Networks All the
Buzz Now?
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As we move forward and technology provides
improvements in:
 Awareness:
You not only know who your friends are,
but who their friends are
 Media richness: Voice, video, music
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All of these contribute to making social networks
online a mirror of people’s “real life” relationships
Growth of popular social network sites is very
fast (Myspace 200,000 new users a day)
Social Network Site’ Hype
Maintain relationships with your friends
 Form new relationships with people of
similar interest
 Find prospective employers/employees
 Keep up to date on popular news or media
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Amalgamation of Technology
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Newest incarnation of social networking sites attempt to
subsume:
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File sharing (photos, music, videos)
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Blogging / Video Blogs
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Instant Messaging (AIM/MSN)
Self Publishing / broadcast
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Xanga / YouTube
Chat / Vchat
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MySpace, Xanga, Youtube
Youtube
Search engines / web portals
File sharing
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p2p is the “newest” big thing in file sharing
Malicious users with fake or corrupted files is a
problem
Research devoted to leveraging social networks
to do collaborative filtering on bad files
File sharing on social networks means
collaborative filtering of bad files
Issues w/Social Networks
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Parents & Govt. banning MySpace due to the
bad rep
 Kids
subjected to obscene or unlawful sexual
advances
 98% of K-12 schools already filtering out Myspace
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The popular banned sites lose visitors that move
to the less popular ones
Too many choices to choose from
Revenue stream beyond advertisements
Security & Privacy Issues
Security & Privacy Issues
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Recent malware exploiting social networks
 Malicious
Banner ads
 Adware
 Phishing
attacks’
 Customizable scripts
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Facebook’s controversial decision to make
visible relationship actions to entire social group
Everyone reading everyone’s shared information
Role of Systems Designers
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Building these social networks faces the same
problems we often have in building large-scale
systems
 Scalability
 Security
 Usability
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The human factor involved means
understanding a bit more about what people
want, and how technology can provide these
things
End