Social Networks

1
Social Networks

• Systems Reading Group
• Jay Chen
• 10/25/06

2
Social Relationships

• 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

3
Ability to Build and Maintain Relationships
Related to

• Cost
• Geographic distance
• Time spent
• Synchrony vs. asynchrony
• Awareness
• Media richness

4
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

5
Social Networks

• Not a new concept, (6 degrees of separation)
• People typically maintain 10-20 close
  relationships among thousands of acquaintances
  
• Metcalfs Law value of a network increases n2
  to of participants
  
• Not exactly, but in theory.
• Dependent upon interaction model

6
Social Networks on the Internet

• Not a new concept
• BBS/Usenet
• Web/Email
• Chat / Video conferencing
• What is new are
• Weblogs or blogs
• Social Networking Websites

7
Why Are Social Networks All the Buzz Now?

• 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
• All of these contribute to making social networks
  online a mirror of peoples real life
  relationships
  
• Growth of popular social network sites is very
  fast (Myspace 200,000 new users a day)

8
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

9
Amalgamation of Technology

• Newest incarnation of social networking sites
  attempt to subsume
  
• File sharing (photos, music, videos)
• MySpace, Xanga, Youtube
• Blogging / Video Blogs
• Xanga / YouTube
• Chat / Vchat
• Instant Messaging (AIM/MSN)
• Self Publishing / broadcast
• Youtube
• Search engines / web portals

10
File sharing

• 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
  

11
Issues w/Social Networks

• 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
  
• 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

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Security Privacy Issues

• Recent malware exploiting social networks
• Malicious Banner ads
• Adware
• Phishing attacks
• Customizable scripts
• Facebooks controversial decision to make visible
  relationship actions to entire social group
  
• Everyone reading everyones shared information

13
Role of Systems Designers

• Building these social networks faces the same
  problems we often have in building large-scale
  systems
  
• Scalability
• Security
• Usability
• The human factor involved means understanding a
  bit more about what people want, and how
  technology can provide these things
  

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End