Social network web sites don't really social network

This article from Washington Post describes how social networking web sites like Facebook inundate us with more connections and actually alienate us than connect us. Duncan Watts feels that these web sites fail to do what they are supposed to do, which is "network". In a sense, I believe that he is right. When you social network, you meet with someone and start connecting and talking. With present social networking sites, it's more like just for getting in touch and updating your life to others. The number of social networking web sites are ballooning and multiplying like crazy. People really want to get on the social networking bandwagon, but they don't really understand the value of social networking.

On Technorati: social network

Prayers with the family and colleagues of Bill Richards

I just heard that Bill Richards, president of INSNA and long time contributor to social network analysis has just died. Apparently, he died of injuries sustained in a fall at his home. This is a great loss to the social networking community. I remember Bill as a vibrant person, full of energy, when I first met him at the Sunbelt conference in Vancouver last year. He also organized the hospitality suite at the conference at night where I remember talking with him. In the short time that I knew him, he came out as a sincere person and dedicated to his work and his graduate students.

Prayers and thoughts are with the Richards family, SFU, his grad students, colleagues and friends around the world. You will be surely missed Bill, but your charisma, energy and warmth will still remain with us.

On Technorati: Bill Richards, INSNA, social network analysis, Sunbelt

Did you know you can be banned from Facebook?

Well, I sure didn't until I read this post. Apparently, this guy tried to upload his 4600 contacts from Gmail into Facebook to allow invites, and then he got banned for unusual activity. I guess the Facebook application thought that he was a spammer uploading that many contacts. This then really begs the question, how does an application know that activity is spam or it is legitimate?

On Technorati: Facebook, banned

Howard Rheingold teaching virtual communities and social networks

Howard Rheingold, the author of The Virtual Community and Smart Mobs, is teaching at Stanford University this fall. His course is on Virtual Communities and Social Networks, in the Stanford Communication Department. The syllabus for the course is here.

Sounds interesting, the course material seems very relevant to what I'm doing. Students will be using social media technologies like forums, blogs, chat, etc. I'd be interested in attending this course if it was offered as a web cast, or even if there are lecture notes that I could download and have a look, as it is much related to my PhD research work on virtual communities.

On Technorati: Howard Rheingold, virtual community

Mapping the sky

Here's an interesting article from a fellow Computer Science student at U of T called Dustin Lang. He's in the AI group with Sam Roweis, designing an astronomy engine that given an image, it will be able to spit out exactly what that image is. How they do it, is that they check the list of images in an astronomical database to see what it is similar to. This doesn't have to be limited to astronomy, I can think of many applications where I have an image that I've taken or seen before, but I don't know what exactly it is or where it came from. I could then do an image search to determine what that image exactly is. This is kind of the reverse of what image searching is now, where you give a keyword, and an image pops up.

It just shows you the many applications that Computer Science can be applied to, that you don't have to just do math and algorithms all the time.

On Technorati: sky mapping, Computer Science, U of T

The next RAZR 2

The successor to the Motorola RAZR is here, it's the RAZR 2. The RAZR is Motorola's successful cell phone to date, that comes in different colours, although I still like the original black version. You can see the RAZR 2 below.



Looks like a nice phone, obviously I don't think it will compete with the iPhone though, but the iPhone is too pricey and big. It will be branded as the RAZR V8 or V9.

I wonder when the RAZR 2 will come to Canada, no word on the Motorola Canada web site. I'm still going to stick with my Motorola RAZR for now until I see another phone that catches my eye and is a good price.

On Technorati: Motorola, RAZR2

Looking for faculty positions or industry research jobs

I'm planning to finish my PhD by the end of this year, and will be on the market for a full-time job in academia or industry research for beginning to middle of next year 2008. If you know of any openings for next year in social computing and pervasive computing, let me know by e-mailing me at achin AT cs DOT toronto DOT edu. You can see my list of publications here.