A New Research Agenda: The Emergence of Online Social Networking Systems - Social Networking Conference @ U of T

A New Research Agenda: The Emergence of Online Social Networking Systems
Stefan Sariou and Nick Koudas
Department of Computer Science
University of Toronto

In this talk, Stefan discussed about research work that their groups are doing with studying and improving online social networking systems. Before, you didn't see much work in Computer Science on this area, but now, this is a hot topic with fertile areas for research. Specifically, Stefan is looking at social networks for access control to content, search, and content delivery and aggregation. Stefan is researching on social networking-based access for personal content. He says that the push model is an inefficient way to share content. For example, e-mail is a push model and e-mail was never designed to push content. Another way to share content is to use social networking sites for sharing content. However, sharing content online is a mess because you can start creating so many social identities and be part of so many social networks as a result. In real life, users have just one social network, but online, they have multiple social networks from different social networking sites. For example, you may have an account on Flickr, LinkedIn, YouTube, MySpace and Facebook, and you have social networks in these sites. But the people that are in your actual social network, is just one network. The online networks are just instances of your own social network. Therefore, there is a need to separate social information from content serving. I wholeheartedly agree with this.

Therefore, Stefan says that people should manage their social networks and maintain one social network. Everyone has a personal address book which they are familiar with and use. Let sites serve content and offer access control based on your social network in your address book. He says that there should not be a person or company that should manage your social network or even aggregate social networks, something of which Google is trying to do to create one huge social network (aggregations of multiple social networks combined together).

So from this, Stefan's research group is looking and developing new internet applications: Social Flickr will be released November 2007, Social BitTorrent in December 2007, and Social Google calendar in January 2008. Those are pretty aggressive time schedules for releasing the software.

Nick's work deals with social media aggregation to build a system to share information with others. His research group has created a system called BlogScope that mines the blogs in the blogosphere and it is currently tracking over 14.28 million blogs with 127.61 million posts. BlogScope can assist the user in discovering interesting information from these millions of blogs via a set of numerous unique features including popularity curves, identification of information bursts, related terms, and geographical search. From social media, based on content, we can extract communities for recommendation (which I believe they could use my work).

On Technorati: social networking symposium, blogscope