Lecture 1: Social Web Introduction (2012)

Social Web
Lecture 1
Organization & Introduction
What IS the Social Web
Lora Aroyo
The Network Institute
VU University Amsterdam

Monday, February 27, 12

Course Organization

Image source: 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


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.jpg

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.html

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 content
founded 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 2012

Issues
creators!
Community-based Systems
1!

• Participation vs. lurking 10!
• Social capital Synthesizers!
• Social networking
• Trust and reputation
• Privacy and presence
100!
consumers!

Peter Brusilovsky, Social Web Course, University of Pittsburgh

2004: Facebook
distinct college networks only
(Harvard-only SNS)


2005: Facebook
including other universities, high school
students, professionals inside corporate
networks, and, eventually - everyone

ability for outside developers to build
"Applications"


2007: Facebook API
Platform 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 standards
sites support: Bebo & Meebo


2010: Facebook
Open Graph

2012: Facebook
Goes Public
“ ... eight years after its
computer-hacking CEO Mark
Zuckerberg started the service
at Harvard University."

"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."

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

Interdisciplinary
• 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?
* Julita Vassileva (2009), Social Computing Course, University of
Saskatchewan, Canada * Dan Ariely (2007). Predictably Irrational

“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


Social Web
deﬁnes

for
Individual users
Businesses
Government

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”

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
Social web sites: web sites that allow people to form
online communities, and share user-created content.
• 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
=
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 women
Women 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?

A way to involve more women with technology?
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.


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 • Hi5 - Latin & South America,
Europe
• Friendster - Paciﬁc Islands
• Bebo - UK, New Zealand &
• Orkut - Brazil, India Australia

• Mixi - Japan • QQ - China

• LunarStorm - Sweden • Cyworld - Korea

• Hyves - the Netherlands • Skyrock - France

• Grono - Poland • Windows Live Spaces -
Mexico, Italy, and Spain

2011: FB vs. Orkut in Brazil

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

Diversity in Activities
• aSmallWorld & BeautifulPeople • Usenet & public discussion
intentionally restrict access to forums - structured by topics
appear selective and elite or topical hierarchies

• Couchsurﬁng: activity-centered • "egocentric" - social network
sites are structured as
• BlackPlanet: identity-driven personal networks - individual
at the center of their own
• MyChurch: afﬁliation-focused community

• niche social network on Ning - • accurately mirrors unmediated
a platform & hosting service social structures: "the world is
for users to create their own composed of networks, not
SNSs 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?

Participating in
online groups
• 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

How does LinkedIn facilitate the forming &
joining of groups?

Communicating with
online connections
• Ambient intimacy - “...that you
wouldn’t usually have access to,
because time & space”
• Emotional support
• Hanging out virtually

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

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.)
For example, Digg has two buttons, ‘‘digg it’’ and ‘‘bury’’
Why there is no ‘DISLIKE’ button in FB? Should there be?

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?

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


The New Web: The
Web of People


Web 1.0 vs Web 2.0
Semantic Web & Social Web
ric
C ent Semantic Web
D ata
Web 1.0 Web 1.0
Us
er C
ent Web 2.0
ric

Social Web Web 2.0

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

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/


Lecture 1: Social Web Introduction (2012)

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