Introduction to the Social Web

Social Web
2013
Lecture 1: Introduction
What IS the Social Web
Lora Aroyo

The Network Institute
VU University Amsterdam

Monday, February 3, 14

Image source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Old_book_-_Timeless_Books.jpg

Course Organization

Social Web 2014, Lora Aroyo!

Goals of the course
• understand & try how the Social Web works
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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
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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
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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 by 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

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How does it work
• Before the Lectures: do the required reading & assignments
• Assignments & Hands-on: done in groups
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use Skype, Dropbox, Google Docs to organize & plan your
work

• state who did what in the “Acknowledgements” section
• use document template: ACM SIG proceedings style; PDF only
• 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
• Final Presentations: in week 12

Grading
• Assignment 1 (15%)
• Final Assignment: application & presentation (15%)
• Final Assignment: individual report (30%)
• Questions/Discussion (10%)

Why Social Web?


“digital technology
is changing both how words and ideas are created
and proliferate, and how they are studied.”

social media is a rich
resource that provides
“a fuller picture of today’s cultural norms, dialogue,
trends and events to inform scholarship, the
legislative process, new works of authorship,
education and other purposes.”


How much content is
consumed & created
every second?

Twitter record:

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9000 tweets/s during MTV
Video Music Awards (Beyonce
pregnant)

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8000 tweets/s during
Madonna’s performance

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10.000 tweets/s in last 3 min of
Super Bowl

7200 tweets/s before the end
of the WC for women’s
football (Japan beats US), july
2011

Library of Congress
archive of public Twitter
messages reached 170
billion tweets and rising,
by about 500 million
tweets a day

http://www.fastcodesign.com/1664377/infographic-of-the-day-the-alchemy-behind-facebook-and-youtube


2011 on the Social Web
• 18.1 million people following Lady Gaga - most popular user in 2011
• 250 million tweets per day (October 2011)
• 1 – #egypt was the number one hashtag on Twitter
• 8,868 tweets per second in August for the MTV Video Music Awards
• $50,000 – raised for charity by the most retweeted tweet of 2011
• 39 million Tumblr blogs by the end of 2011
• 70 million WordPress blogs by the end of 2011
• 1 billion messages sent with WhatsApp during one day (Oct 2011)
• 2.4 billion social networking accounts worldwide
http://royal.pingdom.com/2012/01/17/internet-2011-in-numbers/


2012 on the Social Web
• 85,962 monthly posts by Facebook Pages in Brazil; most active country on FB
• 2.7 billion likes on Facebook every day
• 819,000+ retweets of Barack Obama’s tweet “Four more years” (most retweets ever)
• 327,452 tweets per minute when Barack Obama was re-elected (most ever)
• 9.66 million tweets during the opening ceremony of the London 2012 olympics
• 175 million - average number of tweets every day in 2012
• 307 tweets by the average Twitter user
• 51 – average number of followers per Twitter user
• 163 billion tweets since Twitter started
• 123 heads of state that have a Twitter account
• 187 million members on LinkedIn (September 2012)
• 135 million monthly active users on Google+
• 5 billion times per day the +1 button on Google+ is used
http://royal.pingdom.com/2013/01/16/internet-2012-in-numbers/

Image source: http://clareactman22.blogspot.com/2010/06/meaning-of-life.html

What do those numbers
mean?


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
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Before 1997: AIM, ICQ,
Classmates.com

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1997: SixDegrees.com combining all in one (2000 the
service went ofﬂine) - not
enough user base, not enough
interaction

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1997 - 2001: AsianAvenue,
BlackPlanet, MiGente,
LiveJournal, Cyworld (Korean),
LunarStorm (Swedish)

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2001: professional networks Ryze.com (San Francisco
business and technology
community), Tribe.net, LinkedIn


2002: Rise & Fall
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Friendster - a social complement to
Ryze to compete with Match.com online dating site

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early adopters: bloggers, attendees of
the Burning Man arts festival & gay
men

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300,000 users in 2003 and it couldn’t
handle its rapid growth

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started restricted access to profiles,
e.g. not more than four degrees away

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"Fakesters": fake profiles representing
iconic fictional characters: celebrities,
concepts

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failures: Google's Orkut failed &
Microsoft's Windows Live Spaces
(a.k.a. MSN Spaces)


2003: Mainstream
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YASNS: "Yet Another Social
Networking Service." (Clay Shirky)

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professional: LinkedIn,Visible Path,
Xing (formerly openBC)

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passion-centric: Dogster (dogs),
Care2 (activists), Couchsurﬁng
(travel), MyChurch (christian), Flickr
(photos), Last.FM (music),YouTube
(video)

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MySpace to compete with Friendster,
Xanga, AsianAvenue; 2004 massive
popularity (bands, teenagers); 2005
News Corporation purchase for $580

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popularity in Philippines, Singapore,
Malaysia & Indonesia


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
Articles: 19,700 (2002), 3,835,000 (2012), 4,157,698 (2013)
Wiki pages: 29,355,491 (2013)

Issues
creators!
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Community-based Systems

• Participation vs. lurking
• Social capital
• Social networking
• Trust and reputation
• Privacy and presence

10!
Synthesizers!

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."


2013: Facebook
Graph Search


http://www.insidefacebook.com/2013/01/30/facebooks-global-growth-in-q4-1-06b-mau-mobile-surpasses-web/


http://www.insidefacebook.com/2012/04/27/facebook-platform-supports-more-than-42-million-pages-and-9-million-apps/


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Launched July 2006 by Jack Dorsey

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"the SMS of the Internet"

500 million registered users (2012)
340 million tweets daily
1.6 billion search queries daily
ten most visited websites on the
Internet


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launched June 28, 2011

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Stream, Circles, Hashtags, "What's hot" Stream

500 million registered users (2012), 235 million active on a monthly basis
"social layer" consisting of not just a single site, but rather an overarching
"layer"
Hangouts & Hangouts On-Air (instant webcasts over Google+)
Sparks - front-end to Google Search
Data Liberation
Ripples - re-sharing activity regarding a public post
Google+ Pages for organizations,
Google+ Local (former Google Places)
Google+ Events


* Forrester Research (2008), http:// wwwforrester.com/ResearchThemes/SocialComputing

Social Computing
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interdisciplinary study

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internet provides a good platform for emerging social structures

social structure where technology puts power in communities (not
institutions)

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.*


“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

New Means of
Communication
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beyond email, text messaging, and mobile
phone

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asynchronous (not requiring real-time
response)

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a lot of the communication seems irrelevant
& trivial

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some can be helpful & interesting

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celebrities & organizations use it to
communicate with their fan bases & audience
for self-promotion

many people (especially the teenagers)
addicted to this new mode of communication


New Form of
Communities

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Social Web sites are in essence online communities

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Groups around any type of interest, hobby, or
cause, where people can help one another with
information, advice, and personal networks

Groups around a number of natural attributes of
the members, e.g. schools attended, employers,
cities of residence.

Example: the role of communities in “the Arab Spring”


New Source of
Knowledge
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beyond what search engines can dig into
people can dig into their network of connections
to ﬁnd answers to questions

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folklore knowledge

friends-based news updates
friends-based serendipity
‘‘worldwide directories’’ of people


New Source of
Entertainment
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Most people need to entertain
themselves to enjoy life, to recharge
themselves, and to pass the time

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That’s why people have accounts on
several social Web sites, and visit
them rather diligently and regularly

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People got catapulted to worldwide
fame after they appeared on
YouTube


New Venue for
Self-expression
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a surprisingly large number of people
have had a strong desire for selfexpression and desire for self-satisfaction
that comes from helping others

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a major reason for the Wikipedia
success, where more than 10 mil articles
have been contributed by thousands of
volunteers without ﬁnancial incentives

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the personal posting many people do
appears to help them to derive a sense of
‘self-assurance and belonging’


Social web sites
=
social networking sites
+
social media sites

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
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MySpace - US & abroad
Friendster - Paciﬁc Islands
Orkut - Brazil, India
Mixi - Japan
LunarStorm - Sweden
Hyves - the Netherlands
Grono - Poland

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Hi5 - Latin & South America,
Europe

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Bebo - UK, New Zealand &
Australia

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QQ - China
Cyworld - Korea
Skyrock - France
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
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aSmallWorld & BeautifulPeople
intentionally restrict access to
appear selective and elite

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Usenet & public discussion
forums - structured by topics
or topical hierarchies

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Couchsurﬁng: activity-centered

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"egocentric" - social network
sites are structured as
personal networks - individual
at the center of their own
community

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accurately mirrors unmediated
social structures: "the world is
composed of networks, not
groups"

BlackPlanet: identity-driven
MyChurch: afﬁliation-focused
niche social network on Ning a platform & hosting service
for users to create their own
SNSs


SNS: Features
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Personal proﬁles

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Participating in online
groups

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Communicating with online
connections

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Sharing user generated
content

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Expressing opinions

Establishing online
connections

Finding information
Retaining users


Personal profiles
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Most sites have members create and manage
personal profiles

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Differences in types of information in profiles,
ways to control access (privacy)

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Archived memories
Impress others
Aggregators, e.g. klout.com

Compare Twitter profile with Facebook profile

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Establishing online
connections
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discover connection (‘‘friend’’)
candidates from existing members

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automatic discovery of members from
address books, browsing of groups,
friend-recommendation, or keywordbased search

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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?

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Participating in
online groups
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form new groups, and/or join them

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sense of belonging

members & non-members could both
view all the user-created content, only
members may post content
being where many other people are

How does LinkedIn facilitate the forming &
joining of groups?

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

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Emotional support
Hanging out virtually

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

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Sharing User-created
Content
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members post various types of user-created content, e.g.
blogs, microblogs, photos, images, music, video,
bookmarks, and text

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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?

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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?

Reflections ...
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Twitter profile vs. Facebook profile?

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Pros & cons of (a)symmetry of friendship?

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How often do you experience problems of duplication
of content shared across different sites?

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FB vs Google+ actions for retaining users?

Find friends on different networks?
How does LinkedIn facilitate the forming & joining of
groups? FB? Google+?
Twitter vs. Facebook vs. Flickr differences in terms
facilitating communication?


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

Peter Brusilovsky, Social Web Course, University of Pittsburgh


Hands-on Teaser
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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
semanticweb.cs.vu.nl/socialweb2013
check out the exercises in the book

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Mining the Social Web, by Matthew A. Russell

Social image source: http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/bionicteaching/1375254387/
Web 2014, Lora Aroyo!

Introduction to the Social Web

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