Social Networks Systems Reading Group Jay Chen 10/25/06

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 ( vs phone etc) However, they do know of some correlations…

Ability to Build and Maintain Relationships Related to… Cost Geographic distance Time spent Synchrony vs. asynchrony Awareness Media richness

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”

Social Networks Not a new concept, (6 degrees of separation) People typically maintain close relationships among thousands of acquaintances Metcalf’s Law – value of a network increases n 2 to # of participants  Not exactly, but in theory.  Dependent upon interaction model

Social Networks on the Internet Not a new concept  BBS/Usenet  Web/  Chat / Video conferencing What is “new” are  “Weblogs” or “blogs”  Social Networking Websites

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 people’s “real life” relationships Growth of popular social network sites is very fast (Myspace 200,000 new users a day)

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

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

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

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

Recent malware exploiting social networks  Malicious Banner ads  Adware  Phishing attacks’  Customizable scripts Facebook’s controversial decision to make visible relationship actions to entire social group Everyone reading everyone’s shared information

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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