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The Rise of Social Computing

Dr. Steve Han (steve@revu.co.kr)President and CEO / Opinity AP Inc.

Adjunct Professor / KAIST GSCT

“"How do you make the whole web a more social place?“

– Joe Kraus, director of product management at Google

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Social Computing

• Systems that support the gathering, representation, processing, use, and dissemination of information that is distributed across social collectivities such as teams, communities, organizations, and markets.

• Moreover, the information is not "anonymous" but is significant precisely because it is linked to people, who are in turn linked to other people.

– From Wikipedia

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Social Science

• The study of human society and of individual relationships in and to society.

• A scholarly or scientific discipline that deals with such study, generally regarded as including sociology, psychology, anthropology, economics, political science, and history.

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A Simple Definition from Wikipedia

Social Computing= Use of

Social Software or

Creating or recreating social

conventions and social contexts

online through the use of software

and technology

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Social Software

• Enables people to rendezvous, connect or collaborate through computer-mediated communication

• Tools– Instant Messaging

– Text Chat

– Blog

–Wiki

– RSS

– Forums

– Collaborative Software

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Social Software Building Blocks

• Identity - a way of uniquely identifying people in the system

• Presence - a way of knowing who is online, available or otherwise nearby

• Relationships - a way of describing how two users in the system are related

• Conversations - a way of talking to other people through the system

• Groups - a way of forming communities of interest • Reputation - a way of knowing the status of other people

in the system (who's a good citizen? who can be trusted?) • Sharing - a way of sharing things that are meaningful to

participants (like photos or videos)

– From Gene Smith, Matt Webb, Stewart Butterfield

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Social Computing Applications

• Social Networking

• Social Search

• Social Shopping

• Social Media

• Social Gaming

• And more …

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SOCIAL NETWORKING

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Market Share of U.S. Internet Visits to Top 5 Social Networking Websites

Rank Name Domain Domain Apr-08 Apr-07YoY %

Change

1 Myspace www.myspace.com 73.82% 77.87% -5%

2 Facebook www.facebook.com 14.80% 11.21% 32%

3 myYearbook www.myyearbook.com 1.33% 0.23% 475%

4 Bebo www.bebo.com 1.09% 1.25% -13%

5 BlackPlanet www.blackplanet.com 0.98% 0.85% 15%

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Social Networking by Regions

Popular Social Networking Websites Around The World

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Facebook Statistics

• Active users: Over 60 million

• Daily new user average: 250,000

• Page views: Over 65 billion per month

• Searches: Over 500 million per month

• Search index size: 200GB

• Largest countries: US, Canada, UK

– Remaining top 10 countries in order of active users (outside of the U.S., Canada

and UK): Australia, Turkey, Sweden, Norway, South Africa, France, Hong Kong.

• Largest networks: London, UK: 2,000,124 and Toronto, Canada:

1,012,604

• Traffic rank: 7th

• Photos: 1.7 billion (which averages to about 44 photos per user)

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Facebook Features

• The Wall– A space on each user's profile page that allows friends to post messages for the

user to see

• Photos– 1.7 billion user photos – 2.2 billion friends tagged in user photos – 160 terabytes of photo storage used with an extra 60 terabytes available – 60+ million photos added each week which take up 5 terabytes of disk space – 3+ billion photo images served to users every day – 100,000+ images served per second during our peak traffic windows

• Gifts• Marketplace• Pokes

– poke is a way to interact with your friends

• Status: current whereabouts and actions • Events• Applications

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F8 Platform

• FBML - Facebook Markup Language• FQL - Facebook Query Language• API - REST Web Service• FBJS - Facebook Javascript• Mobile - Facebook Platform for Mobile

• In little over 2 months 1000’s of new applications have been offered to Facebook users, with many, many more to come

• As of December 5, 2007, there are more than 10,000 applications

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OpenSocial

• A set of APIs for building social applications by accessing core functions and information at social networks– Profile Information (user data) – Friends Information (social graph) – Activities (things that happen, News Feed type stuff)

• Launch Partners– Hosts: participating social networks including Orkut,

Salesforce, LinkedIn, Ning, Hi5, Plaxo, Friendster, Viadeo and Oracle

– Developers: Flixster, iLike, RockYou and Slide

• No Markup Language � Javascript and HTML

• Applications: http://opensocial-examples.googlemashups.com/

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Social Graph

• The representation of our relationships

– Define our personal, family, or business communities on social networking websites

• Problems?

– Duplicating same Social Graph on multiple websites, resulting in inaccurate data and time spent managing it

• Opportunity

– Allow relationships to be quickly shared once and then replicated across multiple websites

– Reduce inefficient adding of relationships, improving the accuracy of the network, and providing users with control and management of their relationship data

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Data Portability

• Giving users the ability to take their identity and friends with them around the Web – http://dataportability.org/

• Friend Connect from Google– Give users a shortcut to connections

they’ve built up somewhere else

• MySpace Data Availability– Data sharing partnerships with Yahoo,

Ebay, Twitter and Photobucket

• Facebook Connect

Social Graph Platforms

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Strategies and Issues for the Social Graph

• The social graph is poised to replace the address book and contact list as the preferred organizing structure for personal and business relationships

• Ownership of the social graph is going to be a ground zero issuein 2008

• Many social networking services will adopt open data initiatives• Attempts to monetize social graphs will drive interest in regulation

and legislation.• The line is blurring between personal and business use of social

graphs.• Open Web identity, which will ultimately form the global "primary

key" for social graph nodes, will not get anywhere soon.• Making social networking "gardening" and administration easier

will drive new innovations.• The optional two-way confirmation of a social graph link becoming

standard• Social networking fatigue will not set in as perceived constraints

such as Dunbar's limit do not prove to be universal.

From Dion Hinchcliffe's Web 2.0 Blog

Four components of ubiquitous social networks

• Universal identities

– Opening of identity and profile systems from currently closed services

– A federated approach like OpenID?

• A single social graph

• Social context for activities

– The epitome of social networks being like air, when it’s integrated into everything that you do.

• A business model where social influence defines marketing value

– Marketing value based on how valuable I am in the context of my influence

– "PageRank of people”

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From: The future of social networks: Social networks will be like air by Charlene Li

SNS in Business: The Good

“They say it’s good to talk”

• Over 10% of social networkers visit social networking sites for business reasons – Emedia

• Sites like LinkedIn, Viadeo, Huddle and BT Tradespace

• Designed to help companies initiate and strengthen relationships with colleagues, clients, suppliers and partners, wherever they are in the world

• A medium that not only promotes exchange of knowledge, ideas and information, but can also make it an unusually energizing and rewarding experience.

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SNS in Business: The Bad

• 8% of workers owned up to spending between one and five hours a week on social networking sites while in the office

• The risk of indiscreetly broadcasting confidential commercial information and valuable intellectual property in a very public forum

• Spammers, virus-writers and their partners in crime who set up false profiles, trawl through social networking sites and piece together job titles, phone numbers, email addresses and so on

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Instant Messaging in the past?

Become an integral feature of global commerce

Social Search

• A type of search engine that determines the relevance of search results by considering the interactions or contributions of users

• “Social search to be an essential part of the leading search engine in coming years” - Marissa Mayer, Google’s VP in search

– Social search is any search aided by a social interaction or a social connection

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Types of Social Search

• Shared Bookmark and Web Pages– Voting of web users– Del.icio.us, SPURL, Yahoo's MyWeb, Furl, Bummy, SiteULike

• Collaborative directories– Limited scope with high quality, less spam– Open Directory Project, Prefound, Zimbio, Wikipedia

• Social Network Search– Topic Community-based niche search

– Eurekster’s Swicki, Rollyo

• Social Q&A sites– Yahoo Answers, Answerbag, Wondir, MSN Live QnA

Social Search thru Social Graph

• DELVER - searching the Web through the prism of the social graph

– When the user enters a search query, results related to, produced by, or tagged by members of her social network are given priority

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Social Media

• From Wikipedia

– The online tools and platforms that people use to share opinions, insights, experiences, and perspectives with each other.

– Social media can take many different forms, including text, images, audio, and video.

– Popular social mediums include blogs, message boards, podcasts, wikis, and vlogs

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How Big a Deal Is Social Media

• Technorati is tracking 112.8 million blogs and over 250 million pieces of tagged social media

• An estimated 100 million videos a day being watched on video sharing website

• More than 300 million profiles created by users on social network MySpace

Traditional Media vs. Social Media

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Characteristics of Social Media

• Can be updated

• Interact with readers

• Sense of Popularity in real time

• Can look at all archives and see all posts

• Mix media

• Free to publish

• Infinite

• Syndicatable and Linkable and Easily Reused

• Mashed up with other data from other services

- From Scobleizer.com

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Characteristics of Social Media

Participation Encourages contributions and feedback from everyone who is interested

Openness Encourage voting, comments and the sharing of information

Conversation Two-way conversation

Community Allows communities to form quickly and communicate effectively

Connectedness Thrive on their connectedness, making use of links to other sites, resources and people

- From “What Is Social Media? An e-Book from Spannerworks”

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Basic Form of Social Media

• Social Network: MySpace, Facebook, Bebo

• Blogs

• Wikis: Wikipedia

• Podcasts

• Forum

• Content Communities: Flickr (Photo), YouTube (Video), Del.icio.us (Bookmark), Digg (News)

• Microblogging: Twitter, Jaiku

Mass Social Media

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The Rise of Citizen Media

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How youths are using social media

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Source: “Creating and Connecting//Research and Guidelines on Online Social — and Educational — Networking”

by the National School Boards Association

Social Media and Business

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Social and Content Creation are High-Level Engagement

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Social Shopping

• Based on the wisdom of crowds– Recommend products to each other – What to buy and which ones have the most buzz

• 80% of online shopping time that is spent researching products rather than buying them

• Generally focusing on wish lists, recommendation lists or both– Tools to put widgets with recommended or desired products

up on their blogs or websites– The content is less about price comparison and instead

centers around an individual's own taste and style.

• Revenue from affiliate fees (via links to ecommerce sites) and/or via contextual advertising

Social Shopping Still Small, but Usage Increasing

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REVU 2.0: Social Shopping

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Online Consumers using UGC

forums, ratings, and reviews around the world

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Social Gaming

• Small, casual game applications designed to be played on social networks– Social Gaming Network, Zynga, Blake Commagere, Team Moulin,

Mytopia

– Gaming is becoming an increasingly social activity, nearly 60 percent of gamers playing with friends, 33 percent playing with siblings, and about 25 percent playing with spouses or parents � IDSA

• How to translate user engagement and virality into monetization?

• Conferences

– Social Gaming Summit@SF in June

– InterPlay

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Games on Facebook

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[ From Inside Facebook ]

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Social Computing and Enterprise

• Extension and virtualization of work, workforces, work associations, and the workplace itself

• Context and trust are critically important (e.g., identity, presence, culture, privacy)

• NOT limited to apply Web 2.0 tools to enterprises

• Microsoft and IBM’s Social Computing Group

New Niche Players

• Social Music Service – SellABand, Strayform, Amie Street, OurStage

• Collaborative investment – SocialPicks, Feeling Bullish, Bullpoo, Gradr, Stocktickr, Digstock

– Users enter their stock trading activities and thoughts then befriend and rate other users.

• Social Aggregators – FriendFeed, Socailthing!, Spokeo, Second Brain, Iminta

– Emerging new tools to better manage and track their various online relationships, both personal and professional

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Social Computing @ KAIST GSCT

• Augmented Tagging (Qtag) for Rating and Collective Opinions for VLSC

• Blogger Reputation

• User Participation and User Satisfaction

• Collective Filtering for Digital Media

• Attention

• Rich Media

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Ultimately…

• Second Life