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Emerging Social Networking Technologies and Possible Implications for Libraries

Emerging Social Networking Technologies and Possible Implications for Libraries. John Breslin. john.breslin@deri.org http://www.johnbreslin.com/. Lir Annual Seminar 14 th April 2008. A little bit about myself!. Hello, World!. 1990: VMS MAP.COM. 1998: Forum* on the Irish Games Network.

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Emerging Social Networking Technologies and Possible Implications for Libraries

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  1. Emerging Social Networking Technologies and Possible Implications for Libraries John Breslin john.breslin@deri.org http://www.johnbreslin.com/ Lir Annual Seminar 14th April 2008

  2. A little bit about myself! Hello, World! 1990: VMS MAP.COM 1998: Forum* on the Irish Games Network 2000: boards.ie Ltd. Formed 2004: Researcher at DERI, NUI Galway 2008: 10th Anniversary*

  3. What is DERI? • Digital Enterprise Research Institute • Established at NUI Galway in June 2003 • One of the largest “Semantic Web” research institutes • About €25 million in funding from SFI, EI and the EU • Now has 128 members (staff and students) • Two main research clusters: • Semantic Web • Semantic Reality • About 100 project partners

  4. We all live in a social network… • …of friends, family, workmates, fellow students, acquaintances, etc.

  5. Everyone’s connected… • Friend of a friend, or “dúirt bean liom go ndúirt bean leí” • Theory that anybody is connected to everybody else (on average) by no more than six degrees of separation

  6. Sociologist Milgram conducted this experiment: Random people from Nebraska were to send a letter (via intermediaries) to a stock broker in Boston Could only send to someone with whom they were on a first-name basis Among the letters that found the target, the average number of links was six Stanley Milgram (1933-1984) Milgram’s six degrees of separation theory

  7. Number of links required to connect scholars to Erdős via co-authorship of papers Erdős wrote 1500+ papers with 507 co-authors Jerry Grossman’s site allows mathematicians to compute their Erdős numbers: http://www.oakland.edu/enp/ Connecting path lengths, among mathematicians only: The average is 4.65 The maximum is 13 Paul Erdős (1913-1996) The Erdős number

  8. Trying to make friends Latvia Uldis DERI John Clare Bros John C Andrew Dublin Valdis Met Marc Marc and I already had friends in common! I later found out my cousin Ailish also knows Andrew. The “small world” phenomenon…

  9. “It’s a small world after all!”, by Kentaro Toyama Ranjeet Prof. Sastry Prof. Veni Prof. Kannan Prof. Balki Ravi’s Father Ravi Pres. Kalam Prof. Prahalad Pawan Prof. Jhunjhunwala Aishwarya PM Manmohan Singh Dr. Isher Judge Ahluwalia Amitabh Bachchan Nandana Sen Dr. Montek Singh Ahluwalia Prof. Amartya Sen Bash Kentaro Sharad Prof. McDermott Anandan Venkie Karishma Maithreyi Soumya * Source: http://research.microsoft.com/toyama/talks/

  10. Boxed version of the game Invented by three Albright College students in 1994: Craig Fass, Brian Turtle, Mike Ginelly Goal is to connect any actor to Kevin Bacon, by linking actors who have acted in the same movie The “Oracle of Bacon” website uses IMDB to find the shortest link between any two actors: http://oracleofbacon.org/ The Kevin Bacon game

  11. Total number of actors in database (as of 15th October): 893283 Average path length to Kevin: 2.957 Actor closest to “center”: Rod Steiger (2.68) Rank of Kevin, in terms of closeness to center: 1049th Most actors are within three links of each other! The Kevin Bacon game (2)

  12. From the beginning, the Internet was a medium for connecting not only machines but people Idea behind SNSs is to make the aforementioned real-world relationships explicitly defined online 2002: Friendster 2003: MySpace, LinkedIn, hi5 2004: orkut, Facebook 2005: Bebo What are social networking services (SNSs)?

  13. The 10 most popular domains ~= 40% percent of all page views on the Web (Compete, November 2006) Nearly half of those views were from the social networking services MySpace and Facebook – wow! And that’s just in the top 10… Alexa rankings: #5: MySpace #6: Facebook #8: hi5 #10: orkut #18: Friendster #119: Bebo #212: LinkedIn The popularity of SNSs

  14. SNSs attracting lots of monetary / media attention • Friendster – $13M VC • Tribe – $6.3M VC • LinkedIn – $4.7M VC • Bebo – $15M VC, sold to AOL for $850M • MySpace – Sold for $580M • Friends Reunited – Sold for £120M • Facebook – $1B Y! offer, 1.6% sold to MS for $250M

  15. Other niche SNSs • Age: • Multiply (seniors and settled); Boomj (baby boomers); Rezoom • Country of origin: • Silicon India • Gender: • CaféMom; MothersClick; Sister Woman (female friends) • Occupation: • ModelsHotel; FanLib (fiction writers); AdGabber; TheFeng.org (financial services executives); MilitarySpot (military families); Sermo (doctors and physicians) • Business and careers: • ConnectBuzz; Doostang; Execunet; Netshare; Ryze; Viadeo; Xing • Interests: • TradeKing (investors); StreetCred (hip hop); IndiePublic (art and design); PeerTrainer (health and wellbeing) * Source: Paul Gibler, Wisconsin Technology Network

  16. Allows a user to create and maintain an online network of close friends or business associates for social and professional reasons: Friendships and relationships Offline meetings Curiosity about others Business opportunities Job hunting … For social good: Kevin Bacon – sixdegrees.org Sun – openeco.org Features of social networking services: Network of friends (inner circle) Person surfing Private messaging Discussion forums Events management Blogging and commenting Media uploading Motivation for social networking services

  17. Big SNSs (in terms of total number of accounts) • myspace.com 110,000,000 • facebook.com 98,000,000 • habbo.com 86,000,000 • spaces.live.com 40,000,000 • orkut.com 59,000,000 • hi5.com 70,000,000 • friendster.com 58,000,000 • xanga.com 40,000,000 • classmates.com 40,000,000 • flixster.com 36,000,000 • netlog.com 32,000,000 • reunion.com 28,000,000 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_networking_websites

  18. Enterprise 2.0 • Web 2.0 includes applications such as blogs, wikis, RSS feeds and social networking, while Enterprise 2.0 is the packaging of those technologies in both corporate IT and workplace environments • “Enterprise 2.0 is the use of a freeform social software platform inside an organisation that allows them to do things that are important”, Harvard Business School’s Professor Andrew McAfee • “There are direct enterprise equivalents [to Facebook]. You can ask people the status of their projects, what they’re working on, are they travelling, things they’ve learned. All of these things would be very valuable inside an enterprise.”

  19. Fears if employees are using external SNSs • Chief information officers from large companies (e.g. financial institutions) block employee access to public social networks: • There is a fear of losing control of information in response to the “open” ethos of the Internet; security issues • Accounting firms need to ensure their employeesdon’t provide tax or financial advice online to comply with regulatory guidelines and disclosure legislation • Requires safeguards in terms of tracking documents, discussions: • Awareness Inc.’s system tracks SNS posts and sends potentially inflammatory posts into moderation boxes for manager review • Need to comply with company, legal or state regulations

  20. Some negative aspects for SNSs and organisations • Can sap employee productivity? • Potential violations / breaches of company protocol? • Forrester Research recently found that 14% of companies have disciplined employees and 5% fired them for offences related to social networking • A poll by Sophos found that 66% of workers think their colleagues share too much information on Facebook • 50% of companies (including Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, UBS, and Lehman Brothers) block access to Facebook according to the same Sophos survey

  21. What opportunities are there for organisations? • A useful means for self-promotion, marketing products online, and attracting new hires: • Can promote products or services through targeted advertising and viral marketing • Get feedback (directly, indirectly) about your products or services, especially from influential hubs / connectors • Discover new recruits; network with peers • An opportunity to create an internal network for sharing information and expertise: • Share information within a business’ own walls • Efficient way to mine for in-house expertise (“expert finding”) • Reduce the time spent mailing docs and e-mailing comments • Encourage employees, alumni, interns, new hires, retired staff, other stakeholders to interact with each other

  22. The positives of SNSs for employees • “Bosses warm up to social networking on company time” • www.technewsworld.com/story/social-networking/59315.html • “Corporate adoption of social networking tools, has been considerable due to their effectiveness in cutting across barriers in large corporations.” • “Social networking has become a tool to drive corporate innovation.”

  23. SNSs for informal learning in organisations • Figures estimate that 75-80% of learning is done informally, and with 40-50% of employees accessing information and knowledge from social media sites, Web 2.0 is potentially responsible for a large proportion of this informal learning (up to 30-40%): • “More than 40 percent of business users consume social networking applications like blogs, intranets and RSS [really simple syndication] feeds more than three times a week.” • “More than 30 percent of respondents read information in wikis, social networks, discussion boards and videoconferences / IMs more than three times a week.” • “More than 20 percent of respondents contribute to blogs, intranets, social networks, discussion boards, video conferencing and tagging [social media sites] more than three times a week.”

  24. Elgg, social networking software for education

  25. LibraryThing, find out who else reads like you

  26. All Consuming, what have you read today?

  27. Twine, a knowledge networking tool (In beta, ask John for an invite.)

  28. CiteULike, get publication references from peers

  29. Social networks, media and digital libraries • A move from the Web to a “Social Web”: • Blogs, Wikipedia, Flickr, etc. • All powered by people and user-generated content • The blogosphere doubles in size every six months • Digital libraries need to participate in this ecosystem: • Contribute metadata to the ecosystem • Leverage the semantics being created by users

  30. Previously in digital content and digital libraries • Digital libraries provide: • Databases and archiving (storage) • Digital bibliographic descriptions (metadata) • Full-text search (interface) • Advantages: • Content is accessible online • Federations of libraries, have to visit less places • Disadvantages: • Lonely users! • If we need to find the right keywords, there is no one to ask when we do not know them (e.g. “man without an ear” paintings) • Still many problems with connecting to other sources

  31. Possibilities with today’s interlinked social media • Towards social semantic information spaces: • Semantic descriptions (interconnected metadata) • Annotations provided by users (social metadata) • Collaborative search and browsing (interface) • Features associated with this: • Search and browsing based on semantics empowers users • Users contribute to the classification process • Users can understand community-driven annotations • Users enhance digital content using blogs, wikis on the side • Library can interact with other Internet services

  32. JeromeDL, DERI’s social semantic digital library • Integrated social networking with user profiling • Enhanced personalised search facility • Interconnects meaningful descriptions of resources with social media • Extensible access control based on social networks • Collaborative browsing and filtering • Dynamic collections • Integration with other Web 2.0 services • Open source!

  33. Metadata and services from JeromeDL

  34. Search and browsing based on semantics • Natural language templates: • Perform complex queries using natural language • Can be created and modified based on the needs of users • Semantic query expansion: • Refines query based on current context • Extensible context definition: user profile, history of queries, current query, etc. • Search beyond a single JeromeDL installation: • Distributed search via extensible library protocol, HyperCuP • Federated search via hierarchically-ordered JeromeDLs • OAI-PMH, to import from or export to other libraries • Browsing via facets, tags and treemaps, place and time

  35. Identity, access control, social semantic collaborative filtering • Identity management based on social network standards like FOAF • Extensible access control to resources and services, based on IP or position within the social network • Social semantic collaborative filtering in JeromeDL: • Acquiring knowledge is often done via informal communication (“word of mouth”) • Most people classify (filter) their information in bookmark folders (user-oriented taxonomies) • Peers can then share (and collaborate on) the information (community-driven taxonomies) • As a result, knowledge “flows“ from the expert through the social network to the user • System also amasses a lot of information on user / community profiles (context)

  36. Towards “Library 2.0” • Users become active producers of the content and metadataJeromeDL can turn a single resource into a blog post: • Users can then annotate it • Users can also rank it • Metadata about user annotations is exported for other services • Community annotations for multimedia: • Region of interest (ROI) tagging in photos • Time-tagging of video streams • Other Web 2.0 services can easily hook up to the information and services provided by JeromeDL • e.g. notitio.us

  37. Questions and answers ?

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