Social Software Articles
Important articles in the field of social software.
English
German
- Jarke, M., & Klamma, R. (2007). Social Software und Reflektive Informationssysteme. In Architekturen und Prozesse (pp. 51-62). Berlin Heidelberg: Springer.
Skyrails - 3D interactive network vizualization
Skyrails is an interesting project to vizualize networks in an interactive 3D environment. The tools is available as beta and is able to read pajek and netdraw data. The download is available here:
http://cgi.cse.unsw.edu.au/~wyos/skyrails/.
Here is a short video demonstration:
Level of Social Networks? How to define a social networks in digital media?
Social networks in social science are characterised by the social interaction between two actors/nodes (Wasserman & Faust, Jansen). For the use of social network methods in information retrieval it is most interesting, where social networks can be found in digital media? How can we identify and extract social networks in digital media? What are the criteria to identify a social network? How to determine the tie strength between actors?
Social network sites are obvious choices, where the connection between actors are sometimes explicitly made public. There are lots of studies of these social networks. Email communication and Instant Messengers are another type, where social networks can be extracted. Networks within scientific publications are also cited often for social network analysis, because most of the publication data is available electronically by now. In this case either the co-author network or citation networks are analysed. I'll try to categorise in this post.
Social Network Literature and History
This table is based on the work in progress article "SNS History" from Danah Boyd, which tries to draw the history of social network sites.
Profile centric
Sites, where a personal profile has to be created and links to friends are displayed.
| year | name | type/description |
|---|---|---|
| 1997 | SixDegrees.com | First Network, that allowed public profile and friend list |
| 1999 | LiveJournal.com | Blogging system and blog hoster with addition buddy list functions. |
| 2000 | Xanga.com | Livejournal clone |
| 2000 | SkyBlog.com | Livejournal clone |
| 2001 | CyWorld.com | Korean social network |
| 2001 | Ryze.com | first business oriented social network |
| 2002 | Friendster.com | social complement to ryze.com |
| 2003 | LinkedIn.com | business oriented social network |
| 2003 | Tribe.net | designed for classifieds but adopted by the Burning Man community |
| 2003 | MySpace.com | to compete with friendster |
| 2004 | Orkut.com | Google's social network to compete with myspace.com, became very popular in Brazil |
| 2004 | Mixi.jp | Japan |
| 2004 | Lunarstorm.se | Sweden |
| 2004 | Grono.net | Poland |
| 2004 | Hi5.com | Smaller south american countries |
| 2004 | Xing.com (openBC) | Germany/Europe business oriented social network |
| 2004 | Bebo.com | United Kingdom, New Zealand, and Australia |
| 2004 | Facebook.com | Social network for students |
| 2005 | studivz.net | German social network for students |
Application centric
Sites with a specific goal/target group and added social network features.
| year | name | type/description |
|---|---|---|
| 2003 | del.ico.us | social bookmarking |
| 2003 | last.fm | music recommendation social network |
| 2004 | flickr.com | photo sharing social network |
| 2005 | youtube.com | video sharing social network |
List of social network publications:
Historically we can see a shift in the primary focus of networking/network sites, also. As Paul DiPerma suggested in his paper "The Web Connector Model: New Implications for Social Change" sites in the early phases used the created network to find/match a single person (node) to another. The main reason was finding an appropriate match. Sites like match.com, classmates.com or ebay.com (a bit far). The second wave that we now see uses the network for personal or professional use to keep in touch with your contacts (either on- or offline contacts).
Cyberculture Book Reviews
There is a very comprehensive list of book reviews from the Resource Center for Cyberculture Studies (RCCS), which is updated frequently. The list includes reviews and even author repsonses to this reviews. Very valuable to get an overview.
