VU Amsterdam: Social Web Course: Lecture1: Introduction to Social Web

Social Web
2015
Lecture 1: Introduction to Social Web?
Lora Aroyo
The Network Institute
VU University Amsterdam

Course Organization
Image source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Old_book_-_Timeles

Goals of the course
Understand Try how the Social Web works
ü  What IS the Social Web Social Computing?
ü  What people DO on the Social Web?
ü  How is DATA on the Social Web ACCESSED?
ü  How is Social Web DATA used for STUDIES?
ü  What are typical Social Web APPLICATIONS?
ü  What are Social Web research CHALLENGES?
Social Web 2015, Lora Aroyo

You will learn about
ü  data formats
ü  social web platforms
ü  data mining, analysis, visualization
reuse across applications
ü  user-generated content
ü  personalization in Social Web apps
ü  interdisciplinary research
ü  critical thinking

Format of the course
ü  Lots of WORK, and lots of FUN
ü  Lots of 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
ü  Use name or VUNetID to identify yourself in website postings

How does it work
ü  before the Lectures: do the required reading assignments
ü  Assignments Hands-on: done in groups
ü  state who did what in the Acknowledgements section
ü  use document template: ACM SIG proceedings style; PDF only
ü  name of the ﬁle: [group#]_[handson#]; [group#]_[assignment#]
ü  title page of your docs: include names of all group members group#

Schedule
ü  Interactive Lectures: Mondays 1:30-3:15
assignments hands-on introduced during lecture
ü  Hands-on Sessions: Thursdays 11:00-12:45
practical exercises work on assignments
ü  Final Presentations: in week 12

Grading
ü  Assignment 1 (15%)
ü  Final Assignment: application presentation (15%)
ü  Final Assignment: individual report (30%)
ü  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?

http://blog.wiwo.de/look-at-it/2013/01/16/infograﬁk-von-2002-
bis-2012-das-internet-eine-dekade-spater/
http://proto-knowledge.blogspot.nl/2011_03_01_archive.html
The Rise of Users Content

http://www.mediabistro.com/alltwitter/ﬁles/2012/05/spending-time-online.gif

http://www.mediabistro.com/alltwitter/ﬁles/
2012/05/spending-time-online.gif

What do those
numbers mean?
Image source: http://clareactman22.blogspot.com/2010/06/meaning-of-life.html

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?

1969 - WWW
http://www.creativeramblings.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/style1-1000px-rec7-MILLION.jpg

1994 – Last.fm

2003 - Twitter

2007 – Google+

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)

Community-based Systems
ü Participation vs. lurking
ü Social capital
ü Social networking
ü Trust reputation
ü Privacy presence
Peter Brusilovsky, SocialWeb 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
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.
“ ... eight years after its computer-
hacking CEO Mark Zuckerberg started
the service at Harvard University.

2013: Facebook Graph Search

http://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2013/10/24/facebook-graph-search

Jack Dorsey launches Twitter in July
2006 and by 2012 it has:
•  500 million users
•  340 million tweets daily
•  1.6 billion search queries daily
•  is in the10th most visited
websites
•  becomes the the SMS of the
Internet
http://blog.alivenow.in/2011/10/infographic-140-characters-journey.html/http://blog.alivenow.in/2011/10/infographic-140-characters-journey.html/

Library of Congress archive of publicTwitter
messages reached 170 billion tweets and
rising, by about 500 million tweets a day
9000 tweets/sec during MTVVideo
Music Awards (Beyonce pregnant);
7200 tweets/sec before the end of
WC for women’s football (Japan
beats US)
In 2011
In 2012
8000 tweets/sec during
Madonna’s performance
In 2014

•  launched June 28, 2011: since
then 500 million users (2012),
235 million active (monthly)
•  social layer”: not just a single
site, but an overarching layer”
•  Data Liberation policy

G+ (Re-)Sharing

G+ What’s Hot Trending

G+ Hagouts

G+ Events

2013
2013

end 2013

•  interdisciplinary study
•  social structure where technology puts power in communities (not
institutions)
•  internet provides a good platform for emerging social structures
•  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.*
* Forrester Research (2008), http:// wwwforrester.com/ResearchThemes/SocialComputing
Social Computing

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
•  beyond email, text messaging mobile
phone
•  asynchronous (not requiring real-time
response)
•  a lot of communication seems irrelevant
trivial
•  some can be helpful interesting
•  celebrities organizations use it to
communicate with their fan bases
audience
•  many people (especially the teenagers)
addicted to this new mode of
communication

New Form of Communities
•  Social Web sites are in essence online communities
•  Groups around a number of natural attributes of the
members, e.g. schools attended, employers, cities of
residence.
•  Groups around any type of interest, hobby, or cause, where
people can help one another with information, advice, and
personal networks
e.g. the role of communities in the Arab Spring, unrests inTurkey, Ukraine,
Russia Olympics, OccupyWall Street, etc.

New Source of Knowledge
•  beyond what search engines can dig into
•  people can dig into their network of connections to ﬁnd
answers to questions
•  folklore knowledge
•  friends-based news updates
•  friends-based serendipity
•  worldwide directories of people
and concepts

New Source of Entertainment
•  Most people need to entertain
themselves to enjoy life, to recharge
themselves, and to pass the time
•  That s why people have accounts on
several social Web sites, and visit
them rather diligently and regularly
•  People got catapulted to worldwide
fame after they appeared on YouTube

New Venue for Self-expression
•  a surprisingly large number of people have
had a strong desire for self-expression and
desire for self-satisfaction that comes from
helping others
•  a major reason for the Wikipedia success,
where more than 10 mil articles have been
contributed by thousands of volunteers
without ﬁnancial incentives
•  the personal posting many people do appears
to help them to derive a sense of self-
assurance and belonging

New Venue for Self-expression
•  a surprisingly large number of people
have had a strong desire for self-
expression and desire for self-
satisfaction that comes from helping
others
•  a major reason for the Wikipedia
success, where more than 10 mil
articles have been contributed by
thousands of volunteers without
ﬁnancial incentives
•  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
ü Social networking sites (open vs. closed)
•  General-purpose, e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn
•  Vertical, e.g. Dogster, Couchsurﬁng
ü 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 socialWeb sites. Information Systems 35, 215–236

Diversity in Cultures
•  MySpace: US abroad
•  Friendster: Paciﬁc Islands
•  Orkut: Brazil, India
•  Mixi: Japan
•  LunarStorm: Sweden
•  Hyves: NL
•  Grono: Poland
•  Hi5: South America, Europe
•  Bebo: UK, New Zealand, Australia
•  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
•  aSmallWorld BeautifulPeople: restricted access - appear
selective elite
•  Couchsurﬁng: activity-centered
•  BlackPlanet: identity-driven
•  MyChurch: afﬁliation-focused
•  Usenet public discussion forums: structured by topics
•  SNS are structured as personal networks
•  egocentric”: individual at the center of their own community
•  mirror unmediated social structures

SNS: Features
•  Personal proﬁles
•  Establishing online
connections
•  Participating in online
groups
•  Communicating with online
connections
•  Sharing user generated
content
•  Expressing opinions
•  Finding information
•  Retaining users

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.)
Why there is no ‘DISLIKE’ button in FB? Should there be?
For example, Digg has two buttons, ‘digg it’ ‘bury’

Reflections ...
•  Twitter profile vs. Facebook profile?
•  Find friends on different networks?
•  How does LinkedIn facilitate the forming joining of groups? FB? Google+? Others?
•  Pros cons of (a)symmetry of friendship?
•  Twitter vs. Facebook vs. Flickr vs. Vine differences in terms facilitating
communication?
•  How often do you experience problems of duplication of content shared across
different sites?
•  FB vs Google+ actions for retaining users?

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
Where do YOU come in

Peter Brusilovsky, SocialWeb Course, University of Pittsburgh
The New Web:
The Web of People

Hands-on Teaser
•  ﬁrst (basic) taste of social web data analysis:
http://bit.ly/SocWeb_Ex1
•  some Python command line experience
•  Twitter data
•  check out Getting Started Guide on course website
http://semanticweb.cs.vu.nl/socialweb2014
•  check out the exercises in the book:
Mining the Social Web (Second Edition),
by Matthew A. Russell

VU Amsterdam: Social Web Course: Lecture1: Introduction to Social Web

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VU Amsterdam: Social Web Course: Lecture1: Introduction to Social Web