alexmikro.net » social networking

Social search now by Google

Alexander Mikroyannidis — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 19:41:05 +0000

Google has just launched a new search service based on social data: Google Social Search. It works like this: if you have a Google profile, you can add the social networks you’re a member of (e.g. Twitter or FriendFeed). Then, when you do a Google search, you will also get results that have to do with your friends, like a post from a friend’s blog. Of course, if you don’t add this information to your Google profile, or if you are not logged into your Google account when you do a search, you won’t get any social results.

Here’s a demo video of this new service. You might notice that Google is quite concerned about privacy issues, reassuring us about the transparency of the service throughout the video:

Our privacy on the Social Web

Alexander Mikroyannidis — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 16:17:40 +0000

How is well is our privacy protected on the Social Web? Of course, you can (and should) take some basic precaution measures, like not giving away sensitive information that can be used for financial fraud against you. However, there are issues beyond our hands that depend on how the Social Web handles our information.

Google recently published a paper entitled “(Under)mining Privacy in Social Networks”. The paper outlines some possible threats and proposes a number of counter-measures. In particular, the issues identified have to do with:

Activity Streams: These are collections of actions we perform on the Social Web, e.g. adding a friend, or posting a video. We may not be aware of all the actions fed into our activity stream. Also, we may not be able to control who sees our activity stream. For example, when Facebook introduced Beacon, purchases that I would make on eBay would be fed into my activity stream and would also be available to my friends.
Unwelcome Linkage: This happens when web links reveal information about us that we did not intend to.
Merging Social Graphs: It is possible to uncover personal information by merging data from different Social Web sites.

Getting complete control over the construction and publication of your activity stream is the key. The authors propose a solution in the form of a privacy warning system. When you upload information on the Social Web, you should be warned whether this information could be used to make connections about you.

The Social Web in plain English

Alexander Mikroyannidis — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 11:13:07 +0000

The Social Web offers lots of opportunities for social networking. Through sites like Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn, you can connect with friends from real life, make new ones, and keep in touch with them. Also, through microblogging sites like Twitter, you can let your friends know what you’re up to any time of the day. It can get pretty addictive!

The Common Craft channel on YouTube has a series of clips explaining these (and many more) technologies in “plain English”. The following two clips are about social networking and microblogging:

The Social Web and You

Alexander Mikroyannidis — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 09:17:29 +0000

Web 2.0 can best be described as the accumulation of new web-based collaboration technologies, such as social networking sites, social bookmarking sites, wikis, blogs, and more. The success of Web 2.0 is mainly attributed to the fact that it appeals to the public through services, like syndication and tagging, that allow people to easily publish and share content. The wide acceptance of these technologies has resulted into what is sometimes referred to as the Social Web, a medium for the communication and collaboration of online communities.

A popular way for organizing content in the Social Web is labeling it with descriptive terms, which are called keywords or tags. This bottom-up collaborative process, which is called tagging, has been successfully used in most Social Web applications, where users tag web pages, photos and videos, so that they can later retrieve them, as well as share them with other users having common interests. The sets of categories derived from tagging are commonly referred to as folksonomies.

The Social Web has transformed each one of us from a passive receiver to an active producer of web content. The following video illustrates how: