Lecture 1 of The Social Web Course 2016

1. Social WebSocial Web
20162016
Lecture 1: Introduction to Social WebLecture 1: Introduction to Social Web
Davide Ceolin (credits to: Lora Aroyo)
The Network Institute
VU University Amsterdam

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

3. Goals of the course
Understand &Try how the Social Web works
 What IS the Social Web & Social Computing?
 What people DO on the Social Web?
 How is DATA on the Social Web ACCESSED?
 How is Social Web DATA used for STUDIES?
 How to make the Social Web PERSONALIZED?
 What are typical Social Web APPLICATIONS?
 What are Social Web research CHALLENGES?
Social Web 2016, Davide Ceolin

4. You will learn about
 data formats
 social web platforms
 data mining, analysis, visualization &
reuse across applications
 user-generated content
 personalization in Social Web apps
 interdisciplinary research
 critical thinking
Social Web 2016, Davide Ceolin

5. Format of the course
 Lots of WORK, and lots of FUN
 Lots of interaction
• post a question or a discussion point by Friday10:00
• vote on questions by Friday 17:00
• discuss on selected topics during lectures on Monday
• group work during hands-on sessions
• presentations of final assignments
 Use name or VUNetID to identify yourself in website postings
Social Web 2016, Davide Ceolin

6. How does it work
 before the Lectures: do the required reading & assignments
 Assignments & Hands-on: done in groups
 state who did what in the “Acknowledgements” section
 use document template: ACM SIG proceedings style; PDF only
 name of the file: [group#]_[handson#]; [group#]_[assignment#]
 title page of your docs: include names of all group members & group#
Social Web 2016, Davide Ceolin

7. Schedule
 Interactive Lectures: Mondays 9:00-10:45
assignments & hands-on introduced during lecture
 Hands-on Sessions: Thursdays 9:00-10:45
practical exercises & work on assignments
 Intermediate deadlines + Final Presentations
Social Web 2016, Davide Ceolin

8. Grading
 Assignment 1 (15%)
 Assignment 2 (15%)
 Assignment 3 (15%)
 Final Assignment: application & presentation (15%)
 Final Assignment: individual report (30%)
 Questions/Discussion (10%)
Social Web 2016, Davide Ceolin

9. VU Lustrum
Final Project Theme:The
Network Institute
The best final project will be
presented at theVU Lustrum
Conference
http://www.vu.nl/nl/lustrum
In collaboration with the
Text Mining Course
Social Web 2016, Davide Ceolin

10. Social Web 2014, Lora Aroyo
Why Social Web?

11. “digital technology
is changing both how words and ideas are created
and proliferate, and how they are studied.”
Social Web 2016, Davide Ceolin

12. 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.”
Social Web 2016, Davide Ceolin

13. The Onlife Manifesto
“The ever-increasing pervasiveness of ICTs shakes established
reference frameworks through the following transformations:
i.the blurring of the distinction between reality and virtuality;
ii.the blurring of the distinctions between human, machine and
nature;
iii.the reversal from information scarcity to information abundance;
and
iv.the shift from the primacy of entities to the primacy of
interactions.” [Floridi et al., 2015]
Social Web 2016, Davide Ceolin

14. How much content is
consumed & created
every second?
Social Web 2016, Davide Ceolin

15. http://wearesocial.sg/blog/2016/01/digital-2016/
http://proto-knowledge.blogspot.nl/2011_03_01_archive.html
The Rise of Users &
Content
Social Web 2016, Davide Ceolin

16. http://wearesocial.sg/blog/2016/01/digital-2016/
The Rise of Users &
Content
Social Web 2016, Davide Ceolin

17. What do those numbers
mean?
Image source: http://clareactman22.blogspot.com/2010/06/meaning-of-life.html
Social Web 2016, Davide Ceolin

18. 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
Social Web 2016, Davide Ceolin

19. How did it all start?
Social Web 2016, Davide Ceolin

20. 1969 - WWW
http://www.creativeramblings.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/style1-1000px-rec7-MILLION.jpg
Social Web 2016, Davide Ceolin

21. 1994 – Last.fm
http://www.creativeramblings.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/style1-1000px-rec7-MILLION.jpg
Social Web 2016, Davide Ceolin

22. 2003 - Twitter
http://www.creativeramblings.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/style1-1000px-rec7-MILLION.jpg
Social Web 2016, Davide Ceolin

23. 2007 – Google+
http://www.creativeramblings.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/style1-1000px-rec7-MILLION.jpg
Social Web 2016, Davide Ceolin

24. Highlights
http://www.booksaresocial.com/social-media-timeline/#lightbox/0/
Social Web 2016, Davide Ceolin

25. The Big Ones
Social Web 2016, Davide Ceolin

26. 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)
Social Web 2016, Davide Ceolin

27. Community-based Systems
Participation vs. lurking
Social capital
Social networking
Trust & reputation
Privacy & presence
Peter Brusilovsky, Social Web Course, University of Pittsburgh
Social Web 2016, Davide Ceolin

28. 2004: Facebook
distinct college networks only
(Harvard-only SNS)
Social Web 2016, Davide Ceolin

29. 2005: Facebook
including other universities, high school students, professionals
inside corporate networks, and eventually - everyone
ability for outside developers to build "Applications"
Social Web 2016, Davide Ceolin

30. 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
Social Web 2016, Davide Ceolin

31. 2010: Facebook
Open Graph
Social Web 2016, Davide Ceolin

32. 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."
Social Web 2016, Davide Ceolin

33. 2013: Facebook Graph Search
Social Web 2016, Davide Ceolin

34. 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/
Social Web 2016, Davide Ceolin

35. Library of Congress archive of public Twitter
messages reached 170 billion tweets and
rising, by about 500 million tweets a day
9000 tweets/sec during MTV Video
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
Social Web 2016, Davide Ceolin

36. • 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
Social Web 2016, Davide Ceolin

37. G+ Hagouts
Social Web 2016, Davide Ceolin

38. G+ Events
Social Web 2016, Davide Ceolin

39. G+ Pages

40. Social Web 2016, Davide Ceolin
https://leveragenewagemedia.com/blog/category/social-media/
Comparison

41. • 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
Social Web 2016, Davide Ceolin

42. “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
Social Web 2016, Davide Ceolin

43. 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
Social Web 2016, Davide Ceolin

44. 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 in Turkey, Ukraine,
Russia Olympics, Occupy Wall Street, etc.
Social Web 2016, Davide Ceolin

45. New Form of Collaboration
• The Social Web enables
innovative types of
collaboration
• E.g., Github for collaborative
coding
• Overleaf,Authorea and
Sharelatex for collaborative
writing
Social Web 2016, Davide Ceolin

46. 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
Social Web 2016, Davide Ceolin

47. 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
Social Web 2016, Davide Ceolin

48. NewVenue 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 2016, Davide Ceolin

49. New Economic Models
• “Sharing economy (also
known as shareconomy or
collaborative consumption)
refers to peer-to-peer-based
sharing of access to goods
and services (coordinated
through community-based
online services).” [Hamari et
al. 2015]
• Barter, and much more.
http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Honeycomb.jpg
Social Web 2016, Davide Ceolin

50. Social web sites
=
social networking sites +
social media sites
Social Web 2016, Davide Ceolin

51. Social Sites Categories
 Social networking sites (open vs. closed)
• General-purpose, e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn
• Vertical, e.g. Dogster, Couchsurfing
 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 social Web sites. Information Systems 35, 215–236
Social Web 2016, Davide Ceolin

52. 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
Social Web 2015, Lora Aroyo

53. http://www.adweek.com/socialtimes/wp-
content/uploads/sites/2/2015/09/WorldMapOfSocialNetworksAugust2015.jpg
Country diversity
Social Web 2016, Davide Ceolin

54. 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
Social Web 2016, Davide Ceolin

55. 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
Social Web 2016, Davide Ceolin

56. 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.)
For example, Digg has two buttons, ‘digg it’ &‘bury’
Similarly, YouTube has ‘like’ and ‘dislike’
Also Facebook announced a ‘dislike’ button.
Social Web 2016, Davide Ceolin

57. Social Web 2016, Davide Ceolin

58. 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?
Social Web 2016, Davide Ceolin

59. 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
Social Web 2015, Lora Aroyo

60. Hands-onTeaser
• 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
https://thesocialweb2016.wordpress.com/hands-on-materials/
• check out the exercises in the book:
Mining the SocialWeb (Second Edition),
by Matthew A. Russell
Social Web 2016, Davide Ceolin