Report of the W3C Workshop on Social Networking

Posted on February 4, 2009 by Ivan Herman

W3C has published a report from the Workshop on the Future of Social Networking. Observations from the fifty-five organizations that participated (and submitted 72 position papers) include:

  • By enabling users to share profiles and data across networks, social networking sites can grow further and open possibilities for a decentralized architecture for the Social Web.
  • Contextual information, especially for mobile device users, can significantly enrich the social networking user experience.
  • Many users remain unaware of the impact of social networking on their privacy.

The report highlights the need for an interoperable distributed social Web framework and suggests concrete next steps for W3C. W3C now welcomes interested parties to contribute to public discussion. See also video highlights from the Workshop or read the press release.

About Ivan Herman

Ivan Herman is the Semantic Web Activity Lead at W3C. He graduated as a mathematician at the Eötvös Loránd University of Budapest, Hungary, in 1979. After a brief scholarship at the Université Paris VI he joined the Hungarian research institute in computer science (SZTAKI) where he worked for 6 years. He left Hungary in 1986 and, after a few years in industry, he joined the Centre for Mathematics and Computer Sciences (CWI) in Amsterdam where he has held a tenure position since 1988. He received a PhD degree in Computer Science in 1990 at the Leiden University, in the Netherlands. Ivan joined the W3C team as Head of Offices in January 2001 while maintaining his position at CWI. He served as Head of Offices until June 2006, when he was asked to take the Semantic Web Activity Lead position.

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