SocialNetworks2009Workshop/AppropriateArchitecturesNotes

Appropriate Architectures for Social Networking - Notes

Agenda

Agenda

Description

Date

2009-01-15

The Social Web: Small Businesses / Big Solutions

Timothée Anglade, AF83

Talk

Changed a bit the title of the paper.
We need to worry about sustainability. Make sure that the outcome of the workshop does not go to waste.
Distributed social networking. Questions. What do we do? What do we need?
We do not need yet another authentication stuff. Let's focus on the two main ones: OpenID, OAUth. They came from the need for privacy and trust. Should people care? Yes. Do they care? No.
Being business-friendly is a double-edged sword. Users don't care so "we" (businesses) don't care.
There was a big Twitter phishing problem a couple of weeks ago, and suddenly, people start to care.
That's one reason to drive, but it's not enough. Backup plan:
- step 1: show the money that may be made by relying on OpenID and so on
- step 2: show the money
- step 3: show the money
You need to tell businesses that there is a financial interest, that business models do exist.
Data portability. Sounds a bit like a religious thing, but it's also money. Why? It relies on the notion of liquidity. In economics, it's the capacity to transform money from one form to one other (checks to money). I want to be able to convert my Facebook pictures to Flickr pictures. I don't want to have to use all the hooks I need to today.
What's in them for the business? Free market. And more than that. Free *niche* markets. Where you can focus on a tiny little part of the huge pie. Example: event-driven businesses. Facebook tells me I missed a birthday, that there's a party tonight. It means more gifts may be bought. Not much, but that's still money.
What can we liquidify? Authentication. Done (OpenID). Authorization. Done as well. Assets (your pictures, music, ...). That's the main thing that is missing right now. But that's not the only one. Micropayments cannot be done easily. Really something I want. Enables not only B2B. There was an old W3C draft on Micro-payments Transport Protocol. Seems to have disappeared.
Liquidity is one way to ensure that we can create a cool future.

Questions/Answers

Henry Story: One thing missing here is the push from the network. It's what make the thing stand. You want the long tail in there to make it work.

Managing Social Communications Identities

Oscar Sola, Telefonica

Talk

Telco services were to produce "conversational experiences" (Voice, Text, video calls). Centered on conversation. Since users are moving to social networks, telco operators need to provide services that follow this trend.
Online social networks improve the communication experiene. From the operator's point of view, it's a win as well, because it helps profile users, improves user experience and thus increases the network's use, and it provides an incredible way to gather users' feedback. Operators can follow users' needs through twitter messages, blogs posts, and so on.
We need to know the users identities. We can expect that friends on Facebook are real friends in real life. Different social identities represent me. I may have different privacy issues. Communication identities on the other hand need to be a unique number (phone number or URI). Users usually have only one single communication identity, and an important point here is that privacy is required by *law*.
To offer social communications services, a user either needs to know the communication identity of the person he wants to connect with, or one of the social identities. In the second case, the link between the social identity and the communication identity is kept private by the network.
We created a social broker which is the only identity manager that knows how to link between social identities and communication identities. Through interfaces, this enables the inter-connection of various social networks.
In terms of privacy, two possibilities through the exchange of tokens and authentication requests between the operator network and the social network.
We did it. It works. "Movistar contacta" is a Facebook app that allows you to send text or trigger a call to some other user.

Questions/Answers

Karl: This doesn't solve the privacy issue. The privacy issue is now the identity broker. Hope we can discuss the "why" later on.
Q: Who pays?
A: No one knows for the time being. Telefonica, here, is selling a "brand".

Leveraging social data with semantics

Fabien Gandon, INRIA

Talk

We're discovering sociograms. We want to know who the brokers are ("betweenness").
There is one thing interesting in the One Web architecture. Basically you have two choices: XML Infoset, or RDF set. Using RDF, you activate a different branch to play with the graph.
Two types of graph: social network analysis, and semantic web graph. We know how to do things with both of them: compute degree of acquaintance in the first case, compute inferences in the second case.
What we'd like to do is to stick to RDF and leverage its capabilities to apply SNA algorithms. We need new standards, on social data. Example: I'd like to be able to compute at run-time the people that are close, but only from a professional's point of view. This could be done with a slight extension of SPARQL. We've extracted 2020 FOAF profiles from flickr, and run the computation of betweenness.
We're interesting into building a global social semantic graph. Other graphs are available and could be merged. FOAF + SKOS + SIOK. We've extracted bookmarks of users of delicious, and were looking at ways to merge labels together. It makes it possible to link users together who use the same labels.
Open issues: how does this scale? and of course security? Some industries stopped using delicious, because they were just giving away strategical information. Open your data + mobileOK = open your mobile Web! There is absolutely no incompabilities.
Some bridges already exist such as POWDER, use semantic web schemas. Works on vocabularies use semantic Web. Semantic Web applications already exist on mobile phones: DBPedia, i-MoCo.
ISICIL: how to make this interesting and available for corporate applications.

Questions/Answers

John Kemp: You mentioned FOAF. Do you need the one true format, or could this scale well using different formats?
Fabien: No need for one ontogoly. Some technologies such as GRDDL allow you to provide mappings between formats.

Current Issues with Social Networks representations

Peter Mika, Yahoo! Research

Talk

We're focusing on web mining in our lab in Barcelona.
Some of you may have heard about Yahoo's SearchMonkey, based on semantic Web technologies, but not only. For this to work, you obviously need metadata. It's very hard to do it automatically. With more semantic, it's much easier. You need some form of data compatibility.
The Web is decentralized. We do have shared syntaxes which are pretty good (RDF, RDFa). We have API compatibility (OpenSocial), which are good as well although they may not be available for Jo the Blogger. We have authentication (OpenID, OAuth). We have incentives to participate.
We have some ideas on identity management, not exactly done, and out of scope of this talks.
But we have a huge vocabulary problem. It's not so much a technological problem, but a social issue. It cannot solve itself automatically.
People like microformats, because they're both chosing the syntax and the vocabulary as opposed to RDF/RDFa where it's a two-step process. The problem with microformat is that you cannot extend the vocabulary, at which point people start to move to RDFa. The important thing is that both are useful, and RDF has the advantage of being the base for a Lingua Franca, but we need vocabularies.
Main problems with vocabularies is that there's often a mismatch (e.g. birthday vs. age). People in general don't understand the differences between key concepts that underlie metadata. Sometimes you may also want to represent a value as multimedia content.

Questions/Answers

Karl: You made the opposition between doing it right and making it simple. What is right?
Peter: Difficult to say "right". Was referring to what technical experts think is needed (use of a URI instead of a value for instance).
Q: Jo the Blogger is your first public. And maybe it's more a question of the platform that he uses than his own knowledge.