Friday, May 10, 2013

Linking Online Social Networks (##) by Dr. Maher Salam and Ahmad Sufian Bayram



  1. Abstract

Current Online Social Networks (OSNs) are centralized repositories of personal information, groups, and users activities, by both technology savvy and inexpert audiences. Considering OSN’s impressive growth it is arguably the most popular service on Internet. Being maintained and automatically exploitable within a single provider platform, each provider groups become isolated and a challenging target for exploitation across providers.

Several approaches and techniques have been proposed to mitigate this drawback. Removing the provider centralized storage of user profile by adopting new Decentralized OSN architecture (references ....). However, these approaches require massive shift in the underlying architecture, move the task of the profile hosting to the user, for which can be challenging for the inexpert audiences. by no mean it impose adding the capability to link content and groups across several providers
This paper gives an overview of a proposed approach and technique to resolve the issue of groups’ isolation within a single provider platform (e.g. Facebook, Twitter etc...) without having to impose new architecture.

  1. From Web 1.0 to Web 2.0

World Wild Web evolve overtime, the terms Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 describe stages of development types of the World Wide Web Petril (2010), also, they reflect and communication and relationship types between content provider and consumers. Web 1.0 describes the traditional, single-sided one-to-many method of content retrieval. The content creator, usually the website administrator acts as sender and provides data to a multitude of Internet users. The recipients play thereby a rather passive user role as they have no direct influence on the content creation and distribution.
In contrast to that, Web 2.0 is a “collaborative and open” approach that allows Internet users an active role in the content creation and distribution Petril (2010) and communities establishment. According to Chang & Kannan (2008) users become co-producers of content and information rather than being just content consumers. They describe Web 2.0 as network platform that allows user interactions in form of content updates and community development , these updates are in a “permanent beta” stage as they constantly evolve via community participation, and that this in turn enables rich user experiences that go much beyond the Web 1.0 era.
OSN services are sometimes considered as a social network service, though in a broader sense, OSN service usually means an individual-centered service whereas online community services are group-centered. OSN sites allow users to share ideas, activities, events, and interests within their users’ networks.

4.     Web 2.0 communities drawbacks

Web 2.0 is all about content and communities. However, The two major drawbacks of Web 2.0 are community isolation and users’ content ownership within the social media platform,
1. Community Isolation, OSN participants are well connected within their groups, but groups are getting isolated because of their weak and limited links. Groups may get larger or might shrink, but they cannot merge or interact with each other even if they shared the same topics inside the same social networks. The interactive communication channels inside these groups are accessible only amongst the group individuals; all of which know each other. This OSN drawback made each group individuals isolation within their goups(s) that is usually hosted by the social media platform e.g. none of the current OSN allows users to retrieve their profile, posts and related comments out of the social media platform, or even share them with other individuals who are not listed as contacts.
2. content ownership and centralization,
Usually Web 2.0 social media platforms privacy policy has the following drawbacks,  
·         Accounts and company pages can be shut down arbitrarily by the social media provider
·         Privacy settings give control to the social media provider ,
·         Limited features in the interface.
·         Can’t displays all the tags related to that particular topic with a click


3.     The three levels of online communication

Communication evolved over time and so are the social media platforms, this evolution has gone through three levels,
level One, communication is powered by Web 1.0 technology and the content flow is  unidirectional (admin to consumer). Content hosted and owned by Web 1.0 platform.    
Level Two, communication is powered by web 2.0 technology and the content flow is bidirectional (admin to consumer, consumer to admin). This level is about communities, participation, and peering. Easy-to-use tools are constantly proliferating the internet and are evolving into a global, living, and networked web. However, these communities have weak links and the content is hosted centrally on and hosted by the social media platform
Level Three, communication is powered by web 2.0 technology where consumers can access content out of their communities borders. hashtag (#) plays an enabler role to allow this level of communication and act as a missing jigsaw not just in increasing the audience, but in increasing the communication across disconnected communities.

5.            Web 2.0 drawbacks mitigation strategy

1. Decentralized Online Social Network

A decentralized social networking framework described is based on open, technologies such as Linked Data, Semantic Web ontologies, open single-signon identity systems, and access control.
The world of sharing economy is no longer driven by platforms but rather by complex ecologies that often combine communities. Take this for an example: the Arduino business ecology which is being developed in a way that is not relying on any single platform or group which makes it a difficult to track it.
To sum it up, with the decentralization social network things become easier it help the social networks to solve the problem of the isolated groups without any infringement of privacy when people have the flexibility to either limit it to only predetermined and specific persons or make it available for public view and also for other people to track things and be updated for all the changes in it, and to enjoy the benefits of the "other" social networking sites, such as to share the data with friends who may be members of other social networking sites. But this technique requires a major shift in today’s OSN infrastructure and put more weight on the user. So what is the alternative?

2. Hashtag

A hashtag is a pound sign (#), but it’s also used to categorize messages, keywords and topics. A hashtag provides a means of grouping; since one can search for the hashtag and get the set of messages that include the hashtags keyword.
These hashtags allow you to assign a topic or a trend to your post which others - who are talking about the same topic - can easily find and respond to. You can easily have an access to activities and updates from people and organizations that you are interested in. Most social networking sites are in real-time so you can be assured that everything is up-to-date.

5.            Linking OSN platforms

The phenomena of community isolation within a single OSN platform has been resolved by the Hashtags, The hashtag has been very important especially considering how these tags can be used to organize content and debates between larger groups of people within a single social media platform, so accessed content is limited to the used social media platform.  We propose a double hashtags (##); it allows people to hold an open conversational session about a specific keyword across social media platforms. Similar to Hashtags, Double Hashtags are distinguished for their click-to-go feature in the sense that they redirect you to a new page which aggregate content across a list of social media platform. Accessing the other OSN platforms requires an extra software component will not be available by the OSN platforms.



References


About the authors


1. Maher Salam DMIT, Ms. CS


Dr. Maher Salam has more than 13 years of accomplished professional experience in USA, UAE, Qatar and Syria in the areas of Enterprise Architecture, Business Process Management, Business Process Management Systems BPMS, Social Media Solutions, IT Audit, Strategic Management, ERP/CRM implementation, Business and Solution Architecture, Program Management, Requirements Engineering, Business Analysis, and Software Development Life Cycle SDLC methodology coaching and implementation (such as the RUP ®, Agile and Pega SmartBPM ® Enabled Methodology). Also he has a doctorate of Management in Information Technology (DMIT), Doctoral dissertation focused on online solution for Small and Medium Enterprises- European Union Project “Digital Business Ecosystem ®”, he has been a faculty member in the College of Management at International University of Science and Technology since 2009.



2. Ahmad Sufian Bayram

Ahmad sufian Bayram is OuiShare MENA connector, he is a blogger and speaker about Collaborative Economy, Published articles in local and international media.