- 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.
- 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.
