EK Telecom Analysis Newsletter

Social Networking Article Follow-Up:

From my post last week on an idea for a social networking tool, I received a url from a trusted reader of the EKTAN to an article titled, "'Friend locator' could become next craze for social networkers", which was launched at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.  The idea of a location services overlay onto social networks, like Facebook, might be a boom or bust, but no doubt, some of the location services highlighted in Barcelona as mentioned by this Unstrung article, "Location: It's Creepy, But It's Here."   Privacy issues are clearly an important consideration as the nascent Reese's combination of location and social networking takes off.  In fact, there is a significant and surprising body of research already done on how one might social network anonymously through "Private Information Retrieval" (PIR) algorithms, efforts by Trusted Computing, and others.  Some researchers have devised creative techniques, such as that of MobiEyes of Georgia Tech, with concepts such as "Anonymization-based Location Privacy", which contains, in the second half of the presentation, cool ideas such as "spatial cloaking" and "temporal cloaking."  Ok, nerds, you may now return to your regularly scheduled programming.

Social Networking Tool

Several months ago, while attending a conference sponsored by the Fairfax County Economic Development Authority on the subject of the Creative Economy, I had a brain flash for a tool that would help social networkers get more value out of the many general and specialized social networks in which they are members.

I developed the idea, shared it with many people in my trusted network (including many people on my Newsletter distribution list), people I'd worked with in the past, took their feedback, refined the concept, took a stab at seeing what it would take to get the idea commercialized, posted it on INmobile as a question, received interest from someone in the wireless industry who "got it" and was working on something similar and never heard from them again, and then it took the back burner as other projects came up.  After all these months, I still believe the idea has merit. 

Below are some of my original notes from the conference (I did score a Tom Friedman inscription to the "World is Flat" after he gave one of the keynotes) and follow on analysis.

Is there (or will there be in the future) a need / business opportunity to create a personal social networking tool or console that provides centralized maintenance (i.e., contacts, feeds, etc for various social networking sites) and analysis functions for individuals who are members of multiple specialized social networking sites?  If so, a solution could be achieved through a combination of
1. an extensible   northbound interface (NBI) architecture and interoperability protocol for communication between the console and the different social networking sites.
2. algorithms that would analyze the effectiveness and productivity of social network "ties," building on and codifying the theoretical social networking researchers from the 1940's to today.
3. Social Stream project- or Flock-like centralized console / front end for usability

The idea is to create a tool that is more than an aggregator of other social networking site, but a tool that analyzes the effectiveness and utility of social network connections.

Assumptions:

• People want to maintain different “personalities” or identities on different SNSs
• The greater the number of SNSs a person is a member of, the greater value there would be in a one-stop personal administrative and management console / interface
• The more sites that a person is a member of, the greater need for, and complexity involved in, managing interactions on multiple sites.
• There would be end user value in a tool that simplified administration of multiple site memberships to a degree that additional sites could be joined.

The first working name was SNIP for Social Networking Interop Protocol, but SNIP implies horizontal communication between social networking sites, so the current working name is.... PSNMAT, which is Personal Social Network Management and Analysis Tool.

Selected High Level Requirements:

• Statistics on user interactions – number and “quality” of “transactions” by source (e.g., SNS site, friend) **
• Develop or use algorithms to identify “weak ties” and “tie strength” across social networks **
• “The question that social network designers worry about is, once you can understand network activity on different networks via a single, consolidated interface, how will that affect your own network preferences?” **
• Develop Personal Social network analysis [SNA] tools across multiple networks. SNA “is the mapping and measuring of relationships and flows between people, groups, organizations, computers, web sites, and other information/knowledge processing entities.” Source:

  Social Network Analysis, A Brief Introduction

• Friendly User Interface that masks underlying complexity

** Social Networks And Group Formation, Theoretical Concepts to Leverage

If you'd like to learn more about the architecture, solutions approach, competitive analysis, etc., please contact me.