Social network

About: Social network is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 42980 publications have been published within this topic receiving 1511768 citations. The topic is also known as: social networking.

The Call of the Crowd: Event Participation in Location-based Social Services

Abstract: Understanding the social and behavioral forces behind event participation is not only interesting from the viewpoint of social science, but also has important applications in the design of personalized event recommender systems. This paper takes advantage of data from a widely used location-based social network, Foursquare, to analyze event patterns in three metropolitan cities. We put forward several hypotheses on the motivating factors of user participation and confirm that social aspects play a major role in determining the likelihood of a user to participate in an event. While an explicit social filtering signal accounting for whether friends are attending dominates the factors, the popularity of an event proves to also be a strong attractor. Further, we capture an implicit social signal by performing random walks in a high dimensional graph that encodes the place type preferences of friends and that proves especially suited to identify relevant niche events for users. Our findings on the extent to which the various temporal, spatial and social aspects underlie users' event preferences lead us to further hypothesize that a combination of factors better models users' event interests. We verify this through a supervised learning framework. We show that for one in three users in London and one in five users in New York and Chicago it identifies the exact event the user would attend among the pool of suggestions.

What Are You Working On? Status Message Q&A in an Enterprise SNS

Abstract: Social networking services (SNS) have been deployed within enterprises to encourage informal social interactions and information sharing. As such, users have turned to the status message functionality in a SNS for social information seeking by employing it as a medium for question asking. In this paper, we present the results of a qualitative study observing emergent question and answer (Q&A) behaviors in an enterprise SNS and then describe user motivations in employing this medium for social information seeking. We report data describing the types and topics of questions asked within the workplace and the prevalence of questions and responses within this system. Results suggest that users choose status message Q&A for non-urgent information seeking needs and perceive question asking as a way to elicit social support from their professional networks.

System and method for social networking

Abstract: A system and method of the present invention pertains to a mobile social networking application intended to be used by the members of a social network as a tool for trading personal services and offering services between each other. The system allows each user to automatically locate other users located within specified radius and offering services that the user desires to benefit from. Each user creates a profile that includes user's personal information such, as for example, name, gender, address, phone number, hobbies, college information, and more importantly the list of services the user can offer and services that the user is looking to receive or benefit from.