Social Networking 2: The Dilemma of Social Recommendation

Here comes the mid-term. By week 5, we almost finished the first half of this course, which mainly focuses on humanity fields including psychology, sociology, as well as anthropology. We learned some graphical representations of social networks on week 6, which means the scientific and technical part begins.

Among those topics, I would like to study social recommendation. Social media has changed the way to do traditional marketing and even online marketing. Users nowadays are able to publish and express their views and publish information online with Web 2.0. Oftentimes, this information requires a human perspective to process, for example indicate preference, quote alternative sources, categorize, add supporting materials and assessment of quality. This facilitates the potential users to consider, consume, and apply the information about a product and service. It makes social network users easily to refer to particular ratings and items and to redistribute these opinions to others.

Why do people choose your product? How do potential customers locate your goods? How to convert browsers into buyers? 

Reputation! Customers trust opinions and buyers who share their interest. Currently, customers do a lot of research online before making a big buying decision. The comments and reviews of previous customers play a more and more powerful role for retailers and e-commerce sites. As Internet is a chaotic information universe, social reviews and recommendation become more useful for consumers and more profitable for e-retailers.

However, the proliferation of user-generated content and the associated metadata on social multimedia sites introduces new challenges in search, for example unstructured data, vulnerability to spam and noise, short lifespan, much of the content offers little value to the general public. What is worse, some malicious users deliberately post misleading information on social multimedia sites. According to the recent news, Apple app store China branch is now heavily suffering the harassment of so-called Internet mercenaries. Those Internet mercenaries post fake comments on certain apps and push them to the Top popular ones. Now Apple users in China can not trust the recommended apps by Apple store, because those apps very likely cheat by employing the Internet mercenaries.

That is the dilemma of social recommendation. How to utilize its merits and prevent from malicious recommendation is such a big challenge.

Social Networking 1: The Power of sharing

On 1^st Feb 2012, Facebook Inc. filed for an initial public offering that could value the social network between $75 billion and $100 billion, putting the company on track for one of the biggest U.S. stock-market debuts of all time. What makes Facebook becomes such a valuable company? It’s the power of sharing.

Before taking this course, Social Networking, I have already got to know it intuitively. I use Facebook, Twitter, Weibo and some other social networks almost everyday. I even know some techniques on how to construct such kind of social networking platforms. But this class gives me much fresh knowledge from a different perspective. On week 1, I acquired some definitions about social media, social networks and social computing. I consider the Facebook’s mission, “Facebook’s mission is to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected”, to be best definition of social networks. On week 2, I understand social experience, cognitive processing and memory and social nature of human activity. It’s interesting to know that human beings process and store information in 3 stages. On week 3, I am really fond of learning the theory of knowledge and cognition. The core concept is the three different levels of cognitions: Cognition – “perceive new information”, Metacognition – “knowing about knowing”, Epistemic Cognition – “construction of knowledge”.

Among all the stuffs above, I would like to talk about Atkinson-Shiffrin memory model, which also known as multi-store model. It is an explanation of how memory processes work. You hear, see, and feel many things, but only a small number are remembered. It is important to learn about human information processing and memory so as to design social website that are usable and facilitate social interactions. Let’s take Facebook for example. Facebook usually recommend about 3 ~ 5 friends to you. When you point to a certain person, Facebook will display a simple profile about this people. All these designs have taken the limited capacity of human memory into consideration.

Back to Facebook's IPO, its success reflects people's great expectation on social networks. I think Facebook to be the third milestone within Internet development. The first one is Yahoo!. According to Yahoo's statement of its mission "providing knowledge obtained via personal experience, association, awareness and understanding.", Internet users first time have much easier access to the information they want in the chaos internet universe. Yahoo categorize numerous websites and form a hierarchic structure.  The second milestone is Google whose mission is "providing information obtained via investigation, study, data, measurement and numerical quantities". With google's search engine, you can search whatever information as you want in the Internet. Google provides the results by a series of PageRank-like algorithms with absolut neutral attitude. Facebook is totally different from Yahoo or Google. It gives information via "sharing". Those messages are posted by your friends, so the information become more attractive and trust-worthy. It gets every individuals involved.

Let's take the protest against legislation of 'Stop Online Privacy and Protect Intellectual Property Acts' as an example. Some social websites called on users in the US to contact their local congressman to vote against the bill on Jan. 18. By the next day, over 8 million people wrote their senators to protest against PIPA/SOPA bill according NYT reports. This led the US congress to reconsider and lay aside that bill. Once again, we witness the great power of Social Networks.