Popular Social Networking Service Research Articles

Access-control-based Efficient Privacy Protection Method for Social Networking Services

There has been a recent surge in the popularity of social networking services (SNSs) and SNSs have grown rapidly, as has the variety of information shared through SNSs. However, SNSs raise concerns about the security and privacy of users because the information written by the user might be exposed in the SNS. Many studies have addressed this issue, but previous research has lacked methods that can be applied efficiently in the SNS environment. In this paper, we propose a method for the efficient protection of privacy in SNS based on access control

TwitterTrends: a spatio-temporal trend detection and related keywords recommendation scheme

Twitter is a very popular online social networking service that enables its users to post and share text-based messages known as tweets. Even though one tweet may contain at most only 140 characters, the number of tweets generated daily is enormous and hence, collectively, they can give important clues to the resolution of interesting issues such as those associated with public opinion and current trends and the retrieval or recommendation of hot multimedia contents. In this paper, we propose a spatio-temporal trend detection and related keyword recommendation scheme for tweets called TwitterTrends. Our scheme can identify hot keywords and recommend their related keywords at a given location and time by analyzing user tweets and their metadata such as GPS data. The scheme is based on a client---server collaboration model for efficiency. The client on the user device manages user interactions with the Twitter server, such as the writing and uploading of tweets. In addition, it selects candidate trend keywords from tweets by simple filtering, collects user location data from the mobile user device, and sends them to our trend processing (TP) server. Our scheme can show trend keywords and their related keywords intuitively and expand them on the fly by displaying relevant keywords collected from portal sites such as Wikipedia and Google. The TP server collects candidate trend keywords and metadata from all the clients and analyzes them to detect spatio-temporal trend keywords and their related keywords by considering their co-occurrence in tweets. Our scheme is very robust in that it can handle typical input events such as abbreviations and typing errors that occur when writing tweets on mobile devices as well as provide supplementary keywords from portal sites. We implemented a prototype system and performed various experiments to demonstrate that our scheme can achieve satisfactory performance and scalability.

소셜커머스의 쇼핑 가치와 재구매의도에 영향을 미치는 개인 및 소셜커머스 특성과 지각된 보안의 조절효과에 대한 연구

Web 2.0 has affected existing e-commerce and created a new business model of e-commerce, known as social commerce. Social commerce is a subset of e-commerce using social network services and is emerging as an important platform due to increased popularity of social networking services. This study focuses on analyzing the factors that influence the shopping value and intention to repurchase of social commerce users. Based on prior researches, we develop a research model, including individual characteristics of social commerce users (Collectivism, Price Sensitivity, Impulse Buying) and social commerce characteristics (Cost saving, Product Variety, Shopping Convenience). Furthermore, this study proposed the moderating effect of Perceived Security and the relationship between shopping value and intention to repurchase. To empirically validate, the data were collected from 220 social commerce users. The results indicated that individual characteristics (collectivism, price sensitivity, impulse buying) were positively related to hedonic shopping value. In addition, social commerce characteristics (cost saving, shopping convenience) were positively related to utilitarian value. The shopping value(hedonic and utilitarian) had a significant influence on intention to repurchase. The moderating effects of perceived security also was significant. Lastly, the implications for theory and practice are discussed.

Campaigning on Twitter: Microblogging and Online Social Networking as Campaign Tools in the 2010 General Elections in the Netherlands

The present study focuses on how candidates in the Dutch general elections of 2010 use Twitter, a popular microblogging and social networking service. Specifically the study focuses on explaining why some candidates are more likely to adopt Twitter, have larger networks, and show more reciprocation than other candidates. The innovation hypothesis, predicting that candidates from less established and smaller parties will use Twitter more extensively, is unsupported. This suggests that normalization of campaign practices is present on Twitter, not changing existing communication practices. The findings do show that being an early adopter of these new technologies is more effective than adoption shortly before Election Day.

Quantifying Collective Attention from Tweet Stream

Online social media are increasingly facilitating our social interactions, thereby making available a massive “digital fossil” of human behavior. Discovering and quantifying distinct patterns using these data is important for studying social behavior, although the rapid time-variant nature and large volumes of these data make this task difficult and challenging. In this study, we focused on the emergence of “collective attention” on Twitter, a popular social networking service. We propose a simple method for detecting and measuring the collective attention evoked by various types of events. This method exploits the fact that tweeting activity exhibits a burst-like increase and an irregular oscillation when a particular real-world event occurs; otherwise, it follows regular circadian rhythms. The difference between regular and irregular states in the tweet stream was measured using the Jensen-Shannon divergence, which corresponds to the intensity of collective attention. We then associated irregular incidents with their corresponding events that attracted the attention and elicited responses from large numbers of people, based on the popularity and the enhancement of key terms in posted messages or “tweets.” Next, we demonstrate the effectiveness of this method using a large dataset that contained approximately 490 million Japanese tweets by over 400,000 users, in which we identified 60 cases of collective attentions, including one related to the Tohoku-oki earthquake. “Retweet” networks were also investigated to understand collective attention in terms of social interactions. This simple method provides a retrospective summary of collective attention, thereby contributing to the fundamental understanding of social behavior in the digital era.

Underage Children and Social Networking

Despite minimum age requirements for joining popular social networking services such as Facebook, many students misrepresent their real ages and join as active participants in the networks. This descriptive study examines the use of social networking services (SNSs) by children under the age of 13. The researchers surveyed a sample of 199 students, ages 7–12, to determine how active they were within social networking services and how knowledgeable they were about their personal safety and the potential for harmful interactions the services might cause them. The study concluded that students begin to join social networking services as early as age 9. Although their parents are generally aware of their participation and children generally have an open communication with them about their activities, there appears to be a general lack of training and information about such skills as creating privacy settings and assessing safety risks. This early student engagement with social networking strongly suggests that training pre-service teachers about online safety awareness should be more widespread.

The Development of an Automatic Question Generation System on Facebook Using an Artificial Bee Colony Algorithm

Facebook is currently one of the world's most popular social networking services, and has been widely used in the field of e-learning. In general, learners in e-learning environments need to evaluate their learning ability through taking tests to present the learning achievement. In order to evaluate their ability on e-learning platform with social network services, this study proposes an automatic question generation system for individual learning status. The proposed system uses the artificial bee colony algorithm to find suitable questions for each learner according to the learner's profile, reading experience, professional ability, and the e-learning records in the system. The experimental results indicate that the proposed method improves the accuracy of the automatic question generation system and that it outperforms the random method.

소셜네트워크서비스 사용자 접속요인 비교분석 : 트위터, 페이스북, 카카오스토리를 중심으로

2009년 아이폰이 수입되면서 트위터와 페이스북이라는 소셜네트워크서비스가 국내에 알려지게 된 이후 국내에서나 국외에서 폭발적인 성장을 가져왔다. 뿐만 아니라 최근에 개통한 카카오스토리가 소셜네트워크서비스 시장에 가세하면서 국내에서는 단 시간에 선두를 달릴 만큼 성장하였다. 소셜네트워크서비스는 인터넷 상에서 공통의 관심사를 지니고 있는 사용자들 간의 관계형성을 지원하고, 이렇게 형성된 지인 관계를 바탕으로 인맥 관리, 정보 및 콘텐츠 공유 등 다양한 활동을 할 수 있도록 지원하는 서비스이다. 소셜네트워크서비스는 다양한 콘텐츠와의 결합을 통하여 네트워크를 통해 형성된 지인 관계를 기반으로 공유와 배포를 원활하게 하는 주요 플랫폼으로 활용되는 등 몇 가지의 공통적인 기능을 가지고 있다. 사용자가 각각의 서비스에 접속할 때는 서비스마다 특별히 강한 접속요인을 가지고 있다. 이에 트위터, 페이스북, 카카오스토리를 모두 사용하고 있는 사용자들을 대상으로 설문조사를 진행하였으며, 설문에 응답한 자료를 통계 내어 사용자 접속요인을 비교분석하였다. 이 연구결과는 사용자들의 목적에 따라 소셜네트워크 서비스를 선택하는 기준이 되고, 새로운 소셜네트워크서비스를 개발하거나 기존의 서비스를 발전시키는데 고려해야 할 요인들을 정리하였다. 이 연구는 향후 소셜시대의 윤리 중 하나의 덕목인 신뢰형성과 관련한 연구를 위해서도 기초자료가 될 것이다. Social Network Service (SNS) such as Twitter and Facebook has explosively grown nationwide since iPhone was introduced to Korea in 2009. In addition, KakaoStory has recently opened and joined to the SNS market, and it has grown to one of the most popular SNS in the domestic market in a short period of time. Social Network Service supports not only the formation of relationship between SNS users in common interests but also various activities such as management of personal connections and the sharing of information or contents. These three types of SNS have several common functions of sharing and distributing various contents rooted on the personal relationship formed through SNS. As each SNS user has specific reasons for the use of each service, a survey was conducted targeting those who use all of Twitter, Facebook, and KakaoStory was drawn by the statistical analyses of survey answers on users' reasons for each service. This result of study suggests factors to consider in order to exploit a new SNS or to enhance an existing service and can be used as a standard of which SNS for users to select for their own different purposes. It will also provide the basic data for the trust formation, one of the ethics in the upcoming Social Era.

Workload Characterization and Performance Implications of Large-Scale Blog Servers

With the ever-increasing popularity of Social Network Services (SNSs), an understanding of the characteristics of these services and their effects on the behavior of their host servers is critical. However, there has been a lack of research on the workload characterization of servers running SNS applications such as blog services. To fill this void, we empirically characterized real-world Web server logs collected from one of the largest South Korean blog hosting sites for 12 consecutive days. The logs consist of more than 96 million HTTP requests and 4.7TB of network traffic. Our analysis reveals the following: (i) The transfer size of nonmultimedia files and blog articles can be modeled using a truncated Pareto distribution and a log-normal distribution, respectively; (ii) user access for blog articles does not show temporal locality, but is strongly biased towards those posted with image or audio files. We additionally discuss the potential performance improvement through clustering of small files on a blog page into contiguous disk blocks, which benefits from the observed file access patterns. Trace-driven simulations show that, on average, the suggested approach achieves 60.6% better system throughput and reduces the processing time for file access by 30.8% compared to the best performance of the Ext4 filesystem.

Analyzing knowledge dimensions and cognitive process of a project-based online discussion instructional activity using Facebook in an adult and continuing education course

In recent years, social networking services (SNSs), for example, Facebook, have shown exponential growth in their number of users. Witnessing the popularity of these SNSs, educational researchers have also explored the potential educational value of using SNSs. Despite the few studies that have investigated learners' attitudes toward and the effects of incorporating SNSs in class, limited attention has been paid to examining learners' knowledge and cognitive processes involved in online discussions using SNSs. Although general public interest in life-long learning has been gradually increasing, relatively little attention has been devoted to exploring the application of SNSs in adult and continuing education programs. To promote a better understanding of using SNSs in learning, this study seeks to explore learners' online discussion behaviors in an art course that involved a project-based learning activity using a popular SNS, Facebook, to support students' asynchronous online discussions. The participants in our study included 62 students enrolled in the school of continuing education at a university in northern Taiwan. Adapting the Revised Bloom's Taxonomy as a coding scheme, this study employed a quantitative content analysis (QCA) and lag sequential analysis (LSA) to examine the content and behavioral patterns of students' discussions. The results indicate that the most prominent knowledge dimension in students' discussions is the meta-cognitive knowledge, while the cognitive process is primarily focused on understanding and comprehension. In addition, a moderate proportion of off-topic discussion was found in this study. Considering the different behaviors that may be exhibited by members of varied age and gender, a further analysis based on students' individual differences was conducted. The results showed that, in the context of online discussions, female and older learners are more likely to engage in off-topic discussions. Based on these findings, this study suggests that when conducting online discussion activities using SNSs, instructors should consider the characteristics of adult learners and their individual differences and design their teaching activities accordingly. Implications and limitations of this study are discussed, and pedagogical suggestions for adapting SNSs to teaching activities for adult and continuing education are proposed.

Microblogging, Online Expression, and Political Efficacy Among Young Chinese Citizens: The Moderating Role of Information and Entertainment Needs in the Use of Weibo

In 2011, China's Internet population reached over half a billion users and the popular Twitter-like social networking service, Weibo, has been adopted by half of the users since its launch in August 2009. Given the potential of the Internet to facilitate a civic culture in the authoritarian state, the use of Weibo and its effects on citizens' political attitudes and behaviors are of important concern. A survey of 499 Weibo users found that intensity of use was related to increased willingness to express opinions about government and politics, the perception that one has the ability to participate in politics, and feelings that the government is not responsive to the demands of citizens. Moreover, the above relationships were moderated by the motivations of Weibo use, such that information motives strengthened the relationships while entertainment motives weakened the relationships.

Composition and Structure of a Large Online Social Network in the Netherlands

Limitations in data collection have long been an obstacle in research on friendship networks. Most earlier studies use either a sample of ego-networks, or complete network data on a relatively small group (e.g., a single organization). The rise of online social networking services such as Friendster and Facebook, however, provides researchers with opportunities to study friendship networks on a much larger scale. This study uses complete network data from Hyves, a popular online social networking service in the Netherlands, comprising over eight million members and over 400 million online friendship relations. In the first study of its kind for the Netherlands, I examine the structure of this network in terms of the degree distribution, characteristic path length, clustering, and degree assortativity. Results indicate that this network shares features of other large complex networks, but also deviates in other respects. In addition, a comparison with other online social networks shows that these networks show remarkable similarities.

SNS 통합관리 API와 응용

An SNS(Social Network Service) is an online service that supports an effective way to share information over virtual communities. Recently, as SNSs such as Twitter, Facebook, and Me2day are getting bigger, the purposes of using popular SNSs are expanded to broadcastings, politics, marketings and so on. In this paper, we propose an API to integrate and manage open APIs for various SNSs, presenting a library as an implementation of the proposed API. Also, utilizing the developed library, a smartphone application is provided which supports integrated management of popular SNSs and personal schedules. Using the library, developers can reduce costs when they need to implement specific functions for managing various SNSs. With the developed application, we can read and write to/from the related SNSs on same screen, automatically reminding our schedule and sharing the schedule with friends over the SNSs.

The effects of the English writing activities using Twitter on learners’ writing abilities at university level.

While the popularity of Social Network Services (SNS) has been growing, little research has been conducted on the application of SNS in EFL learning. The purpose of this study is to investigate the effectiveness of English writing activities using SNS, especially Twitter, on students’ writing abilities and its effects on their affective domains. A total of 74 university students were assigned to two groups and given nine different writing tasks to complete either on paper or through Twitter over a period of nine weeks. Each student’s writing sample was assessed at the first week and the last week of the experiment as a pre-test and a post-test. The participants’ impressions of using Twitter in their writing tasks were also investigated through questionnaires. The results of the study show that the group that used Twitter for their writing activities showed significantly greater improvements than the group that used paper. The results of the questionnaires show that students in general hold negative attitudes towards engaging in writing activities using Twitter. The reasons for this may be the lack of familiarity with the learning activity presentations. Based on the results, this study suggests that the development of appropriate writing activities using SNS is needed.

A Method of Measuring User Influence in MicroBlog

Microblog is a popular social networking service. In order to analyze the user behavior in microblog, a method is proposed in this paper to measure the influence of users. By analyzing the data set collected from Sina microblog, it is worth noting that the number of the followers and friends obey power-law distribution. In addition, the users display a weak correlation in their number of followers and friends, and show a strong correlation in their retweet influence and mention influence. Besides, we propose a method to model user influence by taking consideration the factors including the number of followers and friends as well as the scale of the network. The experiment results indicate that the model can calculate the value of user influence and effectively reflect the influence of users. The proposed method and result have important implications in understanding human behaviors and provide new insights for microblog’s study.

Composition and Structure of a Large Online Social Network in the Netherlands

Limitations in data collection have long been an obstacle in research on friendship networks. Most earlier studies use either a sample of ego-networks, or complete network data on a relatively small group (e.g., a single organization). The rise of online social networking services such as Friendster and Facebook, however, provides researchers with opportunities to study friendship networks on a much larger scale. This study uses complete network data from Hyves, a popular online social networking service in the Netherlands, comprising over eight million members and over 400 million online friendship relations. In the first study of its kind for the Netherlands, I examine the structure of this network in terms of the degree distribution, characteristic path length, clustering, and degree assortativity. Results indicate that this network shares features of other large complex networks, but also deviates in other respects. In addition, a comparison with other online social networks shows that these networks show remarkable similarities.

The Weakest Link: The Risks Associated with Social Networking Websites

The relatively rapid rise in popularity of social networking services is now well known. MySpace, Twitter, and Facebook have become well known sites and terms. According to the Web traffic tracking site Alexa.com, as of December 2009, Facebook had 350 million registered users, MySpace just under 475 million, and Twitter 44.5 million. Many people think very little of posting prodigious amounts of personal information on social networking sites, not realizing that this information puts them at risk. Specifically, those in the law enforcement and military communities may not realize that information posted on these sites can compromise operational security and potentially endanger lives. In July 2009, the Associated Press ran a story which was picked up by most major news outlets in the USA, in which it was reported that the wife of the incoming head of Britain's MI6 intelligence agency had posted pictures and family details on her Facebook page. Astonishingly, there were those that argued that this was not a security breach! Although it is true that, in general, photos of a vacationing family would not be considered sensitive, when you consider that the family taking the vacation includes the head of the British foreign intelligence service, it is easy to see how this kind of exposure could open the door to potential blackmail.We are all too aware of the possibility of terrorist sleeper cells living among typical American families under false identities. It is vital to understand how these individuals melt into the crowd, hiding their true identities while they hatch their nefarious plots. Recent events in Denver and New York City only serve to underscore the urgency of this need. This article will examine social networking in the context of social engineering. There are no easy or fast solutions to this problem, and this paper does not pretend to propose any. Rather, it is the purpose of this paper to enhance understanding of this very critical issue, and perhaps assist organizations and security professionals in developing policies and training which will mitigate this risk. This article is available in Journal of Strategic Security: http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/jss/vol3/iss2/7 63 The Weakest Link: The Risks Associated with Social Networking Websites

Government 2.0

PurposeResearchers have argued that social networks within a community have positive effects on people's behavior in disasters. The Japanese government is testing online SNS at the municipal level with the intention to improve community building, democratic processes, and disaster management. This paper seeks to explore the use of social networking services (SNSs) in government and disaster in Japan.Design/methodology/approachThis study is based on a literature review of social capital, social support, disaster, and social software. Two exploratory case studies of local government SNS in Yatsushiro city, Kumamoto prefecture and Nagaoka city, Niigata prefecture provide empirical evidence. Consequently, the role of local SNS for social capital development and disaster is discussed.FindingsYatsushiro's solution seems to be sustainable, Nagaoka's SNS is in decline. Both have to compete with popular SNS like Mixi and lack critical mass. There are some indications that government‐initiated SNS helps to build social capital and utilize it in times of a disaster.Research limitations/implicationsThe paper contributes to the research on eParticipation and Public Management by describing an internet‐based social software application and its embeddedness in the administrative organization. Any conclusions must be tentative, especially as a consequence of the non‐representative number of users and the lack of testing in a disaster.Practical implicationsThe paper provides practitioners with two real life case studies on the implementation and use of local SNS in government.Originality/valueThe paper offers theoretical and practical insights into the use of social software in government. Moreover, it connects current trends in government 2.0 to disaster research.

Cyworld is my world: Korean adult experiences in an online community for learning

This article introduces Cyworld, a popular online social networking service in South Korea, and explores it as a potential context in which informal learning occurs through social activities and communication. Based on the results of an online survey, this article discusses (a) the nature of social activities in Cyworld in terms of informal adult learning, (b) user perception of online activities in relation to learning, and (c) the relationship between the users' perception of the online activities and their definitions of learning (i.e., learning as acquisition or as reflection). The article concludes that Cyworld appears to be a meaningful context that facilitates informal learning, and that users who emphasise a meaning-making process for learning perceive that mini-homepage activities are both learning-related and constructive.

Approaching the Mobile Culture of East Asia

Convergence is a term that has been gaining increasing attention across the globe. Conceptually situated between technological and socio-cultural domains – as has been intensely debated between the technological and social determinists since the birth of computer mediated communication (CMC) – mobile culture is no exception. It is powered by inter-operable and multi-functional mobile telecommunication technologies, which are also becoming increasingly high functional especially via fixed-mobile convergence, interconnecting fixed and wireless broadband networks. Wide diffusion and convergence of digital communication technologies – wired and wireless – in recent years have resulted in the emergence of two key paradigmatic convergences: between technology and sociality, and between productivity and play. I will first elucidate these convergences; I will then discuss cultural characteristics of specific East Asian cultures, focusing on South Korea, China, and Japan.