What are big research problems in Social Web technologies?

Just finished reading Dion Hichcliffe's piece over at ZDNet on emerging technologies for Social Web in 2010. I have been reading all these different predictions to see how it relates to our research agenda. Dion's piece is long, but several points resonated with what we have been doing:

First, he said that one problem we have is

"Poor integration between social media and location services. Again, while there’s already some location awareness in social networking services today, there’s a long way to go before it’s integrated meaningfully into the social experience to provide real utility."

I agree wholeheartedly. Not too long ago, I participated in a research project here at PARC called Magitti, which was an activity recommender that modeled your content interests, your schedule, your location, as well as the your personal history on the mobile device [1]. The integration of personalization and social features with location-aware services will be a significant trend in 2010, and there will be a lot of good research and products in this area.

Second, he said that people are having difficulties in

"coherently engaging in social activity across many channels. Tired of the day-long round-robin between your e-mail, SMS, Twitter, Facebook, and any other services you use to keep up with what’s going on? You’re not the only one. While aggregation services such as Friendfeed potentially cut down on the manual effort of using the social Web, it’s still not mainstream despite being a good example of what’s possible. Notably it’s often the big (and closed) social silos that are causing the problem."

Our group was an early adopter of FriendFeed, and realized that many of the issues relating to social annotation, commenting, and other interactions were due to the distributed nature of social media. It is hard to keep track of who said what, and the aggregate reactions to content. Our research group has some investments in this research problem, which relates to aggregation and the ability to browse and filter the feeds. We are about to publish a paper in CHI2010 about how to use faceted browsing techniques to partially solve this problem [2].

Finally, the most important point he made was the our need in

"Coping with and getting value from the expanding information volume of social media. We’re all learning how to deal with the firehose of information that flows out of social media on a minute-by-minute basis. Sometimes it’s hard to remember that this flow of transparent and open information is actually good and often useful and creates important conversations. But the simple fact is that much of it isn’t meant for non-stop, instantaneous consumption [emphasis added]; it simply isn’t practical. Rather, social media leaves behind artifacts and information that we can find and use later when we need them. But at the moment the process of sorting through, aggregating, and filtering the vast volume of information cascading through social media today remains a real and growing challenge. I also began to get the first real reports that this is happening in the enterprise last year as social media begins to grow there as well."

Here ASC group's investment in summarization, recommendation, and personalization, etc, hopefully will pay off. Our investments have been in understanding particularly how to apply these techniques in social media, with the added social contexts and new data mining techniques around social streams. Research-wise, we will be pushing on this last point the most, and I believe it is also the area we most likely can extract user value. We are about to publish a paper at CHI2010 on how to do recommendations on Twitter network [3].

I will blog about these research efforts soon.

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[1] Victoria Bellotti, James Bo Begole, Ed H. Chi, Nicolas Ducheneaut, Ji Fang, Ellen Isaacs, Tracy King, Mark Newman, Kurt Partridge, Bob Price, Paul Rasmussen, Michael Roberts, Diane J. Schiano, Alan Walendowski. Activity-Based Serendipitous Recommendations with the Magitti Mobile Leisure Guide. In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human-factors in Computing Systems (CHI2008), pp. 1157-1166. ACM Press, 2008. Florence, Italy.

[2] Hong, L.; Convertino, G.; Suh, B.; Chi, E. H.; Kairam, S. FeedWinnower: layering structures over collections of information streams. Submitted and accepted to ACM CHI2010.

[3] Chen, J., Nairn, R., Nelson, L., Chi, E. H. Short and Tweet: Experiments on Recommending Content from Information Streams. Submitted and Accepted to ACM CHI2010.

A Study on Efficient Diffusion of News in an Organization

[joint work between Les Nelson, Rowan Nairn, Ed H. Chi]

In our knowledge economy, enterprises’ competitiveness often depend on the efficiency in which important news travels to the right people at the right times. Knowledge workers depend now heavily on communication channels both inside and outside the enterprise to be kept up to date on the most important information, such as the latest news on competitors, memos on human resources, status of business proposals, and the progress of workflows. The efficiency of news spread in an organization determines not just how the organization might absorb and make sense of the information, but also how it might decide to respond and react.

For example, one study of how email impacts an organization showed that one piece of email may create an organizational footprint that is 30 times larger [1]. A large body of literature surrounds the issue of news flow in organizations, including information seeking, organizational memory, and expertise location. For example, more specific to organizational information flow, sociological research shows that there is greater homogeneity of information within groups of people than between groups of people [2].

News in general is about the communication of current events, where the timeliness of the information is key. ‘Timeliness’ might not necessarily be limited to just up-to-the-minute, ‘breaking’ news. For example, one interviewee in one of our studies recently said: “It's about the leading edge of something. Staying current in a professional sense, I go through bouts of finding information. And I share it”. In the organization, this may constitute keeping up with information for ‘knowing what’ is happening and ‘knowing how’ to do things.

How can organizations better respond to the complex social and technical situation involved in staying current in their areas of business? With respect to news at work, what roles, tools, and practices might we expect in the brokering of news?

INTERVIEW STUDY

We recently conducted an interview study within our research organization. The company is an established research organization, having approximately 200 staff members in one location. Most employees belong to an approximately 5- to 10-person group (we will call this a ‘team’) organized into 4 larger multi-team groups. Each employee has an office, generally located near the rest of his or her group.

The company uses wikis for project and group knowledge repositories. The project wikis typically receive brief but intense activity (e,g, collecting web links on a topic), and then lapse into occasional use. Group wikis are updated infrequently, usually when there is organizational change (e.g., new projects and people). External blogs on topic areas promoted by the company are encouraged. Internal blogs receive infrequent use for general information sharing on topics of wide interest. Microblogging (e.g., Yammer.com) was tried early, but did not persist.

Participants were chosen from a range of positions and tenure with the company, including staff members involved in the primary business production, service people in support of the staff members (e.g., marketing, administrators, staff services), managers, and executive level managers.

16 interviews were conducted in peoples’ offices, starting with a critical incident style interview on the most recent news events received, and then followed by explicit probing to elicit different ways in which news arrives, frequency of such news, and who was involved.

STUDY FINDINGS

We have found a relatively mature practice of relying on the communication channels most commonly used at work, such as email and face-to-face. News not only travel along social networks in the organization, but also there is a strong effort in passing along news that known to be relevant. People are conservative in their choices. Moreover, people tune their social network to ensure they receive the appropriate news.

We find three major ways the company responds to getting receiving and transmitting news:

(1) Email is indeed the channel and medium of choice for news [3];

The figure below shows the frequency in which various ways of passing news back and forth are mentioned in the interview study. Although we find that news arrives and is diffused by many channels, with different levels of timeliness and audience, the primary means of communication is email (either directly or via company mailing lists) and face-to-face conversations in offices, hallways, and at lunch.



(2) News follows peoples’ social/work networks, and there is a strong effort to pass along only news seen as relevant to others;

People filter news streams for their peers as a part of their ongoing conversations at work. The filtering includes quality assessments, time investment appropriate for relaying the news, uniqueness of the news:

One subject said to us,

"I have to read it [news related email] to find out if it is unique enough. I do try to filter if it is worth forwarding. There is a huge quality assessment thing, because I would hate clogging peoples’ streams. I would probably send it to people who are actually engaged in a conversation of this type."

(3) People structure their news networks to get news conveyed in short paths of only the ‘necessary, but sufficient’ recipients. They do this by structuring the channel so that it produces quality news, finding ways to avoid unnecessary communication, or setting up shortest paths.

For example, one subject said on who to follow in Twitter:

"I went through [lots of] phases. Imagine a spiral. I could overhear conversations and pick up derivative connections. Then it got to be a little overwhelming so I went and winnowed those down... and again. The people you follow dictate the information you get. And there were three factors. One is how informative or interesting they were to my interests. The second one was how frequently they updated. If they updated 50 times a day I couldn’t keep up with that. And the third reason is strategically, who I want to build a relationship with".

DESIGN IMPLICATIONS

We take from our findings above the following requirements for systems aimed at work news propagation:

1. Integrate into the email habitat to maximize chances of adoption;

2. Facilitate also putting news receivers in control. While email has its advantages, it is in some sense a sender-controlled system;

3. Allow targeting to continue but increase the chance of serendipitous but relevant connections in a way that keeps the social paths for news short and efficient;

4. Enhance the ability to target news to others without overloading email further;

5. Allow the emergence of shared interest spaces.


References

[1] IDC white paper "The Diverse and Exploding Digital Universe: An Updated Forecast of Worldwide Information Growth Through 2011", 2008.

[2] Burt, R. S. 2004. Structural holes and good ideas. American Journal of Sociology 110, 2 (September), 349–99.

[3] Ducheneaut, N. ; Bellotti, V. Email as habitat: An exploration of embedded personal information management. ACM Interactions. 2001 September-October; 8 (5): 30-38.

Technology Mediated Social Participation Workshop at PARC next week

Earlier this year PARC and Univ. of Maryland approached NSF with the idea of funding two workshops on Technology-Mediated Social Participation. NSF eagerly provided funding and simultaneously started a new program on Social-Computational Systems (SoCS).

Technology Mediated Social Participation
WEST COAST WORKSHOP & PANEL - Dec 10-11 @ PARC
With the goal of drawing up a strong scientific research agenda and educational recommendations necessary for a new era of social participation technologies, PARC is hosting the first of two workshops designed to bring together a diverse set of researchers from a variety of disciplines.

The West Coast Workshop will focus on three major themes:

• Integration of theory: from individual behavior to collective action
  
• Social intelligence and capital: understanding connections
  
• Research challenges: shareable infrastructure, ethics, and protection
  

In addition, Peter Pirolli and Jenny Preece will be hosting a special PARC Forum on Technology Mediated Social Participation on Thursday December 10, featuring panelists Ben Shneiderman, Amy Bruckman, Bernardo Huberman, and Cameron Marlow. The Forum will be streamed and recorded as well. We'll be live-testing/ soft launching the PARC Forum livestream at: http://www.justin.tv/parcinc

Check out extensive blog post by Peter here.

Twitter hashtag is #TMSP.

Workshop event page: Event - Technology Mediated Social Participation Workshop - PARC (Palo Alto Research Center)