What Can Social Networking Do?

What else can social networking do except from keeping in touch with friends in virtual www world? It might be a question to all of people who concentrate on building social networking websites at the beginning.

As far as our experience in the past, we know that we can buy things and ask questions through the Internet websites and web-forums. In lecture 2, Prof. Chan systematically introduced us Social Tasks, Social Media with Social Marketing. What interest me most are Open Source Development and Social Recommendation.

Open Source Development can be included in Social Tasks. As its name indicating, it is a kind of cooperation by putting the open source code of software or methods into the Internet website or forum. Any potential people or developer from all over the world can access to the code and improve it. We have already known that CSDN (Chinese software develop net) and Github are exactly the examples of the Open Source Development and thanks to them, many problems in our learning process can be dealt with easily by searching keywords and reading the documentation of code. It’s very convenient for developing beginner to study and improve themselves.

Another interesting thing we learnt is the Social Recommendation. We got in touch some familiar experience about it. For instance, when we log in WeiBo or Twitter and post news, you can set the topic by using the notation “#” to enclose the content you are writing so that you can easily find the similar content of recommendation by clicking the topic. Another example is the Genius of Apple App Store. You can open the Genius option in Apple App Store and it will recommend you some great apps you might be interested according to your downloaded apps.

Genius in App Store

The Social Recommendation seems more and more important in social networking. It is like commercial advertisement but much more interactive. It can search the things you like automatically and output the results for you so that you might very likely click on them which indeed increase the click rate even the incomes of websites. So it’s very important to have a considerate analysis system to filter the potential recommendations. There are three basic derived social recommendation methods as follows: User-based filtering and Item-based filtering with Content-based filtering.

Content-based filtering method gives recommendations by collecting the tags and keywords of items. It is mostly based on the characteristics and preferences of items. If you like apple products like iphone and you set the tag of apple as IT product, the recommendation won’t return the fruit apple for you.

User-based filtering and Item-based filtering are both Collaborative Filtering. To figure out the difference between them, Prof. Chan used a fourth object to explain. Let’s imagine another model that A like Apple product iphone and fruit apple while you are A’s best friend with high correlation in favor.  When you search iphone, User-based filtering method might return you iphone and fruit apple to you by matching A’s favor. Yet Item-based filtering method might just return you iphone and ipad because they are highly correlated as Apple Company product.

I think that commercial websites should think much more about the recommendation filtering methods so that they can earn more profit from social recommendations. And to do it better, it may be a good way to build a social networking for customers like what Taobao did.

In fact, Social Networking can do much more than Open Source Development and Social Recommendation. It can gather great ideas from all over the world as Social Brainstorming or Crowsourcing. Besides, it can record your life or ideas by Blog. To company, it's no need to mention the usage and importance of Social Commerce. In brief, Social Networking can do a lot more than we have known and we should keep digging its potential worth.