Lecture2: What People Do on the Social Web (VU Amsterdam Social Web Course)

Social Web 2015

Lecture 2: What People DO on the Social Web?

Lora AroyoThe Network Institute

VU University Amsterdam

Social Relationships Social Web 2015, Lora Aroyo

People have relationships within & across different contexts: family, sports, work, friends

In ‘real world’ it works due to a relatively small set of social

contexts & interaction opportunities http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/socialweb/wiki/SocialWebFrameworks2#Social_Graph_Management_Today

Social in Physical World

Social Web 2015, Lora Aroyo

Digital social dynamics match physical world: friends are friends in both worlds There are also significant differences:

•  # people to interact with, not limited by distance/time

•  a person can ‘block’ or ‘manage’ relationships •  multiple systems - multiple accounts, i.e.

multi-ple digital representation (personae, personal profiles) of a user

•  personae are subject to different social norms •  personae can evolve over time •  personae are less (not) limited in scope

Social in Digital World


Accounts on different social networks, utilised in different ways, depending on digital context, e.g.:

•  friendly chat on Facebook •  professional discussion on LinkedIn •  dating on match.com

As a consequence there is a need to manage the user profiles, identities & permissions, as well as the data in them

Multiple SN Accounts


Problems

Maintaining a multitude of online profiles for different contexts is cumbersome and time consuming —> not scalable

Difficult for new social networks to attract new & maintain active

members simply because of the effort involved in creating & maintaining “yet-another-profile”, e.g. re-establishing different aspects of your profile

under yet another context

Users cannot control how their information is viewed by others in different contexts by different social applications

for managing multiple Social Web profiles “policy-oriented web” architecture to support

trusted services in the longer term

Architecture Needed


In one system manage your personal information: •  home address, telephone number, & best friends •  your Friends Profile gets exposed to Hives and Twitter

In another system manage work-related information: •  office address, office telephone number, & work colleagues •  your Work Profile gets exposed to Plaxo and LinkedIn

Another choice could be to store your entire profile locally with a trusted third party, and then

•  your Health Profile can be exposed to health care providers •  your Citizen Profile can be exposed to government services

For example …


Social Web User

http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/socialweb/wiki/SocialWebFrameworks2#Social_Graph_Management_Today


Distributed Profile



Social Graph



Social Groups




Frameworks


Personal Profiles

Opening the Sites


•  Demand from application developers to make use of the amounts of Social Web data & make their applications available to the site members

•  Demand from users to reuse data and connections they have already established on other sites, e.g. Google+ download your data, Diaspora* download xml, download photos

•  In response: Facebook provided an API & Google OpenSocial API

Opening the Sites


•  open, decentralized standard for authenticating users that can be used for access control, allowing users to log on to different services with the same digital identity where these services trust the authentication body

•  making sure the users are who they say they are •  http://openid.net/ •  Started in 2005 as Yadis (Yet another distributed identity

system)


http://openidexplained.com/

with OpenID, the process starts with the application asking the user for their

identity (typically an openid URI)


OAuth

•  it enables users to grant third-party access to their web resources without sharing their passwords

•  largely based on: Flickr’s API Auth & Google’s AuthSub •  limitations in terms of complexity, user experience, scale •  3 flows merged into one: web-based apps, desktop clients &

mobile/limited devices; e.g. when Facebook Connect existed - flows for web apps, mobile devices & game consoles

•  http://oauth.net/


OAuth 2.0

the application directly

requests a limited

access OAuth Token

(valet key) to access the

APIs (enter the house)

on user's behalf. If the

user can grant that

access, the application

can retrieve the unique

identifier for establishing

the profile (identity)

using the APIs.


•  focuses on client developer simplicity - providing specific authorization flows for web & desktop applications, mobile phones & living room devices

•  not backwards compatible with previous versions •  6 New Flows •  http://oauth.net/2/

Figure credits: http://www.phpbuilder.com/columns/sachin_khosla062510.php3

Twitter Employing


Figure credits https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/dialogs/oauth

Facebook Employing


Facebook Platform •  Graph API - core of Facebook Platform, to read and write data

to Facebook (simple and consistent view of the social graph) •  Open Graph - defining Actions and Objects •  Facebook Query Language (FQL) - SQL-style interface to

query the data exposed by the Graph API •  Authentication (Facebook Login) - interact with Graph API on

behalf of Facebook users (single-sign on mechanism for web, mobile & desktop apps)

•  Social Plugins, Facebook Payments, Ads API, Chat API (via Jabber/XMPP service), JavaScript SDK

•  Depreciated: REST API, FBML, and the old Javascript API, Facebook Connect APIs


•  open standards-based (e.g. JavaScript, HTML) component model for cloud-based social apps

•  Google initiative (set of APIs) in 2007: •  People & Friends API (people and relationship

information) •  Activities API (publishing & accessing user activity

information) •  Persistence API (simple key-value pair data for

server-free stateful applications) •  with Open Social embedded in a site, a site instantly becomes

a social Web site (initially running only at Orkut) •  integrated, e.g. OAuth, OAuth 2.0, Activity Streams •  http://www.opensocial.org/


•  Half a year after Facebook Platform, Google launched Open Social •  Popular containers (initially): MySpace, Hi5, Plaxo, LinkedIn, Orkut,

Friendster, Six Apart •  http://opensocial.org/category/showcase/ (currently) •  Plugged-in applications: iLike, Slide, Flixter, Rock You, etc. •  https://github.com/opensocial

•  Apache Shinding: reference implementation of OpenSocial Specification (Social Network APIs):

•  Apache Rave: lightweight extendible platform for using, integrating & hosting OpenSocial and W3C Widget services (context-aware personalization, collaboration & content integration capabilities)

OpenSocial



http://www.w3.org/2013/socialweb/social-wg-charter.html

•  The Twitter platform offers access to the data of more than 200 million tweets a day, via different APIs

•  Each API represents a facet of Twitter •  These APIs are constantly evolving, and

developers have to be aware of that •  http://dev.twitter.com

Twitter APIs


•  the API for leveraging core Twitter objects •  enables access to core Twitter primitives including timelines, status

updates & user information, etc. •  RESTful API calls to build a profile of a user: user name, user

Twitter handle, user profile avatar & the graph of people that user is following on Twitter

•  enables interaction with Twitter: create & post tweets back to Twitter, reply to tweets, favorite certain tweets, retweet other tweets, etc.

REST API


•  a set of tweets with specific keywords, •  tweets referencing a specific user, •  tweets from a particular user •  access to data around Trends

•  it’s limited, e.g. index of only recent tweets (6-9 days); no authentication: all queries are made anonymously; some tweets & users may be missing from search results (focus on relevance)

Search API


•  real-time sample of the Twitter Firehose •  for data intensive needs, e.g. data mining, analytics research •  allows for large quantities of keywords to be specified and tracked,

retrieving geo-tagged tweets, or have the public statuses of a user set returned

•  Connecting to the streaming API requires keeping a persistent HTTP connection open (different than the REST API)

Streaming API


REST vs. Streaming


Twitter for Websites


Twitter Cards

Summary

Photo App GallerySocial Web 2015, Lora Aroyo

Twitter Cards App Installs & Deep Linking


Issues related to User Profiles &

Networks


•  Legal still in its infancy, but courts do rule on new behavior •  4th amendt. to U.S. Constitution - not equipped to address SNS

•  e.g., is content on Facebook accessible without a warrant? •  Truthfulness of personal profiles - subject of debate •  Privacy hard to understand (few read Terms) & misinterpret

‘Friends’

Privacy Concerns


Fundamental aspects to consider for users of Social Web: •  Ownership of their own personal information, including:

•  their own profile data •  the list of people they are connected to •  the activity stream of content they create

•  Control of whether & how personal information is shared with others

•  Freedom to grant persistent access to their personal information to trusted external sites

http://opensocialweb.org/2007/09/05/bill-of-rights/

Bill of Rights


http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2012/01/online-privacy

Issues: •  burden on companies: it is next

to impossible to rid the web completely of a piece of information: some digital ripples will inevitably remain

•  where one man’s data end and another’s begin

•  crooks may try to invoke it to have their name struck from unfavorable online coverage

•  it is not always clear what counts as reporting on the internet

“Having figured out how to remember nearly everything, it is about time people relearned how

to forget” !

27-01-2012

“Personal data is the new oil of the internet and the new currency

of the digital world.”!Meglena Kuneva, European

Consumer Commissioner, 2009


•  "privacy paradox" = lack of awareness of the public nature of Internet •  flexibility to handle friends with different conceptions of privacy •  ability to control data flow inside and outside network •  realize that sensitive information can be reconstructed

Privacy: Awareness not Paranoia


http://edition.cnn.com/2014/01/15/tech/web/net-neutrality-explained/

Net Neutrality

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/21659-democrats-introduce-bill-to-restore-fccs-net-neutrality-rules


Initiatives SOPA, PIPA, ACTA

•  By media industry: !•  AHRA 1992 - soft•  DMCA 1998 - surgical•  SOPA/PIPA 2011 - nuclear

•  By non representatives!•  ACTA - 39 countries



18 Jan 2012

http://thenextweb.com/twitter/2012/01/27/twitter-isnt-censoring-you-your-government-is/


Follow-up: CISPA


http://tacma.net/



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1ug9-rhSs4

image source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/bionicteaching/1375254387/

Assignment 1


Provide analysis of privacy issues on the (Social) Web •  three articles <--> three mind maps <--> main Social Web privacy issues •  write for people who didn’t attend the course •  Use the concept maps from the lectures à Attempt to make one merged concept

map (from all the concept maps) on the issue of Privacy on the Social Web by indicating which parts of it come from which papers or other material

Provide analysis of current privacy-related public initiatives •  legal contexts for privacy and ownership •  compare the intentions of both initiatives (advantages & disadvantages) •  your own vision on how this impacts the future of the social web •  your own advise to policy makers with regards to privacy on the web. •  links to Net Neutrality & the right to be forgotten

Link to Hands-on session: •  what would change if any of the initiative mentioned in the lecture were active, e.g.

SOPA, getting documents out of search index – would you still have access to the information you pulled in for the assignments?

•  Illustrate your answer showing what changes could appear in the graph from exercise 4 (Hands-on session 2) and explain why.

•  Do the same exercise with thinking about the formats and the ‘the right to be forgotten’, what does need to be altered or added in order to support such an act from technology point of view.

Deadline: 20 February 23:59


Installations •  Python 2.6 or 2.7 •  Python packages: json, facebook, uurllib2 •  JavaScript Info Vis Toolkit (jit.zip) •  Facebook Developers app Experience OAuth Query the Facebook Open Graph Visualize your FB social network in various ways

image source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/bionicteaching/1375254387/

Hands-on Teaser


Lecture2: What People Do on the Social Web (VU Amsterdam Social Web Course)

Education

Transcript of Lecture2: What People Do on the Social Web (VU Amsterdam Social Web Course)