November 2nd, 2006
Google, MIT, and IBM to invest in Social Web Research
by Joshua Porter | 
8 Comments | shortlink: http://bokardo.com/p/501
“The Web fails to capture the nature of social relationships. We want the Web to be more responsive to the existing relationships people actually have,”
So says Daniel Wentzner, principal research scientist at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), in announcing a new initiative to study the Web, called Web Science Research Initiative (WSRI). Part of the initiative is to “to establish a research center that will sponsor Ph.D. students and ultimately create undergraduate curricula in Web science.”.
This is very interesting news, and readers of Bokardo will recognize that this new initiative is directly related to this site and what we talk about here. People are formally studying the social web. Obviously, this initiative has huge implications for social design. First, we need to understand how people use the Web. Then, we can improve our designs accordingly.
Inventor-of-the-Web Tim Berners-Lee, who is also part of CSAIL, pointed out:
“The Web is basically a web of people. It’s a way that social people interact,” Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the basic software of the Web and is director of the World Wide Web Consortium standards group, said. “Because it’s something we created, we have a duty to make it better.”
Other interesting tidbits of the announcement:
“The universities intend to combine several disciplines, including social sciences, psychology and life sciences, with technology development.”
“The social aspect of the Web–and the Web’s huge impact on society–demands that a field separate from computer science be explored, organizers said. For example, eBay is interesting because it relies on the involvement of millions of people. Similarly, Google used a mathematical algorithm that examines how millions of individuals link to other pages to improve search results.”
“Berners-Lee gave the example of e-mail, which worked well until it was adopted on a mass scale. That tipping point enticed spammers to start abusing the system.
To prevent problems such as these, Web scientists can study the incentives for individuals to do harm as well as the technology that can be misused, such as viruses, Berners-Lee said. Similarly, researchers can analyze the human psychology as it relates to Web-based interactions and the legal implications.”
“We want to see the Web as an object of scientific study from the perspective of various different disciplines,” said Weitzner. “What we are looking for is to direct scholarly attention and research attention to this particular new subject.”
Richard’s got a nice writeup at ReadWriteWeb.
More coverage:
Previous
Social problems need social design
Links to this Post
Comments
1. Daus 10:55am, Fri 3rd, 2006
Good
2. Pauric 10:58am, Fri 3rd, 2006
The best analogy I can think of right now to describe where I think the web is at is the diametrically opposed approaches to development. With UCD on one hand and engineering-out on the other, I see a parallel between the way people approach the web and the way the web provides features. Its the difference between a use case and a feature.
I think the net as a platform has a long way to go. Once it moves beyond providing features: email, photo sharing, etc. and on to a place where people manipulate the platform to their own individual ends… only then will we see the emergence of the true potential of the web.
Every once in a while I see a spark of what is possible, most long term net users have their own stories. Yesterday I had an idea for a site. I mailed a friend the idea, his company got back to me and said make it. Just then another friend sent me a link to a site that would enable the idea, completely unrelated. I wrapped their api in to a page, mailed it back to the company, chingching. This whole interaction from start to finish, from Boston to S.F took less than 2 hours. This is the web enabling my needs as a ui designer, social networking albeit at a fairly rudimentary & techincal level.
I envision a time when the local farmstand has technology to easily broadcast to the neighbourhood that their corn will be in season next week. Real people, real social interactions on the net platform. Again, its not about the features the net can provide, its not about the next myspace, it should be about how we think of and approach the platform to communicate with others. Once ordinary people see past the system on to what they can accomplish then we will have arrived at true social networking.
I guess I would say that at a very high level the entire platform needs a little UCD instead of featurecreep and this initiative is a step towards that.
3. pauric 7:26am, Tue 16th, 2007
“Once ordinary people see past the system on to what they can accomplish then we will have arrived at true social networking.”
e.g… http://tinyurl.com/ykolpp
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/14/nyregion/nyregionspecial2/14Rhyperlocal.html?ex=1326430800&en=eda047d57877babd&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss
4. Jens Meiert 9:34am, Sun 15th, 2007
Didn’t hear from that initiative for a while now, is there any progress? It’s nice to register these efforts though, we definitely need more web design research (HFI still seems to do/publish the most).
5. Download Full Movies 8:28am, Tue 21st, 2007
Very Good
6. Full Mp3 Albums 12:02pm, Thu 6th, 2007
Didn’t hear from that initiative for a while now, is there any progress? It’s nice to register these efforts though, we definitely need more web design research (2 Unlimited).
7. supertist 7:36am, Mon 4th, 2008
Reserch of people’s interaction is rather difficult task , differ from place to place….
http://allmuzz.com