Archive for the 'Social Networks' Category

Silicon Republic: “Online networking for the Social.ie challenged”

Published
by
Cloud
on 6/9/2007
in Boards, General and Social Networks
. 0 Comments

Meant to quote this interview with Marie Boran that was published last week about our forthcoming social.ie site…

Online networking for the Social.ie challenged

27.08.2007 - Social networking fans in Ireland can look forward to a site catering especially for them, as John Breslin, creator of the popular Boards.ie portal is currently working on a platform that will combine all the spin-off functions including blogs, ‘friends’ lists, events and photo albums.

“There are a huge amount of social networks, maybe even an overabundance of them, but at the same time there isn’t any dedicated one where you know you will find things of an Irish interest,” said Breslin.

Breslin, who is also a researcher with the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) in NUI Galway, talked about how his team is developing social.ie while looking at how online communities connect – namely, through shared objects, not people.

“If you look at sites like Flickr and del.icio.us and so on, people are connected through photos and bookmarks and events,” he said.

In parallel with that Breslin started working at DERI three and a half years ago and was introduced to various elements of social networking by his boss Stefan Decker and began thinking about how he could apply this functionality to boards.ie.

He introduced a ‘friends’ function to the boards site three years ago which has led to over 15,000 links between users. With this success his team is now working on bringing this to social.ie, planning to plug the social networking site it into the existing boards user base.

A part of the design which is unique to social.ie is an interactive graph visualisation model, with the user shown at the centre and a graphical display of the offshoots of friends they are linked to.

Boards.ie, said Breslin, has been a part-time project for the five main directors of the company, himself included, but this year for the first time due to its growth and revenue the team is now actively looking for full-time staff.

There is no exact timeframe, however, for the launch of social.ie, although it is in development right now.

By Marie Boran

GAME :ON “Talk Digital” Seminar on “Social Networking in Games”

Published
by
Cloud
on 3/9/2007
in Boards, DERI, Galway, Games, Ireland and Social Networks
. 0 Comments

20070903b.png As mentioned previously, I will be taking part in the “Talk Digital” panel discussion on “Social Networking in Games” on Monday at 1 PM, which is part of the GAME :ON Cyber Games Festival in the Digital Hub, Dublin next week. The panelists are:

The event will be chaired by John Collins from the The Irish Times, and the where and when details are:

  • Date: Monday, 10 September 2007
  • Time: 13:00
  • Venue: Presentation Room in the Digital Depot, Roe Lane, The Digital Hub, Dublin 8 (map)

Investnet.ie Social Networking Platform

Published
by
Cloud
on 3/9/2007
in Ireland and Social Networks
. 0 Comments

20070903a.png I’ve been updating myself on recent developments in the Investnet.ie social networking platform, which hosts a number of Irish social networks including communities for innovation and creativity, the healthcare industry, Wireless Ireland, First Tuesday, Invent DCU and the Ryan Academy.

It looks like Marc and David at Investnet and Derek and Barry at Jeebers have been very busy since I met them last in May, with some nice new features on Investnet.ie like integrated blog feeds in your profile, user endorsements, single sign-on to all the aforementioned network sites, and enhanced connection / event / group browsing functionality.

(Disclosure: I am an advisor to Investnet Ltd.)

Been a busy B…

Published
by
Cloud
on 3/9/2007
in BarCamp, Boards, DERI, Education, Galway, Games, Internet, Ireland, Japan, NUI Galway, Semantic Web, Social Networks, Social Software, Web and Web 2.0
. 0 Comments

…for the past few months, hence the lack of regular blog entries. Most of my summer has been taken up with proposal writing for research funding here at DERI, the first of which finished up around the end of the June and the second ran from then until the end of August, so unfortunately I haven’t had time for much else…

Anyway, here are some updates about future social media / social software activities I’m involved in:

social.ie: Working on it…

Published
by
Cloud
on 21/8/2007
in Boards and Social Networks
. 3 Comments

20070822c.gifAs you probably know, we’ve been planning to spin off various boards.ie services (blogs, albums, events, friends functionality) into a separate social networking site for nearly a year now. Unfortunately, time and effort have been against us, but I’ve started on this again and hopefully we can launch a beta version within the next few weeks.

20070821b.pngThe result will be called social.ie (pronounced “socially” :-)). It will leverage our existing boards.ie userbase and the social network connections that have been formed on the site since I added friends functionality three years ago (so far, there are 15335 links between users, 6347 of those are reciprocated). The screenshot below shows the buddylist functionality in vBDrupal that has been hacked a little to be a bit more graphical.

20070821a.png

Will post more as it happens…

“Bebo Instructional Tutorial”

Published
by
Cloud
on 13/6/2007
in Social Networks
. 0 Comments

Watched the “Bebo Instructional Tutorial“. It’s actually a deleted scene from the recent Multime documentary about Bebo, but it could be an official promotional video, almost! Enjoy…

Multime: A documentary about Bebo

Published
by
Cloud
on 23/5/2007
in General, Social Networks and Social Software
. 1 Comment

I was interviewed by the Multime group in DCU for this documentary on Bebo recently. Enjoy the video (in two parts) below.

Some recent social network links

Published
by
Cloud
on 21/5/2007
in Social Networks and Social Software
. 1 Comment
  • Are you connected?: The Guardian’s guide to social networks.
  • Imagini: Connect to and communicate with others using images, not words. About 2.5 million registered users.
  • nimble: A new Irish social network for young adults. About 30,000 registered users.

Wink social network search engine

Published
by
Cloud
on 13/4/2007
in Social Networks and Social Software
. 2 Comments

Wink looks nice, kind of like Bigulo but for multiple OSNs. See it in action at wink.com, and here’s the “about” blurb:

Wink is a people search engine. We specifically target our search engine to find individual people who are active web and social network users. We search the public profiles on MySpace, Bebo, Friendster, LinkedIn, Live Spaces, and other sources. We’re adding more and more networks all the time and are developing new technology to find even more people in a variety of cool ways. We also use our PeopleRank technology that takes direct input about our search results from users and refines it to deliver the results that people think are the best. Wink People Search lets you find people by name, location, school, work, and interest anywhere on the web.

My Erdös number is <= 4

Published
by
Cloud
on 23/3/2007
in Social Networks
. 0 Comments

After seeing a reference to his own value on Ivan’s page, I’ve found out that my Erdös number is no more than 4 (via an IEEE paper with Eugene G. Gath, who wrote a paper with Thomas J. Laffey, who wrote a paper with LeRoy B. Beasley, who wrote with Paul Erdös), using the MathSciNet author search and collaboration distance calculator.

The Erdös number (more info here) is the number of links required to connect scholars to mathematician Paul Erdös, a prolific writer who co-authored over 1500 papers with more than 500 authors, and this number is commonly referenced in social network materials.