Social Computing

There’s no doubt that social media is making a huge impact on our society. It increases the connectivity among social media users by reducing the time and geographical barriers. Information is spreading out in a much faster pace through social networking. Activities in social media aren’t limited to the virtual space—they’re also having significant influence on real-world events. Applications have been extended from entertainment and business to many other fields such as healthcare, crisis management, public safety, finance, education, e-government, and more. In the last decade, we’ve witnessed how social media has made an impact on presidential elections, facilitated emergency response to disasters, enabled social movements such as Occupy Wall Street, and supported health consumers in acquiring healthcare knowledge to cope with their health conditions. It has also created new problems, such as online bullying and cybercrime. As social media continues to evolve, more effort is needed to identify new opportunities, as well as coping with new problems arising in our society.

Social computing is an area of computer science that is concerned with the intersection of social behavior and computational systems. It is based on creating or recreating social conventions and social contexts through the use of software and technology. Thus, blogs, email, instant messaging, social network services, wikis, social bookmarking and other instances of what is often called social software illustrate ideas from social computing.

Social computing is inherently interdisciplinary, involving researchers, scientists, and practitioners from diverse fields—such as cognitive science, computing, engineering, information science, social science, psychology, sustainability science, economics, business, human-coupled complex systems, human factors, behavior modeling, neural science, linguistics, security, criminal intelligence, health, and public policy.

Social Software

Social software can be any computational system that supports social interactions among groups of people. The following are examples of such systems.

Social media

Social media has become an outlet that is one of the most widely used ways of interacting through computers. Though there are many different platforms that can be used for social media, they all serve the same primary purpose of creating a social interaction through computers, mobile devices, etc. Social media has evolved into not just an interaction through text, but through pictures, videos, GIFs, and many other forms of multimedia. This has provided users an enhanced way to interact with other users while being able to more widely express and share during computational interaction. Within the last couple decades,

social media has blown up and created many famous applications within the social computing arena.

Social networking

Through social networking, people are able to use platforms to build or enhance social networks/relations among people. These are people who commonly share similar backgrounds, interests, or participate in the same activities. For more details see social networking service.

Blogs

A blog, in social computing aspects, is more a way for people to follow a particular user, group, or company and comment on the progress toward the particular ideal being covered in the blog. This allows users to interact using the content that is provided by page admin as the main subject.

Five of the best blogging platforms include Tumblr, WordPress, Squarespace, Blogger, and Posterous. These sites enable users, whether it be a person, company, or organization, to express certain ideas, thoughts, and/or opinions on either a single or variety of subjects. There are also a new technology called webloging which are sites that hosts blogs such as Myspace and Xanga. Both blogs and weblogging are very similar in that they act as a form of social computing where they help form social relations through one another such as gaining followers, trending using hashtags, or commenting on a post providing an opinion on a blog.

Blogs are also highly used in social computing concepts in order to understand human behaviors amongst online communities through a concept called social network analysis. Social network analysis (SNA) is "a discipline of social science that seeks to explain social phenomena through a structural interpretation of human interaction both as a theory and a methodology". There are certain links that occur in blogs, weblogs in this case, where they have different functions that portray different types of information such as Permalink, Blogrolls, Comments, and Trackbacks.

Online gaming

Online gaming is the social behavior of using an online game while interacting with other users. Online gaming can be done using a multitude of different platforms; common ones include personal computers, Xbox, PlayStation, and many more gaming consoles that can be stationary or mobile.

Socially Intelligent Computing

Groups of people interact with these social computing systems in a variety of ways, all of which may be described as socially intelligent computing.

Crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing is currently a branch of social computing that has brought computing tasks to a new level when it comes to completion speed. This has also given users a way to earn an income through things like Amazon Mechanical Turk.

Dark social media

The Dark social media is the social media tools used to collaborate between individuals where contents are supposed to be only available to the participants. However, unlike mobile phone calls or messaging where information is sent from one user, transmitted through a medium and stored on each user devices, with the medium having no storage permission of the actual content of the data, more and more communication methods include a centralized server where all the contents are received, stored, and then transmitted. Some examples of these new mechanisms include Google Doc, Facebook Messages or Snapchat. All of the information passes through these channels has largely been unaccounted for by users themselves and the data analytics. However, in addition to their respective users private companies (Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat) that provided these services do have complete control over such data. The number of images, links, referrals and information pass through digital is supposed to be completely unaccounted for in the marketing scheme of things.