Kolbitsch, J. and Maurer, H. 2006. The transformation of the Web: How Emerging Communities Shape the Information we Consume. In Journal of Universal Computer Science, vol. 12, no. 2 (2006): 187-213. http://www.jucs.org/jucs_12_2/the_transformation_of_the
This is a very interesting paper on social web, offering in detail an overview on main application that are shaping the new web, or social web, or web 2.0.
From the abstract: This paper presents an overview of a broad selection of current technologies and services: blogs, wikis including Wikipedia and Wikinews, social networks such as Friendster and Orkut as well as related social services like del.icio.us, file sharing tools such as Flickr, and podcasting. These services enable user participation on the Web and manage to recruit a large number of users as authors of new content. It is argued that the transformations the Web is subject to are not driven by new technologies but by a fundamental mind shift that encourages individuals to take part in developing new structures and content. The evolving services and technologies encourage ordinary users to make their knowledge explicit and help a collective intelligence to develop.

In particular, I appreciated the defense of the non-hierarchical model (chapter 1.1) using ant colonies as example. “Although [...] individial ants make wrong decisions, the large number of ants in colonies assures that decisions are ultimately correct”.

The paper briefly mentionns the problem of different version of Wikipedia (one version for each different languages), that yields to unbalanced and non-communicating articles. After saying that it’s “hard to compare Wikipedia to a tradizional encyclopaedia”, last pages are devoted to social networks (chapter 8 ). Social networks are based on the concept of six degree of separation and on the rule of 150 (since an average human brain can remember factual, emotional and social details of maximum 150 people, a genuine social network is limited to about 150 people).

A first brick for my research: the authors consider Skype as a social network, although users are not conscious on this aspect: a phone-call contitutes a strong relationship through people. The same for email. This yields to an automated generation of a social network (versus a manually generated social network as Orkut or openBC).

Second brick: socially powered search engines are a potential application of social network. They may answer to query like “Has any of my acquaintances been on holidays in New Zealand?” or “recent articles on hypertext authored by people associated with Ted Nelson”.

Is Google going in this direction? Gmail and Search History are services that may take to this social aspect of the search engine. There are lot of privacy issue to solve (this will be a great problem), but something could already exist in alpha-version.