Data portability and relation management in social web applications

Inhaltsangabe:Introduction: Recent years have witnessed the great popularity of online social networking services, in which millions of members publicly articulate mutual ”friend- ship” relations. Social network services have become a major application in the internet. Correspondingly the number of provider such social net- work services has multiplied and accommodates estimated 272 million users worldwide (Universalmccann, 2008). The mass adoption of social networking websites points to an evolution in human social interaction. These sites let the user create an identity namely their profile, which they fill with personal information. These identities can then be searched and relationships among the users can be made. A user can make friends virtually and by that creates his own social circle, that is why it can also be regarded as a reflection of the real world. Most of the users are part in more than one social network, which creates problems in terms of identity and relation management. At the moment there seems to be no consolidation among the services, but a further fragmentation and by that also a fragmentation of information. In the real world people can be easily identified, but this is not possible in the internet as there is no physical contact. People using assumed names as an identifier which may be different on every platform. On top of this it is difficult to manage all the contacts which are spread over several services. At the moment the social network services do not o er ways to get the data out of their platforms to reuse it somewhere else. The use of separate networks may be wanted by the users regarding order and different roles they can slip into. In spite of these aspects there is an increasing demand for reusing and sharing the contact data to be able to manage the online ’friendships’. To overcome the disadvantages of fragmented data central storage has to be established. In combination with exchange mechanisms it would make data reusable, which means all the social networks the user is part of could be synchronised. This is especially useful when entering a new network. It is like moving into a new city and already know some people. Inevitable for such a scenario is that the information of the social networks are portable and that the user can be uniquely identified. There are e orts to achieve this goal, but up to now only partial problems have been solved. An overall concept seems not possible at the moment due to [...]