Social computing
As a consequence, people are remarkably sensitive to the behavior of those around them and make countless decisions that are shaped by their social context.
Whether it is wrapping up a talk when the audience starts fidgeting, choosing the crowded restaurant over the nearly deserted one, or crossing the street against the light because everyone else is doing so, social information provides a basis for inferences, planning, and coordinating activity.
The premise of 'Social Computing' is that it is possible to design digital systems that support useful functionality by making socially produced information available to their users.
[1]More recent definitions, however, have foregone the restrictions regarding anonymity of information, acknowledging the continued spread and increasing pervasiveness of social computing.
"[2] PLATO may be the earliest example of social computing in a live production environment with initially hundreds and soon thousands of users, on the PLATO computer system based in the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign in 1973, when social software applications for multi-user chat rooms, group message forums, and instant messaging appeared all within that year.
In 1974, email was made available as well as the world's first online newspaper called NewsReport, which supported content submitted by the user community as well as written by editors and reporters.
"[2] Web 2.0 provided functionalities that allowed for low cost web-hosting services and introduced features with browser windows that used basic information structure and expanded it to as many devices as possible using HTTP.
Recent research and practice has also shown that electronic negotiation is beneficial for the coordination of complex interactions among organizations.
Social psychology covers topics such as decision making, persuasion, group behavior, personal attraction, and factors that promote health and well-being.
[5] Cognitive sciences also play a huge role in understanding Social computing and human behavior on networking elements driven by personal needs/means.
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.
According to a study conducted by Rachael Kwai Fun IP and Christian Wagner,[5] some features of weblogs that attract users and support blogs and weblogs as an important aspect of social computing in forming and strengthening relationships are: content management tools, community building tools, time structuring, search by category, commentary, and the ability to secure closed blogs.
Crowdsourcing platforms like Amazon Mechanical Turk allow individuals to perform simple tasks that can be accumulated into a larger project.
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.
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.
A study performed by affiliates of Washington State University used a Latent semantic analysis on academic papers containing the term "social computing" to find that topics in social computing converge into the three major themes of Knowledge Discovery, Knowledge Sharing and Content Management.
Currently, research in the areas of social computing is being done by many well known labs owned by Microsoft and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The team at Microsoft has taken off with a mission statement of "To research and develop software that contributes to compelling and effective social interactions.
They also add rapid prototyping combined with rigorous science to bring forth complete projects and research that can impact the social computing field.
"[15]The current research projects at the MIT social computing lab include The Dog Programming Language,[16] Wildflower Montessori, and You Are Here.
