social computing 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 history social computing begins with the observation that humansand human behaviorare profoundly social from birth humans orient to one another and as they grow they develop abilities for interacting with each other this ranges from expression and gesture to spoken and written language 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 its 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 this information may be provided directly as when systems show the number of users who have rated a review as helpful or not or the information may be provided after being filtered and aggregated as is done when systems recommend a product based on what else people with similar purchase history have purchased alternatively the information may be provided indirectly as is the case with googles page rank algorithms which orders search results based on the number of pages that recursively point to them in all of these cases information that is produced by a group of people is used to provide or enhance the functioning of a system social computing is concerned with systems of this sort and the mechanisms and principles that underlie them social computing can be defined as follows social computing refers to systems that support the gathering representation processing use and dissemination of information that is distributed across social collectivities such as teams communities organizations and markets moreover the information is not anonymous but is significantly precise because it is linked to people who are in turn linked to other people more recent definitions however have foregone the restrictions regarding anonymity of information acknowledging the continued spread and increasing pervasiveness of social computing as an example hemmatazad n 2014 defined social computing as the use of computational devices to facilitate or augment the social interactions of their users or to evaluate those interactions in an effort to obtain new information 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 multiuser chat rooms group message forums and instant messaging appeared all within that year in 1974 email was made available as well as the worlds first online newspaper called newsreport which supported content submitted by the user community as well as written by editors and reporters social computing has to do with supporting computations that are carried out by groups of people an idea that has been popularized in james surowieckis book the wisdom of crowds examples of social computing in this sense include collaborative filtering online auctions prediction markets reputation systems computational social choice tagging and verification games the social information processing page focuses on this sense of social computing background technology infrastructure the idea to engage users using websites to interact was first brought forth by web 20 and was an advancement from web 10 where according to cormode g and krishnamurthy b 2008 content creators were few in web 10 with the vast majority of users simply acting as consumers of content web 20 provided functionalities that allowed for low cost webhosting services and introduced features with browser windows that used basic information structure and expanded it to as many devices as possible using http by 2006 of particular interest in the realm of social computing is social software for enterprise sometimes referred to as enterprise 20 a term derived from web 20 this generally refers to the use of social computing in corporate intranets and in other medium and largescale business environments it consisted of a class of tools that allowed for networking and social changes to businesses at the time it was a layering of the business tools on web 20 and brought forth several applications and collaborative software with specific uses financeelectronic negotiation which first came up in 1969 and was adapted over time to suit financial markets networking needs represents an important and desirable coordination mechanism for electronic markets negotiation between agents software agents as well as humans allows cooperative and competitive sharing of information to determine a proper price recent research and practice has also shown that electronic negotiation is beneficial for the coordination of complex interactions among organizations electronic negotiation has recently emerged as a very dynamic interdisciplinary research area covering aspects from disciplines such as economics information systems computer science communication theory sociology and psychologysocial computing has become more widely known because of its relationship to a number of recent trends these include the growing popularity of social software and web 30 increased academic interest in social network analysis the rise of open source as a viable method of production and a growing conviction that all of this can have a profound impact on daily life a february 13 2006 paper by market research company forrester research suggested that easy connections brought about by cheap devices modular content and shared computing resources are having a profound impact on our global economy and social structure individuals increasingly take cues from one another rather than from institutional sources like corporations media outlets religions and political bodies to thrive in an era of social computing companies must abandon topdown management and communication tactics weave communities into their products and services use employees and partners as marketers and become part of a living fabric of brand loyalists theoretical foundations socially intelligent computing is a new term that refers to the recent efforts of individuals to understand the ways in which systems of people and computers will prove useful as intermediaries between people and tools used by people these systems result in new behaviors that occur as a result of the complex interaction between humans and computers and can be explained by several different areas of science the foundations of social computing are deeply vested in the understanding of social psychology and cyberpsychology social psychology covers topics such as decision making persuasion group behavior personal attraction and factors that promote health and wellbeing there are multiple areas of social computing that have been able to expand the threshold of knowledge in this discipline each area has been able to have a focus and goal behind it that provides us with a deeper understanding of the social behavior between users that interact using some variation of social computing 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 networksrelations among people these are people who commonly share similar backgrounds interests or participate in the same activities for more details see social networking service wiki pages a wiki provides computing users a chance to collaborate to come together with a common goal and provide content to the public both novice and expert users through the collaboration and efforts of many a wiki page has no limit for the number of improvements that can be made blogs tumblr2 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 andor 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 according to a study conducted by rachael kwai fun ip and christian wagner 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 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 online dating online dating has created a community of websites like okcupid eharmony and matchcom these platforms provide users with a way to interact with others that have goals relating to creating new relationships the interaction between users in sites like these will differ based on the platform but the goal is simple create relationships through online social interaction 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 social science theories collective intelligence collective intelligence is considered an area of social computing because of the group collaboration aspect becoming a growing area in computer science collective intelligence provides users with a way to gain knowledge through collective efforts in a social interactive environment social perceptions recent research has begun to look at interactions between humans and their computers in groups this line of research focuses on the interaction as the primary unit of analysis by drawing from fields such as psychology social psychology and sociology current research since 2007 research in social computing has become more popular for researchers and professionals in multiple fields dealing with technology business and politics 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 the difference between social science and computational social science computational social science can be defined as the interdisciplinary investigation of the social universe on many scales ranging from individual actors to the largest grouping through the medium of computation computer science is the study of the principles and use of computers to study experimentation and theories conferences computersupported cooperative workcscw sigchi research institutions mit media lab grouplens research hcii computermediated communication game theory humanbased computation humancentered computing multiagent system open innovation social choice social machine social network social software engineering sociology symbiotic intelligence web 20 introduction to computational social science principles and applications textbook by claudio cioffirevilla published at december 312013page 23 peerreviewed overview of social computing by tom erickson ibm research and elizabeth churchill yahoo research social machines computing means connecting wade roush mit technology review august 2005 microsoft research social computing group home ibm research social computing group hp labs social computing lab university of lincoln social computing research centre icrossing ebook what is social media antony mayfield 2007 you are here social computing snapshots socially intelligent computing talk social computing special edition of the communications of the acm edited by douglas schuler volume 37 issue 1 january 1994 pages 28 108 theoretical foundations of social computation burger j m 2009 replicating milgram would people still obey today american psychologist 64 111 doi101037a0010932 pmid19209958 cialdini r b 2003 crafting normative messages to protect the environment current directions in psychological science 12 105109 doi1011111467872101242 social psychology and cognitive sciences cases 