Directing status messages to their audience in online communities

Abstract

Social interactions have become an important element of today's Web through sites like Social Networks and other online communities. In this paper we focus on a particular aspect of the "Social Web" - the exchange of status messages (short text messages usually broadcasted to a large audience). We investigate the nature of the status message sharing phenomenon and the issues that surround it by the means of a qualitative user study. The results suggest the need to introduce the notion of audience of a status message in the broadcasting in order to prevent the issues of "Gap of Understanding", "Lack of Significance" and "Privacy". In the second part of the paper we present the requirements for a system that would overcome those issues, and seek the concrete solutions in the emerging "Semantic Web" technologies. We present a way how "Semantic Web" ontologies and rules could be used to address the problem of directing status messages to their intended audience. Particularly we show how semantic descriptions of status messages and their intended audiences can be beneficially coupled with the existing distributed data about users to direct status messages to their intended recipients. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2010.