social_eden

1
Building, mining, and
monetizing dynamic
online communities
Author:
Dr. Yoav Intrator, GM Enterprise Architecture, Microsoft Services
Publication Date:
May 2013
Acknowledgments:
The author wants to thank the following people who contributed to,
reviewed, and helped improve this white paper:
•Norm Judah
•Marc Mercuri
•George Anderson
•Marc Ashbrook
•Jon Tobey
•Mark Hoffman
•Yuri Misnik
Introduction
Imagine that you’re working in Macau for six months, and your wife has
come to visit you. Several weeks before her visit, you joined an online social
environment that alerts you whenever any groups in that environment form
to alert you of events and topics near you that might interest you, such as
Macanese folk-pop concerts, sailing events, and natural disasters.
This morning, you left for work just as your wife left to play golf with a friend
on Coloane Island to the south. At 9:37 a.m., the building where you work in
central Macau starts to shake violently. You run outside and see hundreds of
other workers from surrounding buildings. You try several times to call your
wife’s smart phone but can’t get through. Then you receive a text message
on your smart phone that asks if you want to join a group in the social
environment called “Macau earthquake group,” or MEG for short. You click a
link on the text message, enter your credentials for the social environment,
An Enterprise
Architect Whitepaper
Social Edens

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and see on your smart phone the home page for MEG. It’s fully configured for
an emergency and includes a link to the Global Disaster Alert and
Coordination System web site (www.gdacs.org) complemented with
suggestions about what to do during and after a major earthquake, along
with emergency organizations and rescue locations in and near Macau. It
displays a button that says, “Tell your family and friends you’re safe.” You
press the button and see a pre-written message that says, “I’m OK. How
about you?” It shows your current location in latitude and longitude. You
recall that when you subscribed to “natural disasters near me” groups in the
social environment, you provided a list of contacts such as your wife and
children plus their phone numbers to whom you could send such a message.
You make minor edits to the message and press “Send.” Other pages linked
from MEG’s home page include news feeds from earthquake experts
worldwide, text messages from eyewitnesses all over Macau, and even a few
photos and video clips of the earthquake from eyewitnesses. Along the
bottom of a map of the Macau region, you see scrolling text updates about
the quake and feeds from local governmental and volunteer agencies that
provide information about shelters and aid services. The continuously
updating Macau map on your smart phone shows that most of the roads and
bridges in Macau and Coloane are damaged. You see short, Twitter-like
messages from people who joined MEG, and you send one of your own to say
you’re safe outside your building. You also see tweets with hashtags
#eqinmacau and #eqinmacauneedhelp that offer links to important
resources. Some of your coworkers and Macau friends also joined MEG. You
see several of them tagged in the onscreen map of Macau, but you don’t see
your wife. After you send her another text message, you’re delighted to see
her texting back. She’s OK. She read your “I’m OK” message and your text
messages. She’s still near the golf course on Coloane, and she just clicked a
link in your ‘I’m OK” message to an invitation to join the Macau earthquake
group. A minute later her icon appears on the group’s map.
At 9:57 A.M., you receive a text message that a tsunami is heading toward
Macau and will hit the region at about 10:30 A.M. You zoom in on the Macau
map on your smart phone, and it shows where the tsunami might reach in
various scenarios, from best-case to worst. The golf course on Coloane is
inundated in every scenario. Your wife is in the path of imminent death. You
text her again and tell her to get out of Coloane or, if she can’t do that, head
to high ground. She texts you back that she knows about the tsunami; she
received the same message over MEG’s texting environment. She’s trying to
get out of Coloane, but if she can’t, she’ll head to a hill just north of the golf
course that’s 300 feet above sea level.
A text message tells you to head to the hills west of Macau if you can get
there. You have no car, but one of your coworkers does, and MEG’s map
shows that he’s driving toward the Zhuhai Avenue Bridge on Macau’s west
side, which he discovered was open by reading a post on MEG. You text him
to pick up you and two other people neither of you know personally but
whom you engaged via MEG, and you all agree to rendezvous nearby. You
meet there and squeeze into your coworker’s car and drive over the Zhuhai
Avenue Bridge and veer south to the Nanyuan hotel. They all clamber out
and hike up into the hills above. You stay behind in the rapidly filling hotel
parking lot while you follow your wife’s progress on MEG’s map as she and
her friend try to flee Coloane. Using MEG, they found a friend who has a car.
The map shows that all the bridges north of Coloane are down, and traffic is
backed up behind them, so they drive instead toward the Estrada Flor de

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Lotus Bridge to the west, which the map shows is still open. They then drive
west, north, and finally east to the Nanyuan Hotel. You run to her at the back
of the parking lot, and as you embrace she apologizes for being late as usual.
Then you both hike up the hill.
At 10:33 A.M., the tsunami hits. From your perch in the hills west of Macau you
watch, terrified, as the tsunami tears through large swathes of the city and
surrounding countryside. But you’re safe; the tsunami’s waters don’t even
reach the hotel’s parking lot below you. You wonder who among your
coworkers survived. After examining Macau’s online maps on the MEG site,
you see that all of them are in the hills around you, among the thousands of
people who’ve made it to safety here.
By 1:00 P.M., the tsunami has receded. MEG’s text messages suggest that aid
groups are already responding, and the US Navy is on the way with
emergency supplies and help. You and your wife read posts on MEG hour by
hour as the horror of the earthquake and tsunami hit home: more than
100,000 people killed and more than $10 billion in damage. Truck convoys
bring in food, sleeping blankets, and tents, and helicopters bring in medical
supplies for the thousands of people stranded in the hills above Macau. You
read about five separate people trapped by earthquake debris who were
found by sending text messages to MEG; rescuers geolocated two trapped
victims from her text messages. You also read about dozens of people
stranded by the tsunami who found rescuers through MEG.
The MEG solution saved countless lives today. It was the only functioning real-
time information source during the disaster. The thousands of tweets, photos,
videos, and personal stories by tsunami survivors that are archived on the
MEG make for riveting reading. A month later, its members visit it mostly to
reflect on how they survived the disaster. New feeds appear in it to explain
how to file insurance claims and how to rebuild damaged buildings and
homes. With the help of those posts and your insurance company, you file a
claim for your and your wife’s personal items, which you left back at your
hotel before the tsunami.
Two months after the earthquake, a Macau newspaper claims that far fewer
people would have been killed if earthquake experts had given advance
warning of the tsunami. The newspaper hints that this lack of warning was
purposeful: Western scientists in league with their governments, it claims,
wanted to destroy Macau. Many people in Macau believe the newspaper.
You email the newspaper to point out that earthquake experts all over the
world warned of a tsunami more than an hour before it hit, but Macau’s
infrastructure simply wouldn’t let enough people leave the city in time. The
reporter who wrote the story emails you to say, “You’re wrong. Prove it.” You
send her and her editor an invitation to join MEG, with its visualization tools
for the archived trove of the earthquake and tsunami information, and you
send the same invitation to two other major newspapers in Macau. Then you
ask selected friends on MEG to send the same invitation to the editors of the
top 25 newspapers in the world. The newspaper that published the original
story prints a retraction, and the reporter who wrote the story resigns. These
events and the resulting news bring a burst of new members to MEG, all
seeking to find out what actually happened during the earthquake and
tsunami. A reporter at The New York Times uses the group’s trove of
information to write a long analysis of what happened during the Macau
disaster. It’s reprinted in newspapers around the world, and MEG suddenly
gains millions of members.

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The technologies for this scenario and others far less dramatic already exist.
Social media applications have progressed beyond mere “social” software to
become major players in historic events such as the Arab Spring uprisings. This
paper lays out a vision of a new kind of social platform that in addition to
mining traditional interest-based communities also mines online sources to
look for significant events. The platform would invite people to form dynamic
online communities that focus on significant events. This system would
efficiently monitor, memorialize, mine, and monetize temporal occurrences of
any kind, such as sporting events, concerts, political rallies, sales, corporate
mergers and acquisitions, centennials, celebrity deaths and births, and more.
We call these ad hoc, event-driven communities Social Edens. To retain the
interest of a Social Eden’s members, the platform would continuously monitor
interactions in the Social Eden and provide members with stimulating,
relevant content and tools that match their interests. In addition, a software
player could develop the infrastructure to support community-building
features that let users or corporations personalize these Social Edens. The
software player would gain huge benefits and cachet as the first mover in this
space. The player could, for example, commercialize Social Edens with
community-targeted services, or mine their content for other collaboration
services that no one yet envisions. A player with solutions in news media,
social media, and devices could build such a service relatively quickly. Being
first to market and achieving deep penetration early would be the keys to
success in this endeavor.

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Table of Contents
1. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY ............................................................................................6
2. MINING STORIES FOR HISTORY............................................................................7
3. CREATING COMMUNITIES....................................................................................13
3.1 TRUST ....................................................................................................................14
3.1.1 Truthy..........................................................................................................15
3.2 COMMON INTERESTS OR PURPOSE..........................................................16
3.3 APPLYING THE SOCIAL EDEN PLATFORM TO OTHER DOMAINS ....18
3.3.1 Commerce................................................................................................18
3.3.2 Supply line/infrastructure..................................................................18
4. LIFE CYCLE OF A SOCIAL EDEN ..........................................................................19
5. PLAYERS IN THIS SPACE ........................................................................................28
5.1 POTENTIAL PLAYERS IN THIS SPACE ..........................................................32
5.2 USHAHIDI............................................................................................................32
5.3 SWIFTRIVER ........................................................................................................33
5.4 CROWDMAP ......................................................................................................33
5.5 FLIPBOARD..........................................................................................................33
5.6 ELLERDALE ..........................................................................................................33
5.7 SOCIAL EDEN PLATFORM DIFFERENTIATORS........................................34
5.8 RELATED SOLUTIONS......................................................................................35
5.8.1 Microsoft Vine........................................................................................35
5.8.2 Visualizing.org ......................................................................................35
6. CONCLUSION............................................................................................................36
7. APPENDIX A: RESEARCH ......................................................................................37
8. APPENDIX B: DATA VISUALIZATIONS ..............................................................44
8.1 VISUALIZATION OF DEFECTIONS IN SYRIA ............................................44
8.2 BREAST CANCER CONVERSATIONS ..........................................................44
8.3 RECENT SPANISH UPRISINGS ......................................................................45
8.4 NEWSHOUND....................................................................................................46
8.5 MICROSOFT ACQUISITIONS AND INVESTMENTS................................47
8.6 PSYCHOANALYZING THE PRESIDENTIAL DEBATES IN REAL TIME ....48
8.7 WAVII ....................................................................................................................49
9. REFERENCES ..............................................................................................................50

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1. Executive summary
Event-related news and user-generated content are increasingly popular on
the web. One-third of the most popular search terms on YouTube are for
news events, and 40 percent of news-event content on YouTube is user-
generated.1 Real-time, firsthand reports from countless people involved in
events are generating a new, personalized view of history—literally a
multifaceted one. A major software player has a tremendous opportunity to
support this trend by actively identifying significant events and connecting
potential audiences to them in communities of interest that we call Social
Edens. Such a system would be unique in social media because it would:
n Offer an extensible model from which to quickly identify and create ad hoc
social communities
n Be event-driven yet support traditional interest-based social communities
n Build on the growing trend of news content provided by people who are
not professional reporters
n Include impartial, trust-based tools to help people find their own truths
about complex events
n Continuously listen to and feed optimized content to social communities
through their life cycles
n Collect and record historic artifacts in real time to create vast repositories of
valuable content
n Provide marketers with precise micro-targeting tools and opportunities
The Social Eden platform could automatically generate ad hoc, event-driven
Social Edens or supply the platform with which people or organizations could
identify and create their own Social Edens. Once established, a Social Eden
would attract members and then continuously engage them by feeding
relevant content and tools and by growing and evolving as the event unfolds.
The environment would continuously watch and analyze Social Eden
members’ sentiments, voting patterns, and chatter and then automatically
feed new content that best matches their sentiments. For example, if a Social
Eden gathered around a natural disaster, its life cycle might start by guiding
people to safety and facilitating emergency aid, then progress to helping
Social Eden members rebuild housing and file insurance claims. As the event
became less newsworthy, the Social Eden would evolve into the key
repository of information about the event. The Social Eden would end its life
as a valuable historical archive in which members and other interested parties
such as journalists and aid workers could reflect on their experiences on
anniversaries of the event.
Eden members would vote on the accuracy of the information provided by
other members to generate distance-based “clusters of truth” around agreed-
upon facts. Members would also vote on the relevance of information feeds
from the supporting environment. In addition, the hosting platform would
offer powerful, comprehensive features for collaboration among Social Eden
members, government agencies, volunteer organizations, non-governmental
organizations (NGOs), corporations, and e-commerce companies. The Social
Eden platform, services, and content would all be profit centers. By listening
to community chatter and news channels, for example, the platform could
sense a developing natural disaster and instantiate a Social Eden for
insurance professionals to plan for handling new claims.
1. Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, “Youtube & News: A New Kind of Visual
News,” July 16, 2012

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Being the first mover in this area would establish a software company as a
leader in social media and entrench its Social Eden system as one of the
world’s most valuable repositories of rich-media content, historic
information, and marketable data.
2. Mining stories for history
Until recently, historic events rarely spawned any contemporaneous
reporting. Before the printing press, history was oral or handwritten, and it
took a long time to compile and distribute historical texts. The first publicly
circulated documents were usually authored by governments or churches,
which had decidedly one-sided points of view. The Gutenberg bible
democratized the Christian religion and helped incite the Protestant
Reformation, just like Facebook and other social media helped incite the
Arab Spring. The printing press was born in 1440, and the first newspapers
followed in 1620. Newspapers introduced the concept of reporters—people
whose entire profession was to record and report events in an unbiased way.
Photojournalism was born in 1850, allowing people to see images of actual
events. But until the advent of the telegraph in 1844, the telephone in 1876,
the radio in 1897, and the television in 1927, reports in newspapers or letters
could take days, weeks, months, or even years to reach the public. The
advent of radio and TV cemented the idea of an impersonal version of events
by a few select sources to create a single source of truth, which then became
known as history. Despite all the technological advances of the last century,
this flow of information was stable and one-way: from source to consumer.
Today, this model is being inverted. In our socially networked world, any
event of historic significance is widely reported in a variety of media such as
Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and blogs. Events of historic significance are
reported in real time by real people; a wealth of information comes from
eyewitnesses usually before professional reporters can get to the scene.
The recent tsunamis in the Indian Ocean and Japan and the earthquake in
Haiti were recorded in stunning detail by a wealth of observers like never
before. In five out of 15 months between 2011 and early 2012 the most
searched terms on YouTube were for event-related news stories, and about
40 percent of the content posted about news events on YouTube was
produced by citizens.2 At least 16 of the top 20 news stories in 2011 were
event-related.3
Every modern event generates this rich digital stew of text, film, images, and
audio, which provide a much deeper picture of major events than traditional
reporting ever could. Rich content creates context. There is vast untapped
value in the wealth of information that unpaid observers freely provide.
Technology in countless hands creates the perception of truth. As media
expert Shelly Palmer wrote, “Marshall McLuhan said, ‘the medium is the
message,’ but in the 21st century we say, ‘the median is the message.’ If you
are going to report the news, then you are going to have to be able to make
the distinction between fact and fiction, truth and narrative, reality and
wikiality. The median, the measure of the central tendency, will become the
accepted truth — along the same lines as political philosopher John Stuart
Mill’s idea of the tyranny of the majority. Television personality Stephen
Colbert coined this idea as ‘Wikiality.’”4
News events gain
more eyeballs
“News events are inherently
more ephemeral than
other kinds of information,
but at any given moment,
news can outpace even the
biggest entertainment
videos.”
-Pew Research Center for
Excellence in Journalism
2 Ibid
3 Pew Research Center for People and Press, “2011: Year of Big Stories Both Foreign and Domestic,”
Dec. 21, 2011
4 Ibid
Figure 1.
16 of top 20 news stores in
2011 were event-related

Today there is more power in the median than in the media—if we can
harness it. Our proposed system does just that—harnesses the power of
multiple participants and observers of an event to help them compile
distance-based clusters about it.6 We can describe any event that people
participate in or witness with a tuple:
We can use this tuple to mine any and all Internet media for related
information about an event, and then filter the media streams for context,
relevance, duplication, distance, authority, and other factors. The increasingly
powerful natural-language processing tools combined with semantic web
ontologies, and standards such as OWL, RDF, and others technologies can be
used to quickly parse web pages, blog posts, and social media posts and
interpret each element and attribute in this tuple. For example:
Person: This describes a person or people with reference to their social
identities to provide insights into their social personas. This usually includes a
person’s full name, but it sometimes includes merely the relationship to a
person or people, such as:
n John Smith
n My father
n Her teammate
n John’s best friend
With growing public willingness to share private information in exchange for
relevant product and services in social systems such as Facebook, Xbox,
Ancestry.com, Classmates.com, LinkedIn, and Twitter, a rich set of personas
(identities) can be collected over time, helping us map social relationships.
(This assumes that people are willing to share data about their identities for
something of value to them, such as enhancing their online credibility.) Mark
Zuckerberg of Facebook postulates that the amount of personal data that
people are willing to share doubles every year.7
Location: Refers to geographic coordinates or areas, including at times
altitudes or perimeters, such as:
n [longitude, latitude, altitude]
n I met him at the city center
n We met at Café Rose
n Near the north summit of Mount Everest
n I am in New York City
n Third floor
n Between Main St. and Wall St
Global positioning in almost every mobile device will likely ensure that most
of the tuples have actual coordinates.
8
The median is the message
“Marshall McLuhan said,
‘the medium is the
message,’ but in the 21st
century we say, ‘the
median is the message.’”5
-Media expert Shelly Palmer
5 Shelly Palmer, “Truthiness in a Connected World, Part 1,” ShellyPalmer Digital Leadership, August 1, 2010
6 For more information about “clusters of truth,” see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cluster_analysis.
7 Paul Sloan, “In 10 years, folks will share 1,000 times what they do now,” CNET, October 20, 2012

Event: This includes an event name followed by (optional) references to a
larger, encompassing event, set of events, or synonymous event name. It is
common to find multiple redundant names. Examples include:
n D Day, World War II
n Tōhoku earthquake
n London Olympics
n Nordstrom’s Labor Day Sale
n Rolling Stones concert
n Huskies versus Cougars football game
n Marvel’s The Avengers movie
Time: Some statements represent specific, bounded time, but others do not,
as in these examples:
n Today
n After 3: 00 P.M.
n 2:34 A.M.
n After sunset
n During the earthquake
n June 6, 1944
Within minutes of an event, one could automatically generate a Social Eden
that aggregates information about the event, including rich media, and then
invite people to spontaneously participate in this Social Eden. Such an
environment would gather and collate rich media that is not only nearly
instantaneous but could be interactive. Modern cultures have been
transformed by people who are eager to share personal, emotional
experiences about events, with many eyewitnesses eager to share their truth.
Witnesses and those who are engaged with them record, respond to, and
discuss their experiences in the shared environment of the Social Eden.
Because of the greater credibility of information from first-hand witnesses,
the tuple includes a key element: source. The source could refer to either a
person or a technology. For example, a technology—a fixed surveillance
webcam in Sendai airport—produced the most-watched video of the tsunami
in Japan.
The future of news and its legitimacy or factual truth is rapidly shifting from
professional reporters to communities of non-professional eyewitnesses. This
shift can be seen in breaking new stories when no professional reporters, as
agents of truth, are yet on the scene of an event. Syndicated news channels
often use eyewitness accounts and media streams to provide the first
coverage, usually prefacing it with statements such as, “We can’t yet confirm
the authenticity of this video.”
9

News channels also hope to become agents of truth by relying on
technologies that automatically correlate multiple sources of information and
filter out those that do not remotely resemble other reports. Government
intelligence systems already use technologies like these to listen to chatter
from multiple feeds and correlate them around distance-based clusters that
can be mapped and analyzed.8 For example, by using data mapping
technologies, multiple reports from different sources in a city about a
shooting event will easily cluster around the same area and time: let’s say
around 2:00 P.M. on July 11 between 6400 Main Street and 6420 Main Street.
The time and place will become more accurate as more and more reports
come in and the clusters around the shooting becomes smaller and smaller.
As mobile devices with built-in time and location tracking capabilities
become ever more common, the reports that people can post to Social Edens
would become ever more precise. As Time magazine said recently, “If
someone wanted to create a global system for tracking human beings and
collecting information about them, it would look a lot like the digital mobile-
device network. It knows where you are, and—the more you text, tweet, shop,
take pictures and navigate your surroundings using a smart phone—it knows
an awful lot about what you’re doing.”9 If the source is hardware such as a
trusted camera, the Social Eden would have access to an unbiased source that
can further validate time and location in an event.
Figure 2. Identifying distance-based clusters of truth
Although malefactors can use technology to fabricate accounts, the sheer
volume of similar content from multiple authenticated and credible sources
with little or no contradictory denial content is enough to convince the
overwhelming majority of people about the truth of an event. For example,
witnesses of the Japanese tsunami spontaneously generated many media
assets and made them available on websites in or close to real time.
Traditional news channels then rebroadcast these media streams. No one
analyzed these media streams for authenticity because it would be almost
impossible technically to produce so many similar media streams so quickly
from so many different sources.
Reports from users of mobile devices who enable location tracking now make
it even easier to verify the locations and times of events accurately. Using
location tracking technologies, it’s possible to assign different accuracy values
108 Patrick Radden Keefe, “Chatter: Dispatches from the Secret World of Global Eavesdropping,” Random
House, February 15, 2005
9 Massimo Calabresi, “The Phone Knows All” Time magazine, Aug. 27, 2012

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to reports that originate from people who are close to or at an event site
versus those who report about it secondhand or later.
But what if a media asset or its source is faked? For example, what if a source
claims that a video clip came from one country when in fact it came from
another? In some cases, such fakery might succeed temporarily, but over time
a ripple of fake content will always be swept away by a tsunami of real
content delivered by authenticated users and devices. An adage says a lie can
travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its pants, and
lies and false rumors fly faster through social media. For example, after an
article in the New York Times on May 29, 2012 was misinterpreted, rumors
circulated in thousands of posts on the Internet that President Obama had
added a 17-year old girl to the counterterrorist “kill list.”10 Those rumors
turned out to be false. Finding ways to identify and filter out rumors in social
media like Twitter has become a challenge for computer researchers.11
Some
of their papers have identified how firsthand experience could effectively
vote out information that is not credible or relevant and thus minimize the
impact of fabrication on history—whether by members of corrupt governments
or other malefactors. The Social Eden environment would use a predefined
set of heuristics to help Social Eden members and later users such as journalists
and historians filter and weigh the credibility of information sources.
In their research, Mendoza and his colleagues analyzed hundreds of tweets
and retweets that propagated during the Chilean earthquake of 2010.12
Knowing in hindsight which tweets were true, they picked seven tweets that
spread confirmed truths and seven that spread false rumors, and they
classified those 14 true and false tweets and later tweets and retweets about
those tweets into three categories:
n Affirms: Retweets that affirm tweets or retweets, regardless of whether
they’re true or false
n Denies: Tweets that deny tweets or retweets, regardless of whether they’re
true or false
n Questions: Retweets that seek affirmation of other tweets or retweets
Figure 3. Analysis of true versus false tweets by
Mendoza, Poblite, and Castillo
10 Scott Shane, “After Article on ‘Kill List,’ Rumors Fly Fast,” The New York Times, June 5, 2012
11 Eunsoo Seo, Prasant Mohapatra, and Tarek F. Abdelzaher. “Identifying Rumors and their Sources in
Social Networks.” University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, April 2012.
12 Marcelo Mendoza, Barbara Poblete, and Carlos Castillo, “Twitter Under Crisis: Can we trust what we
RT?” 1st Workshop on Social Media Analytics, July 25, 2010.

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As Figure 3 shows, almost 95.5 percent of confirmed-true tweets were
affirmed—more than twice as many as false-rumor tweets. False-rumor
tweets generated 38 percent denial tweets, while confirmed-truth tweets
generated only 0.4 percent denial tweets. More than 17 percent of later
tweets about false-rumor tweets questioned them, while only 3.5 percent of
later tweets about confirmed-truth tweets questioned them.
The Social Eden system could use this crowdsourcing pattern to distinguish
false rumors from truth. Combining this heuristic with powerful data
visualization tools, Social Eden members could make up their own minds
about the truth of postings, and they could filter sources provided by the
tuples (people, locations, time, and sources) in addition to Social Eden
members’ attributes, such as:
n Proximity to the event in time and place
n Proximity in relationship to other observers of the event
n Ranking of the Social Eden member’s credibility by other credible and
authenticated members
n Authenticated member or device user versus anonymous member or
device user
The implications of democratized, personalized media streams are profound.
Governments can no longer credibly claim to own the truth. Media streams
like those generated in the Arab Spring uprisings are helping to topple
corrupt governments.13 In places such as Syria, almost the only news sources
are local people. Without them and the technologies they use to broadcast
their stories and media, atrocious crimes would remain unreported and the
truth would disappear, perhaps forever. The Social Eden platform could fill this
void by becoming the world’s key repository of filterable, reliable, rich,
recorded historical artifacts.
13 Social Capital Blog, “Twitter, Facebook and YouTube’s role in Arab Spring (Middle East uprisings)
[Updated 5/232/12],” January 23, 2011

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3. Creating communities
Belonging to a community is a psychological state.14 People are much more
likely to participate in a virtual community if they can identify similarities with
others in the community. Being part of an event gives community members a
common identity and purpose, which also creates emotional attachment to
the group.15
In the traditional B2B world, this attachment is known as
stickiness. While events are fresh, cybersocial stickiness is likely to be very
strong, but as the event ages, the social stickiness diminishes if it’s not
nourished.
The push of the Social Eden can happen in two ways. In the first, the platform
will continually listen to and mine blogs, news sites, and social media to find
events of import. These events will be defined in a heuristic model based on
their frequency of hits in a set amount of time and their likelihood to have a
significant impact or interest, predefined by an event taxonomy. Such
listening utilities must first be able to identify potentially newsworthy events
and then to distinguish between false rumors and confirmed news. For
example, Kate Starbird and Leysia Palen discuss how analysis of tweets and
retweets combined with other analysis can be used to identify information
that is new.16
When an event of import is established, the model will calculate
distances of geography, time, and syntax (vocabulary) between people
related to the event, using short distances or common interests to create
communities of interest. The platform will then credential people who may be
interested (using existing channels such as Facebook and Twitter) to the
Social Eden that the platform creates for the event.
A second way to establish a Social Eden is to give people or organizations
tools with which to set up their own Social Edens and then let them discover
and collaborate with other interested people. For example, the Social Eden
platform might note growing chatter on an internal B2B communications
channel about a certain subject. The platform could then invite interested
parties to a new Social Eden to discuss the subject. The Social Eden
environment would also gather information to help Social Eden members
discuss and solve any issues related to the subject. This capability would give
organizations a focused and powerful new learning system with which to
anticipate, discuss, and resolve issues before they became problems.
An interesting possibility is to create sub-edens for sub-events of larger
events. For example, in the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, people with
a special interest might want to discuss the Fukushima nuclear power plant
meltdown. The platform’s heuristics might discover this as a separate but
related event, or the community could set up a sub-eden just as people start
sub-boards on a forum. A sub-eden inherits its behavior from its parent Social
Eden. At this point, the tuple might seem to be moving from event-driven to
interest-driven. However, what brings people together is the event; you went
to school with someone, you shared an historic experience, and so on. Even
things like insurance purchases are event-driven; you bought a house, had a
baby, got a car, or reached a certain age, all of which changed your insurance
requirements.
Cybersocial stickiness is
directly influenced by:
n Sense of purpose
n Right audience
n Right content
n Trust
n Technology
n Time
14 Massimo Bergami and Richard P. Bagozzi, “Self-categorization, affective commitment, and group self-
esteem as distinct aspects of social identity in an organization,” British Journal of Social Psychology,
December 16, 2000
15 Utpal M. Dholakia, Richard P. Bagozzi, and Lisa Klein Pearol, “A social influence model of consumer
participation in network- and small-group-based virtual communities,” International Journal of
Research in Marketing 21 (2004)
16 Kate Starbird and Leysia Palen, “(How) Will the Revolution be Retweeted? Information Diffusion
and the 2011 Egyptian Uprising,” CSCW ‘12: Computer Supported Cooperative Work, Seattle, WA,
February 11-15, 2012

14
3.1 Trust
Trust and distrust are the basis of social interactions, so it’s only natural that
users in the cyber social media will look for trust clues and expect cyber tools
in virtual environments to help them. We’re also starting to see growth in the
population that treats the virtual social world as if it was a physical one.
The virtual and physical worlds differ, but people have the full panoply of
social needs in both: to trust and be trusted, to give and provide attention, to
love and be loved, and so on. Most people, whether in the virtual or physical
world, have a fundamental need to determine whether others are trustworthy
and credible. Lacking traditional trust clues from the physical world such as
facial expressions and tone of voice, cyber social communities try to
compensate with a wealth of rich data that is not readily available in the
physical world. Unfortunately, this opens the door for some people to assume
different personas and pose as others, thus affecting users’ trust.18 Although
the virtual world cannot duplicate all the features of the physical world, many
computer scientists are working on technologies to enhance trust, security,
and the ability to find and feed relevant content in social-networking
environments.19
Trust, like truth, is subjective. Establishing truth should be left to the truster,
using their own probability filters. The success of the Social Eden platform
depends on its members’ ability to achieve the following standards of trust:
1. Trust the environment in multiple forms because:
n The environment does not take sides or represent a single truth, but
instead lets members find their own truths.
n Content that feeds the environment comes from trusted sources.
n Users’ privacy is protected.
n The environment eliminates software agents that pose as Social Eden
members.
n The environment is centered on authenticated users.
n The provided default trust views are transparent.
n Users can self-select different criteria for their views (for example, showing
content only from users who were present during an event).
2. Trust or distrust other members because:
n Users can demonstrate their credibility and the source of their information
(for example, saying “I was there when it happened” and proving it by
releasing access to telecom data about their mobile device’s location at the
time).
n Users can challenge the accuracy of others’ content, thus indirectly
challenging their trustworthiness.
n Eden members can retract statements that they made and thus try to repair
their credibility (for example, changing their own statements that were
challenged by others).
n The environment provides access to members’ accuracy ratings from other
Social Edens.
Trust versus distrust
“At any given time, the stability
of a community depends on
the right balance of trust and
distrust.”17
- Alfarez Abdul-Rahman and
Stephen Hailes
17 Alfarez Abdul-Rahman and Stephen Hailes, “Supporting Trust in Virtual Communities,” Department of
Computer Science, University College London, January 2000
18 John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid, “The Social Life of Information,” Harvard Business School
Publishing, 2002
19 For a review of some of this work, see Appendix A: Related Papers and Technologies.

15
To enable trust features, the Social Eden platform would use digital agents
that we call cyber social agents (CSAs). The Social Eden platform and
environment would support CSAs that can:
n Recognize new events by using CSAs that understand different ontologies
and the context of news stories to listen to various news and social
channels and cooperatively identify new events.
n Assess the legitimacy of sources—especially to determine whether a source
is human or a machine—to satisfy the Social Eden members’ need to trust
the system.
n Leverage Social Eden member feedback to determine whether content is
relevant for a Social Eden.
n Determine the trustworthiness of members, based on multifaceted analysis
of factors such as the time and location of an event compared with
information from a member’s mobile device, feedback from other Social
Edens about the trustworthiness of that member, and other techniques.
n Determine what content to feed to the Social Eden based on its life cycle
and members’ sentiments.
n By proximity, assist Social Eden members or groups to identify people with
similar stories to their own in other social communities or websites.
n Identify influencers―people who drive traffic to and within the Social Eden
There will always be some who will try to trick the Social Eden system. Given
that we are dealing with new technology, techniques to fight this new form of
fraud will improve over time. The Social Eden system could mimic the
International Olympic Committee and the International Cycling Union, which
keep blood samples of athletes on file for many years. Because the Social
Eden platform would archive information indefinitely for future forensic
historians, Social Eden members and the Social Eden platform could revisit
member posts years or even decades later to assess the credibility of
members in light of information revealed later.
3.1.1 Truthy
An interesting site whose sole function is to analyze trust is Truthy, whose
data visualization techniques help viewers understand how memes spread
online.20 The site’s name comes from a term invented by television personality
Stephen Colbert to describe “claims that feel like they ought to be true, but
aren’t necessarily.” By using the site, the Truthy team can identify how political
organizations engineer tweets on Twitter to spread misinformation. The team
discovered that, for example, it’s relatively easy to determine whether tweets
are machine- or human-generated based on their frequency.21
20 Truthy, Indiana University, “Frequently Asked Questions”
21 South by Southwest Conference 2011, “Social Media Data Visualization: Mapping the World’s
Conversations”

16
Figure 4. Truthy page and user profile
3.2 Common interests or purpose
Active participation is what makes communities succeed, and people who
participate the most develop influence. Social media expert Mark Silva says
that in social media, the reaction of the community is the key to gaining a
solid ROI: “return on influence.”22 A joint research project by the University of
Arizona and Microsoft in social customer relationship management (CRM)
suggests why and how to leverage influencers in forming social communities.
The project’s authors concluded that influencers have a major impact on the
level of interest and activity of social communities.23 It identified three pillars
of influence: reach, resonance, and relevance.
Reach: This is defined by how far an influencer’s information travels across
online communities; greater reach means greater influence. Reach as a key
performance indicator can be measured by:
n Popularity: Liking, admiration, or support for an individual or community.
n Proximity: Position of an individual in a community, which often defines
their capacity to influence.
n Goodwill: The non-tangible value of the influencer. The more goodwill the
member or community delivers, the more support they are likely to receive.
Resonance: This measures the duration, rate, and level of interactivity around
content or conversations and keeps content alive and at top of mind among
social media members. Resonance is measured by:
n Frequency: The rate at which content or conversations materialize on social
media.
n Period: The duration of time the content or conversation is visible after its
first appearance.
n Amplitude: The level of engagement or activity around content or a
conversation in a network.
Return on Influence (ROI)
“In social media, the action is
the reaction and the ‘I’ in ROI is
influence.”
– Mark Silva, social media expert
22 Mark Silva, “How Do You Measure Social Media? Return On Influence,” Marketing Daily, Feb 29, 2012
23 George Anderson, Microsoft Services, and Nipa Avlani, Megan Everett, Jennifer Gibson, Joshua Stine,
University of Arizona Eller College of Management, “CIO considerations for CRM in a social media
world, Part 1,” June 2012
Figure 5.
Three pillars of influence
in Social Media

17
Relevance: When users are aligned through subject matter, a series of linked
relationships are formed that can quickly send information throughout a
community. For example, a user who has a far-reaching network connects to
like-minded users, each of whom can then influence the communities to
which they are linked. To maintain their relevance, influencers must sustain
the following qualities:
n Authority: The influencer has expertise on the subject matter to maintain
respect and fan following.
n Trust: Confidence in an influencer is difficult to measure but generates
meaningful relationships. Influencers win the trust of their followers by
providing reliable, truthful, and credible information.
n Affinity: By developing affinity, an influencer boosts his or her position in
the community
Finding influencers before instantiating the Social Eden and using them to
promote and influence growth in traffic could drive the Social Eden’s success.
The platform could use influencers to build common interests or purpose for
key classes of Social Edens. In addition, the platform could continuously
evaluate new members as potential influencers by measuring their reach,
resonance, and relevancy. Then it could incentivize key influencers and solicit
their involvement in Social Edens that match their interests and expertise.
Once you catch people’s interest for an event, how do you keep them
interested after the event ends? How do you maintain interest in an event
after it has dropped out of the public eye? There would be a certain amount
of momentum created within the Social Eden, especially if people went there
and continued to find relevant items there. As people collaborated and
developed relationships in the Social Eden, their ties to the community would
strengthen, especially if they create or become involved with
subcommunities. People who are active in Social Edens would establish
additional credentials that strengthen the heuristics that invite them to similar
Social Edens or even dissimilar Social Edens if an event was relevant to them.
A Social Eden’s stickiness would be important, but so would be its liquidity.
Edens should be dynamic so that people could rapidly switch events or topics
as the need arises. For example, there might be am interest to establish a
Seattle Presidents’ Day Shopping Social Eden with sub-edens for women’s
shoes. But shortly after the sale, participants might join a Memorial Day Sale
Social Eden, followed by a Labor Day Sale Social Eden, a Black Friday Sale
Social Eden, and so on. Although there would be very little need for them to
visit Social Edens for past events, the whole or part of the community would
move on to events that continue to bind it.
A Social Eden should dynamically change into a different Social Eden class to
match its members’ interests, so it’s important that the contextual
information in the Social Eden could be inherited by a sub-eden or a new
Social Eden to keep the new members engaged. Thus the platform should
have a mechanism to shift a Social Eden from one class to another so that the
platform could support and engage the community.

18
3.3 Applying the Social Eden platform to
other domains
Although the original idea for Social Edens revolved around bringing people
together for specific events, the same platform could host many similar like-
minded communities. For example, governments and NGOs could use the
platform to support initiatives. Political groups could use it to support
campaigns. A corporation could use the platform for internal
communications. Researchers could use the platform to study events in
depth. The web services could even be used to create a personal Social Eden
that filters online sources and aggregates information about your personal
interests. This functionality would go a step beyond RSS feeds to bring
information from a variety of sources, many of which users would not even be
aware of without the platform’s search abilities. And individual feedback
would tune the search over time.
3.3.1 Commerce
E-commerce would be an easy way to monetize the Social Eden system. The
Social Eden developer could mine information from Social Edens and then
provide this information as a service to third parties. The developer could also
analyze people’s interests to see where they’re going and what communities
they’re in. The developer could mine and sell this data while protecting
personal privacy. This deep understanding of the customer base would
provide precisely targeted marketing opportunities to a single like-minded
community and a limited, targeted marketing arena for vendors. The synergy
between vendors and a specific community would precisely fulfill that
community’s needs, and community members would not have to leave the
Social Eden to purchase what they need. Things like transportation, water,
food, and funding could all be placed where they’re easily accessible.
3.3.2 Supply line/infrastructure
The Social Eden developer could provide an event stream to organizations
that would allow them to react to events; for example, rerouting ships to or
away from an event, transferring workforces, or balancing computer
networks.

19
4. Life cycle of a Social Eden
A simple analogy to the life cycle of a Social Eden is the life cycle of a
teenager’s spontaneous party.
Table 1. Life cycle events of a spontaneous party
Regardless of whether events are social parties, epidemics, or natural
disasters, they all follow a similar event life cycle. The Social Eden
environment will respond to this life cycle.
Table 2. Life cycle events of a significant earthquake
Event stage Party activity
Preparing
A teenager decides to have a spontaneous party
and plans it out.
Forming The teenager invites his or her friends to the party.
Engaging
The teenager continuously tries to engage and
entertain party guests.
Disengaging The guests leave the party.
Reflecting
and analyzing
The guests reflect on and share their stories about
the party with other guests and with friends who
did not attend. The latter analyze the shared stories
to find out what happened at the party.
Event stage Earthquake Social Eden activity
Preparing Although
impending
earthquake times
and magnitudes
are impossible
to predict
accurately,
government and
local agencies
attempt at least to
plan for such
events. For
example, all the
subclasses of what
the EPA classifies as
Natural Events and
Disasters start with
preparations.24 An
individual’s level of
readiness and even
awareness vary.
Like the EPA’s classification, the Social
Eden event classification will include the
earthquake event under the natural
disaster class. The earthquake event class
will likely inherit and add a class of feeds
that vary by geography; for example,
local news channels, local government
emergency feeds, references to local
volunteering sites, mapping tools, and so
on. Government agencies and for-profit
and non-profit organizations can register
before events to relevant event classes in
specific places and times to provide feeds
or to observe in the future. Individuals,
too, can preregister for event classes. For
example, while registering software
products or services, customers could be
presented with an offer to join the Social
Eden environment and to preregister for
specific event classes or collections of
classes: “Register me for all newly reported
natural disasters or terrorist events in my
vicinity.”
24 United States Environmental Protection Agency, “Natural Disasters: Earthquakes”

20
Forming As the earthquake occurs,
the main focus of the local
population is survival.
People will likely use any
means or tools that can
help them survive, find
relatives, shelter, water
and food, and support.
Coordinating the many
volunteer groups, local
agencies, and government
agencies that respond to
a disaster is always
challenging, but failure to
coordinate them can
cause loss of life, valuable
resources, and time. So in
parallel, local agencies
and volunteers will likely
rush to the Social Eden
while attempting to
understand the
magnitude of the disaster
so that they can prioritize
their support and then
direct services to the
appropriate sites and
individuals.
The Social Eden platform picks up
news chatter about the emerging
earthquake and recognizes it as
new. It instantiates an instance of
the earthquake event class and
Social Eden, including default
feeds and tools, and it invites pre-
registered members, relevant
influencers, and SMEs to join the
Social Eden.
Users can now directly engage with
the environment and with other
members in the Social Eden. Using
the Social Eden, government, local
agencies, volunteers, and survivors
can better collaborate and
minimize loss of resources and
critical time.
Engaging While volunteers, local,
and government agencies
on the ground initially
focus on survival, as time
passes the focus shifts to
recovery and rebuilding,
to new efforts and indi-
viduals engaged with the
local communities.
The Social Eden environment
monitors the Social Eden’s
members’ sentiments and provides
them with continuous stimuli from
relevant feed sources. For example,
initial Social Eden chatter will likely
focus on survival, but as time goes
on, the Social Eden environment
can detect users’ interest in
nsurance and rebuilding and adjust
by providing relevant feeds while
soliciting related local businesses to
advertise their services in the Social
Eden. Eden members can evaluate
the accuracy of other members’
statements and respond to them,
and they can also vote on the
relevancy of the feeds provided to
Social Eden members. Current and
new influencers are identified and
sometimes incentivized to increase
their influence.
Disengaging The disaster gradually
becomes less newsworthy,
so the media, volunteers,
nonprofits, and government
agencies start to
disengage. Affected
people and communities
return to daily activities.
The Social Eden’s chatter-
monitoring tools try to retain
members by continuously
providing relevant information
to them; meanwhile, it starts
redirecting members to other
Social Edens that might fit their
interests and personas.

21
Reflecting As the disaster
fades into history,
many members
start to reflect on
their experience
and share it with
others. Members
may have wildly
varying memories
of the disaster, and
different truths
emerge. Some
people, like
holocaust deniers,
are disaster deniers.
On the disaster’s
anniversary,
historians and the
media will likely
try to contact
members to discuss
the disaster.
The Social Eden’s main focus now is to
support its members in analyzing distance-
based clusters. Because the Social Eden
platform recorded the Social Eden’s
chatter and feeds, the Social Eden is
useful now as a way to discuss and
analyze what happened during and after
the disaster. Its visual analytical tools,
which were available earlier in its life
cycle, are now the main focus of members.
They can use these tools to filter reports
from people who were actually present
during the disaster and check their
recorded stories and multimedia artifacts
against hearsay stories or any newly
discovered content to see how well they
match the Social Eden’s distance-based
clusters for the disaster. To increase Social
Eden traffic, just as in the engaging stage,
relevant influencers such as famous
historians are incentivized to join.
The following subsections describe in more detail the functionality of a Social
Eden during its life cycle.
Preparing
A set of event classes with default behavior (functionality) is in place. The
classes are based on ontologies that support different domains. For example,
the Environmental Protection Agency uses a natural disaster ontology that
includes drought, earthquakes, extreme heat, flooding, and so on.25 The
Biocaster biomedical ontology developed in Japan, illustrated below, helps
epidemiologists detect and track outbreaks of infectious diseases by
monitoring hundreds of Internet news feeds simultaneously.26
Figure 6: Biocaster ontology
25 United States Environmental Protection Agency. “Natural Disasters.”
26 Ai Kawazoe, Hutchatai Chanlekha, Mika Shigematsu, and Nigel Collier, “Structuring an event
ontology for disease outbreak detection,” BMC Bioinformatics, Apr 11, 2008

22
The structure of the Biocaster ontology, illustrated in the following figures,
includes (on the left) a high-level taxonomy of events, and (on the right)
detailed classes (causes, includes, hasAgent, hasTheme) with links to
multilingual synonyms.
Figure 7. Figure 8.
High-level taxonomy of events Detailed classes
Similar classes in the Social Eden platform will include rules for instantiation,
including default news feeds, business sponsorships, functional tools, and so
on. Businesses, local agencies, and governments can preregister for an event
class based on time, location, participants, and other business rules.
Marketing and B2B deals could be done in advance and provide precisely
calibrated advertising opportunities. Businesses such as AccuWeather.com
might preregister to provide weather services during future flu outbreaks in
North America while Yahoo.co.jp might preregister to provide weather
services during future flu outbreaks in Japan. Or they could specify that they
would advertise on a Social Eden for a sporting event or concert, but only if it
coincides with a snowstorm. During this stage, target influencers including
SMEs can be identified and potentially incentivized to agree to be included
when relevant Social Edens are instantiated. Each of the classes could be
instantiated at any time (triggered by the platform listening to emerging
news) or at scheduled times (as with a scheduled large concert).
Forming
The Social Eden platform constantly listens to news and media chatter and
then maps incoming news items to pre-defined event classes, such as
terrorism, crimes, epidemics, sales, artistic and sports events, etc.
Firsthand media assets have an untapped value that secondhand media
assets do not have. We propose a platform that includes configurable
searches targeted to the news and social community outlets. This platform
would scan for locally and globally significant events and then, in addition to
inviting preregistered individuals, dynamically solicit (directly and indirectly)
potentially interested individuals or communities to a newly generated Social
Eden that collects relevant information about that event and facilitates
collaboration among its members.

23
If an event is new (that is, no Social Eden has been created for it yet) and its
sources are evaluated as trustworthy, the platform would create an instance
of an applicable Social Eden class. Social Eden classes would include a default
set of related news feeds and even a set of predefined members. For example,
a shooting event would instantiate from a predefined Shooting class and
include links to local government agencies and news channels. As news about
the event is clarified, the event class might change to Terrorism to reflect
updated news feeds. The following figure illustrates the solicitation of new
members to Social Edens based on Bing news events.
Figure 9. Solicitation of new members to
Social Edens based on Bing news events
Pre-identified influencers (as promoters or SMEs) are requested to join the
Social Eden. Users who register to be invited to such a Social Eden if the
events happen in their neighborhood, close to their travel location, or where
other family and friends reside are automatically invited to join the newly
created Social Eden. This Social Eden automatically receives relevant news
feeds. In some cases, government agencies will likely provide content to the
Social Eden.
The Social Eden continuously seeks other members by advertising itself; for
example, by posting on Facebook, advertising on news channels, and so on.
Before anyone can join a newly instantiated Social Eden, individuals or
organizations must classify their relationship to the event and thus their
credibility by choosing proximity categories such as:
n I am/was at the event (A category provided if the person’s location-based
device cannot confirm that the person was present)
n I am/was a witness of the event
n I know someone who is/was at the event (additional questions about the
relationship might be solicited)
n I heard about the event

24
Engaging
The environment will continuously and automatically analyze the Social
Eden’s chatter and determine what information to feed to the Social Eden.
Similar to the Like button in many social computing environments, Social
Eden members can use an Irrelevant button to help the environment
optimize feeds and other sources of information. Members can also press the
Irrelevant button to critique an information feed. (The Irrelevant button
concerns the relevancy only of automated feeds, not member posts.) Over
time, this learning system will improve the quality of the automated feeds
and help the environment learn so that it will, for example, avoid feeding the
Social Eden news stories about turkey, the bird, when Social Eden members
are concerned about Turkey, the country. (This snafu was seen recently in
Google International News.)
Figure 10. Google News misplaces a story about
turkey in a feed about Turkey, the country
Users can vote on the accuracy of other Social Eden members’ postings similar
to how other social media sites solicit feedback on content by assigning the post
one to five OK signs. Any vote of less than five OKs will trigger a dialog to solicit
feedback, such as “Please identify any inaccuracies in the post.” This rating is
directed at a single post, but it affects the member’s overall accuracy rating.
The environment continuously monitors the influence of members. Members
can chat and discuss the event in the Social Eden and enjoy Social Eden
support from various channels. For example, a Social Eden built around a
Lord & Taylor sales event is likely to gain support from the Lord & Taylor sales
group, which would answer members’ questions.
As technology has grown to allow innumerable data feeds about any event, it
also has provided the tools to sort through this information. It is quite
possible to crawl through other news and social media sites to record and
match tuples such as << person, location, event, time>, source> with existing
ones. With such tools, the platform could sift through countless sites and find
specific new details and potentially new members. Then the platform could
invite these people to join the Social Eden. Many major software companies
already have large databases of potential community members, with enough
information about them to filter and propose communities for them to join.

25
For example, imagine that there is a shooting in central Los Angeles. The
event is identified and mapped to an event-related taxonomy (a Shooting
class would have subclasses such as Terrorist, Gang, Fireworks, and so on) or a
folksonomy (which users define by tagging). Although it is not yet clear how
best to classify the shooting, all options get similar probabilities and a set of
common instructions are pulled to determine how to react to the event and
who potentially to solicit. The platform could specify a radius of one mile
around the shooting and use mobile location identifiers (and allow people to
opt out via email) to identify people who live in this vicinity. Then the
platform would build a Social Eden and channel all relevant news about the
shooting from traditional news channels. As more information is gathered
from the information river, better classification and more accurate actions are
possible. If chatter suggests that the shooting is gang-related, the platform
will provide the Social Eden with feeds on historical gang activities in this
vicinity. If chatter suggests it’s a terrorist activity, the platform could notify
members of government agencies and invite them to participate.
In another illustration, consider the recording of Hillary Clinton’s 1996 visit to
Bosnia to visit U.S. troops on a peacekeeping mission and her later
misstatement in 2008 when she was a Democratic presidential candidate that
she had faced sniper fire on that trip, or watching the video that shows
presidential candidate Mitt Romney at a campaign fundraising event in
Florida talking about “the 47 percent of Americans who pay no income tax.”
Imagine being able to solicit viewers to a Social Eden to discuss these topics,
perhaps with Social Eden members who claim they were there at the events
as they happened.
Figure 11. Joining a Social Eden based on a news event

26
All of the provided content can be complemented with a truth index to
determine the probability that it is true. For example, if initial reports identify
two adjacent streets where the shooting happened, the level of confidence in
the street name will vary until reports that identify the right street become
significantly more reliable. The platform would recentralize this sea of
information in a single location and leverage all the power of social networks,
but at the same time it would create new ones. For example, people outside
the event would have multiple avenues to look for loved ones or find
information that would have been too difficult or unimportant to track in
previous models. Using such a site and its built-in tools, people could ask for
and receive aid from a vast array of sources never available before.
Social Edens don’t have to involve just disasters or past events. There are
many other times when people come together and could use similar
information for planned or expected events. Such events might be campaign
events, protest gatherings, concerts and festivals, sporting events, TV shows,
corporate mergers and acquisitions, and so on. (Microsoft, among other
companies, explored something similar with its TownHall system, a cloud-
based political engagement platform.27
Other companies have developed
social platforms for TV shows, movies, and sporting events, such as the social
site and iPad app GetGlue.28
) The Social Eden platform could also be adapted
in portals for commercial sales and corporate events. It would allow users to
evaluate the event’s credibility by viewing historical rankings of the event’s
community and comparing the event to similar events.
The environment has advanced data-curation features so that its data is
permanently preserved and easy to re-use. The environment also has state-
of-the-art data-visualization features to make mining and presenting its data
intuitive. These data-curation and visualization features would be immensely
valuable after an event happens. These features would compile and preserve
the history of an event from dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of
individual viewpoints, just as software like Microsoft Photosynth can stitch
together hundreds of user-submitted photos into a comprehensive, temporal
tableau of a significant event from a photo that has great value as an
historical artifact.29
New social-media products would be integral tools in
many classes of Social Edens. The environment would also provide powerful
filtering tools. For example, later users could select narratives only by people
who were present at the event, as confirmed by location-based services.
Just as the platform supports Social Edens with an appropriate set of
channels, the platform will include different default tools for different classes.
For example, Social Edens that concentrate on financial events such as
corporate mergers and acquisitions might provide Bloomberg News, while
foreign exchange Social Edens would use financial-analysis tools such as
currency conversion calculators, and Social Edens that deal with temporal
news events might include tools for editing and archiving photos, audio, and
video.
27 Microsoft, “Introducing Microsoft TownHall,” April 19, 2010
28 Dan Milano, “GetGlue HD Simplifies Finding What’s On TV,” ABC News Technology Review, August 16, 2012
29 See, for example, the tableau of Washington, D.C. on January 20, 2009, when Barack Obama was
inaugurated: http://photosynth.net/view.aspx?cid=05dc1585-dc53-4f2c-bfb1-4da8d5915256

27
Disengaging
This stage is less a process than a state when Social Eden members’ interest
wanes as the event becomes history. Regardless of the event, the system
could then solicit members to participate in Social Edens that better match
their interests.
Reflecting and/or analyzing
Like the preceding stage, this stage is less a process than a state that reflects a
renewed interest in the event. For example, an anniversary of the event will
bring old and new members to the Social Eden, with old members reflecting
on their past stories and experiences and new members analyzing what
happened. In such cases, the Social Eden will prioritize certain analytical and
visualization tools over others either in advance (on a known anniversary) or
through another trigger (a spike in new membership).
Over time, the site will become a historical artifact and likely will gain the
interest of historians, students, and others who wish to have a better insight
into what happened during and after the events. Visualization tools with
interactive filtering and data mining will enable the formation of clusters of
truth. The site will represent an interactive historical record that will be of
immense value to future historians, who will likely have forensic data skills.
Just as Photosynth and other photo-editing software can stitch together
many photos into a single rich visual tableau with depth and breadth, why
couldn’t one stitch together multiple stories into a unified “storysynth” that
has the broad perspective of a Social Eden community and the depth of
historical evidence? To enable this vision, we must figure out how to stitch
together an e-chronology of multiple sources. This idea goes back to the
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s shelved project LifeLog, which
was canceled in 2004 for privacy reasons and because of public pressure.30
This project focused on chronologically recording an individual’s experiences
and making them available at a later time. With multiple mobile devices
recording individual locations, shopping system logs, street surveillance
cameras, and now the Google Glasses project, this vision is close to reality. In
the near future, technology will be able to stitch together and summarize
objective data from multiple individuals to form historical records of events.
As in the Engaging stage, the platform will attempt to optimize the Social
Eden’s chatter, and over time the process will repeat through Disengaging,
followed by Reflecting or Analyzing.
The Social Eden system should listen to different types of social media and
understand the socio-demographic breakdown of each type because they
might have different political and social sentiments. A recent analysis of
conversations on Twitter, Facebook, and blogs about the first 2012
presidential debate, for example, found that Twitter users (by 35 percent to
22 percent) and Facebook users (by 40 percent to 36 percent) believed that
Barack Obama won the debate, but a large majority of bloggers (45 percent
to 12 percent) believed Mitt Romney won the debate.31
30 Noah Shachtman, “Pentagon Kills LifeLog Project,” Wired, February 4, 2004
31 Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, “Social Media Debate Sentiment Less
Critical of Obama Than Polls and Press Are,” October 5, 2012
Developing a
Storysynth feature
Just as Photosynth can
stitch together many
photos into a single highly
rich visual medium with
depth and breadth, why
can’t we stitch together
multiple stories into a
unified history—
a Storysynth?

28
5. Players in this space
The proposed Social Edens system would be unique, but players with similar
capabilities might emerge from two sectors:
n Online news media such as CNN with iReport, FOXNews with uReport, and
the Wall Street Journal with WSJ Social, which promote user-generated
news sourcing and user interactions with news stories.
n Social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter Google+, Tumblr,
YouTube, Vimeo, MySpace, Yammer, and others that are based on user-
generated content.
As traditional news media lose subscribers, they are driving to expand their
reach into social media. In 2009, FOXNews and MySpace―both of which
were owned at the time by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation―partnered
to launch Fox’s social media platform uReporter. (News Corporation divested
itself of MySpace in June 2011.) The Wall Street Journal also partnered with
Facebook to give readers the ability to read WSJ articles in Facebook. To do
so, users have to let WSJ access their Facebook profiles and post on users’
walls. WSJ Social provides a curtain of news experience where users read
comments and share articles with friends.32
Companies in the United States and China will likely have the biggest impact
in this space. User-generated news content is especially popular in China,
where in the absence of an independent and free media, citizen journalism
and social media are thriving. China has more than 500 million Internet users
and the world’s most active social media users.33 Since 2010, Internet users in
China have produced more content than professional websites.34
Just one
Chinese user-generated video site—Tudou, which is known as the YouTube of
China—had more than 225 million unique visitors in December 2011.35 News
of China’s massive Sichuan earthquake in 2008, for example, was first
reported on Sina Weibo, China’s version of Twitter. Chinese citizen journalists
posted maps of the quake and accounts of shaking buildings and evacuated
offices. What’s more, in a rare moment of openness under the Communist
government, citizen journalists were also able to investigate and critique
officials’ handling of the disaster.36 This openness was in stark contrast to
government information about the earthquake in Tangshan 32 years ago,
“when the Chinese government refused for months to admit the 7.8
magnitude earthquake had even happened, despite the deaths of an
estimated 240,000 people.”37
32 David Cohen, “Wall Street Journal Unveils Facebook Edition, WSJ Social,” AllFacebook, September 20, 2011
33 Cindy Chiu, Davis Lin, and Ari Silverman, “China’s social-media boom,” McKinsey & Company, April 2012
34 Qiang Xiaoji, “User-generated content online now 50.7% of total,” China Daily, July 23, 2010
35 Tudou, “About Tudou”
36 Joyce Nip, “Chapter 7: Citizen Journalism in China: The Case of the Wenchuan Earthquake,” Citizen
Journalism: Global Perspectives
37 Malcolm Moore, “China earthquake brings out citizen journalists,” The Telegraph, May 12, 2008
Figure 12.
Survey information about
receiving news via social
media

29
Two other major stories in China were broken by citizen journalists. Posts by
an environmental blogger, Ma Jun, about conditions at Apple’s Chinese
manufacturing plants forced Apple to reconsider pollution and labor
standards in its supply chain. Another environmental blogger, Liu Fatang,
posted 40 articles on his blog about how Chinese developers had destroyed
one of the world’s last groves of water coconut trees to make space for a
yacht marina. His stories won him the citizen journalism prize at the Chinese
Environmental Press Awards.
Boxun.com, an overseas Chinese user-generated content community, is the
first known Chinese website in the model of citizen journalism. It may also be
the first Chinese blog, having started in 2001. Boxun covers international
political news and human rights abuses in the People’s Republic of China. It
allows anyone to submit news to the site. Editors attempt to confirm and verify
the articles, with pictures and videos published for evidence. Readers include
NGOs and government organizations seeking information about China.38
In China, sites such as Sina Weibo (with more than 330 million users in China)
and Renren (often called China’s Facebook, with more than 147 million
mostly college-educated users) is driving social networking. Sina Weibo tells
readers exactly what other readers care about every day. Recently, the key
word Shifang was among the top ten most talked-about subjects. Shifang is a
city in southwest China where mass protests broke out against the building of
a copper alloy plant. The protest escalated when police not only used tear
gas but also stun grenades on the crowd.39
“An anonymous Chinese blogger called Bloody Map has collated incidents of
illegal land grabs and property demolitions and plotted them on Google
Maps…. There are actually two Bloody Maps: a “revised” version edited by the
founder that shows only cases reported by media, and an “open” version that
anyone can add to or edit.”40
In another case of citizen journalism in China, a letter posted on the Internet
by 400 parents of children working as slaves in brickyards triggered the
national press to finally report on the scandal, which some rights groups say
had been going on for years. The parents’ Internet posting was part of a
growing phenomenon for marginalized people in China who cannot
otherwise have their complaints addressed by the traditional, government-
controlled press.41
38 Wikipedia, “Boxun.com”
39 Al Jazeera Staff, “Chinese citizen journalism succeeds,” Al Jazeera, July 5, 2012
40 Colin Shek, “Social media and citizen journalism help chart China’s violent land grabs,”
Journalism.co.uk, November 9th, 2010
41 ABC News, “’Citizen journalism’ battles the Chinese censors,” Jun 26, 2007
Figure 13.
Social media is not yet an
overwhelming
Figure 14.
Social network
users in China
2011-2014

30
“China’s online news video market could be one of the few ‘blue oceans’ left
for Internet portals,” says Li Ya, COO of Phoenix New Media Ltd, the country’s
fourth largest Web portal by audience viewing. User-generated content will
play a big role in future news websites, Li says.42
Social media has a much
greater influence on purchasing decisions in China than elsewhere because
Chinese are much more wary of news and advertising than citizens of
Western countries and thus rely far more on recommendations from family,
friends, and trusted acquaintances.
A recent Pew Research Center article demonstrates the growing relationship
between the news media and social networks. It shows that although public
trust in the news media is eroding, they are still more trusted than other news
channels. This information helps explain why social media will seek to
increase users trust in their content while news media will attempt to gain
access to more captive audiences in the social media.43
We predict that that over time, through acquisitions and imitation, traditional
news and social media will converge. Many software companies already have
online news capabilities. By combining such capabilities with mobile
technology and devices, this model could be a winning strategy for a large
software company.
Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism assesses that
among the many social channels, Facebook and Twitter will dominate this
crossing between social media and the news media. Although clearly
growing, the population that uses these social networks for news is still
relatively small, especially those who do this very often. Most of the news
media in the US obtained part of their traffic from Facebook. And last year
Facebook introduced Social Reader, which lets users interact with online news
without leaving their site.
The entrenchment of social media giants such as Twitter and Facebook might
make it look difficult to get into the social media space. But the explosive
growth of Google+ against its competitors proves that new sites that are
properly positioned can gain astonishing numbers almost overnight.
According to tech blogger Akar Anil, “Twitter got 10 million users in 780 days
(2.13 years), Facebook got 10 million users in 852 days (2.33 years) whereas
Google+ gained 10 million users just in 16 days (2 weeks). Google+ is
growing exponentially and becoming popular among users.”45
Google+ has
since grown to at least 110 million users, although its growth is slowing and
many Google+ users rarely visit it.46
Traditional news vs.
social media news
“You can’t rely on users
coming to you anymore.
(WSJ is) navigating the
content within the app
around people, (making)
every user an editor.”44
-Maya Baratz, head of new
products at the Wall Street
Journal.
42 Wikipedia, “Internet in China”
43 Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, “Press Widely Criticized, But Trusted More than Other
Information Sources,” September 22, 2011
44 Megan Garber, “With WSJ Social, the Wall Street Journal is rethinking distribution of its content…on
Facebook,” Nieman Journalism Lab, September 20, 2011
45 Aakar Anil, “Growth of Google Plus Vs Twitter Vs Facebook; Google+ Got 10 Million Users Just in 16
Days,” Buzzom, July 22nd, 2011
46 Chris Crum, “It Looks Like Google+ Growth Is Doing Pretty Well Globally Too,” WebProNews, July 26, 2012

31
This figure shows that today, entry barriers are relatively low and that
catching up to competitors is relatively easy if you have an interesting value
proposition. We daresay that the attraction of such sites is the cool factor.
Similarly, because barriers might be very low for competitors to catch up, the
competition is keen. From a user’s perspective the barriers to enter these
communities are also low, so people shift from one application to another as
applications arise to suit a need or the alternative becomes more popular. But
as we have seen with MySpace, the cool factor is not sustainable and millions
of users can shift to the next cool site because of a lack of true value-added
services. MySpace lost millions of members who migrated to Facebook, most
of them following the new cool factor and newly available value propositions.
Because of the ease of both implementation and changing from one
application to another, social media applications have to appeal over time
and evolve to match community interest. The dynamic nature of
communities also defines evolution in the Social Eden’s value proposition.
Facebook recently gained its billionth user.47 But Facebook’s stock valuation
melted down partly because investors grasped the relatively low barriers to
entry into the social media space.
The Facebook stock situation begs the question: What keeps people tied to a
particular social networking platform besides a lack of data portability? It
also begs a corollary question: How can we increase the value proposition
and stickiness of a platform? Surprisingly, many social networking sites
connect people much less loosely than their predecessors such as Usenet,
Classmates.com, or even LinkedIn. Most of the earlier implementations
worked with people who were more tightly bound to common interests or
who shared an experience such as going to school or working together. But
with Facebook, clustering is almost exclusively among loosely organized
social groups. You may share friends with overlapping general interests, but
47 Associated Press, “Mark Zuckerberg crows on his personal page as Facebook surpasses one billion
users,” October 4, 2012
Figure 15.
Symbiosis of social media
and traditional media
Figure 16.
Growth of Google+,
Twitter, and Facebook

32
there is no safe area to collaborate with like-minded people whose judgment
you trust based on the context. On Twitter, you follow people because you
care what they think. In both of these newer platforms, networks of
individuals are not as closely bound by common experiences.
5.1 Potential players in this space
Several small software players already have many or most of the capabilities
needed to create a Social Edens system. These small players include Ushahidi,
Swiftriver, Crowdmap, Flipboard, and Ellerdale.
5.2 Ushahidi
Ushahidi, the site that most closely matches the Social Edens concept, is an
open-source crowdsourcing site that provides a platform for people to
quickly set up a page to aggregate news reports. Ushahidi has made great
inroads in crowdsourcing,48 from monitoring elections to the Tōhoku
earthquake and tsunami to “snowmaggedon”49
events in urban settings. It
has a comprehensive set of web services to manage information and people.
The first Ushahidi site was put together in just a few days. Its website states:
“We build tools for democratizing information, increasing transparency and
lowering the barriers for individuals to share their stories. We’re a disruptive
organization that is willing to take risks in the pursuit of changing the
traditional way that information flows…Our roots are in the collaboration
of Kenyan citizen journalists during a time of crisis.”
Ushahidi, which means testimony in
Swahili, was initially developed to map
reports of violence in Kenya and peace
efforts after the post-election fallout at
the beginning of 2008, based on reports
submitted via the web and mobile
phones. Since then, the name Ushahidi
has come to represent the people
behind the Ushahidi platform. This
website had 45,000 users in Kenya, and
as the site says, “was the catalyst for us
realizing there was a need for a platform
based on it, which could be used by
others around the world.”50
Figure 17.
Ushahidi
48 Jeff Howe, “The Rise of Crowdsourcing,” Wired, June 2006
49 Lloyd Alter, “Open-sourced, Crowd-sourced Ushahidi Platform Following Snowmageddon,”
Treehugger, December 28, 2010
50 Ushahidi “About Us”

33
5.3 Swiftriver
Ushahidi includes Swiftriver, “a free and open source platform for helping
people to make sense of large amounts of information in a short amount of
time. It is a mission to democratize access to the tools used to make sense of
data - discover information that is authentic, accurate and above all, relevant
- by providing the following capabilities:
n Gathering and filtering of information from a variety of channels; e.g. RSS,
Email, SMS, Twitter, etc.
n Drawing insights from the collected information
n Allowing people to create buckets of information using their own
expectations of authority and accuracy as opposed to popularity”51
5.4 Crowdmap
Crowdmap (https://crowdmap.com) “designed and built by the people
behind Ushahidi, a platform that was originally built to crowdsource crisis
information. As the platform has evolved, so have its uses. Crowdmap allows
you to set up your own map of Ushahidi without having to install it on your
own web server.”52
Crowdmap includes:
n Interactive map. One of the most powerful ways to visualize information is
via a map. Choose a location and start plotting reports, information, and
other data right away.
n Dynamic timeline. Track your reports on the map and over time. You can
filter your data by time and then see when things happened and where, as
it’s also tied to the map.
n Real-time data tracking. The admin area of Crowdmap has analytical tools
for you to make sense of your incoming data in real time.
5.5 Flipboard
Flipboard (www.flipboard.com) is ”your social magazine built for a mobile
world. By showcasing social media and Web content in a print-style
magazine, it’s one place to enjoy and share all of your news and life’s great
moments.”53 The Flipboard application works on Apple’s iPad, iPhone, and
iPod Touch, Android devices, Kindle Fire, and Nook. The application collects
the content of social networks and other websites and presents them in
magazine format on the device. The application is designed for touch screens
and lets users flip through their social networking feeds and feeds from
websites that have partnered with Flipboard.
5.6 Ellerdale
Ellerdale (http://flipboard.com/press/flipboard-acquires-ellerdale), “founded
in 2008, developed a web intelligence technology that applies semantic
analysis to large, real-time data streams to extract relevant and valuable
information. To date, Ellerdale has indexed more than 6 billion messages
from around the social web and currently processes nearly 70 million
messages per day. This technology and data set will be become the relevancy
engine for the next release of Flipboard, which will enhance the reader’s
experience by always surfacing the most important and personally
interesting information from Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks.
51 Ushahidi, “SwiftRiver – Community Wiki – Ushahidi”
52 Crowdmap home page, “Crowdmap | Create and Share Interactive Maps Online”
53 Flipboard, “Flipboard Community”

34
Designed from the ground up for iPad, Flipboard creates a magazine out of a
user’s social content. With Ellerdaleʼs technology, future versions of Flipboard
will be able to extract, categorize, and feature highly relevant and hot
trending content from across a variety of social networks.”54
5.7 Social Eden platform differentiators
The Social Eden platform would be different from other social media sites
because it would:
n Offer an extensible model from which to quickly identify and create ad hoc
social communities. It uses a push model that brings together people who
have shared interests and facilitates collaboration among the shared tuple:
<<person, location, event, time>, source>. Many current social sites such
as Pinterest are still very much in a pull model that requires users to search
for items that might interest them. Others such as Facebook and Zynga
reach out to users with notices when other users post what might be
interesting.
n Be event-driven, yet support traditional interest-driven social communities.
In addition to forming around an event, a Social Eden could form around a
common interest of any kind.
n Build on the growing trend of news content provided by people who are
not professional reporters. Social Edens by their nature would solicit news
content from non-professional citizen reporters.
n Include impartial, trust-based tools to help people find their own truths
about complex events. It’s just a matter of time before social media
networks include online capabilities to compensate for the lack of trust
mechanisms like those in the physical world, which help people build and
maintain trust in each another. The Social Eden platform would already
include powerful trust features such as location-based tools, user
authentication, members voting on the accuracy of other members,
analytical tools for finding truth clusters, and more.
n Continuously listen to and feeds optimized content to social communities
through their life cycles. The Social Eden platform would be a learning
system that constantly improves the quality of the content that it feeds to
members.
n Collect and record historic artifacts in real time to create vast repositories
of valuable content. A Social Eden would probably end up as the world’s
deepest, richest repository of media artifacts about an event or interest.
n Provide precisely calibrated micro-targeting opportunities for marketers.
Because Social Edens would focus on specific topics or events, marketers
would find it much easier to target potential customers in the Social Eden
system. A marketer that sells books about the history of Peru, for example,
would find it easier to target customers in a Social Eden focused on
Peruvian history than it could anywhere else online. A company that sells
home construction supplies in a locale would find it much easier to sell its
products to members of a Social Eden created in the wake of a hurricane in
that locale.
54 Flipboard, “Flipboard Acquires Ellerdale to Boost Content Relevancy in New Social Magazine”
July 21, 2010

35
5.8 Related solutions
Although the Social Edens system is unique, some software players have
developed related solutions.
5.8.1 Microsoft Vine
The Microsoft Vine service was intended to let people keep in
touch with each other during emergencies. As one article
headlined it, “Microsoft Vine is Twitter for Emergencies.”55 Vine
was released in beta only, and was a desktop-only application
that ran on Windows XP SP2 and Windows Vista. Vine was
inspired by the confusion after Hurricane Katrina, although
Microsoft pointed out that people could use it to get help with
childcare, connect with neighbors, report last-minute changes
in events, and more.56
Microsoft discontinued the Vine service
in 2010.
5.8.2 Visualizing.org
The ability to visualize social data is critical to the success of the
Social Eden platform. Such visualizations must enable
contextual navigation—letting members, for example, filter
other members in or out based on their credibility rating or
current or past location during an event. The Social Eden
platform must also enable data mining to verify facts and
communicate messages. Some of these visualization tools would be
interactive and others would be static—especially the communication tools.
Key sites in the dataviz community display countless examples of stunning
infographics that combine business intelligence and data visualizations in
social media. The wealth of visualizations
on Visualizing.org is impressive, especially
for social media. For examples of these
visualizations, see Appendix B: Data
visualizations.
Figure 19.
Home page on
Visualizing.org
55 Stan Schroeder, “Microsoft Vine is Twitter for Emergencies,” Mashable, April 28, 2009
56 Microsoft GrapeVine, “Practical uses for Microsoft Vine,” May 14, 2009
Figure 18.
Microsoft Vine dashboard
and alert

36
6. Conclusion
Social media, mobile devices, and user-generated content are changing
every aspect of how people communicate and consume information. We’ve
outlined an approach to leverage this spectacular growth by creating a new,
robust, and generic platform to support emerging technologies,
communication methods, and ways to share information. This platform
would differentiate itself from existing solutions in its ability to support the
missing trust among members of its communities and in its ability to follow a
community’s life cycle by mimicking real-world social life cycles and
providing state-of-the-art trust mechanisms and community-sensing
sentiment sensors that continuously provide relevant stimulus.
Just as cloud computing is the industrialization of traditional IT, our proposed
Social Edens system—an event-driven, automatically managed, and
optimized social platform and life cycle—represents the industrialization of
social media. It would provide fast scalability and vast economies of scale for
cybersocial growth. The models to commercialize this space already exist and
are robust. They include e-commerce, services, cloud hosting, and hardware
integration. End-to-end control of the system’s supply chain would have a
positive impact on the social stickiness of this model.
Something like our proposed Social Edens system is how social media will
inevitably evolve next, so time is of the essence for any software player that
wants to develop it. The key technologies and resources are already available
to build this kind of compelling social media platform that could bind
hundreds of millions of users into event- and interest-based communities.
Who will dominate this space?

37
7. Appendix A: Research
This appendix includes references to and quotations from papers and
technologies that would be very useful in developing the Social Eden
platform.
“Robust space transformations for distance-based operations”
http://infolab.usc.edu/csci599/Fall2002/paper/DR1_robust-space-
transformations-for.pdf
This paper discusses distance-based clustering, which the Social Eden
platform would use. “For many KDD operations, such as nearest neighbor
search, distance-based clustering, and outlier detection, there is an
underlying KDD data space in which each tuple/object is represented as a
point in the space. In the presence of differing scales, variability, correlation,
and/or outliers, we may get unintuitive results if an inappropriate space is
used. “
Wikipedia: “Cluster analysis”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cluster_analysis
This entry discusses distance-based clustering, which the Social Eden
platform would use. “Cluster analysis or clustering is the task of assigning a
set of objects into groups (called clusters) so that the objects in the same
cluster are more similar (in some sense or another) to each other than to
those in other clusters…Popular notions of clusters include groups with low
distances among the cluster members, dense areas of the data space,
intervals or particular statistical distributions. Clustering can therefore be
formulated as a multi-objective optimization problem.”
The image to the left is of several distance-based clusters, which could be
formed from aggregations of the kinds of observations or facts that Social
Edens would create. The external rings of each cluster contain outliers that in
many cases can or should be ignored.
“Supporting Trust in Virtual Communities”
www.sce.carleton.ca/faculty/esfandiari/agents/papers/abdulrahman.pdf
This paper makes clear that trust, like truth, is subjective, and it discusses the
concept of subjective probability to suggest that there are different levels of
trust. The paper also discusses how to evaluate semantic distance. “At any
given time, the stability of a community depends on the right balance of trust
and distrust. Furthermore, we face information overload, increased
uncertainty and risk taking as a prominent feature of modern living. As
members of society, we cope with these complexities and uncertainties by
relying on trust, which is the basis of all social interactions. Although a small
number of trust models have been proposed for the virtual medium, we find
that they are largely impractical and artificial. In this paper we provide and
discuss a trust model that is grounded in real-world social trust
characteristics, and based on a reputation mechanism, or word-of-mouth.
Our proposed model allows agents to decide which other agents’ opinions
they trust more and allows agents to progressively tune their understanding
of another agent’s subjective recommendations…Our aim is to provide a trust
model based on the real world social properties of trust, founded on work
from the social sciences…
Figure 20

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