One of the demos here at ECSCW 2007 is “SONAR: Social Networks Architecture” by IBM Haifa Research Lab – Given by Ido Guy:
The application gathers social network information from several providers: email (Lotus Notes), social tagging (Dogear), blogs (comments), social networking services (Fringe), …, allows to weight the links according to source (a nice user interface with sliders for this) and display the result – firstly as a list of your contacts ordered by the aggregated contact strength and secondly as a per-person-view showing how the contact with this person is distributed over all the sources and how this develops in time (per-month bar chart with color coding of sources in the bars). Additionally there are some network visualizations and a list view of the data that went into the calculation of a connection.
The whole application is implemented in Lotus Sametime – just for reference implementation issues.
As you might have guessed from the sources listed above, the application is implemented for the IBM intranet (only). This makes matching identities easy since all the systems are using the same employee email identifier.
Nevertheless, it should be possible to migrate this to the Internet – perhaps using OpenId? However, there are no such plans from IBM Research (yet) – what a pitty …
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