(HBSN) How to Build a Social Network

We got a great response to last week's frequently asked questions about Google Wave, and decided it's worth expanding further on the differences between Wave and the current crop of web-based collaboration offerings. Wave combines features from email, instant messenger, Google Docs, wikis, and forums and throws its own spin on things. For a quick visual of its offerings versus similar tools, check out this feature-by-feature comparison table. (Click the image below for a closer look.) You'll notice that Wave doesn't have a green yes in every cell in its column; it's still missing functionality that's holding it back from being a viable alternative in a production environment—specifically, user permissions (everyone can edit everything) and the ability to export a wave or publish it so that anyone can see its contents (not just folks logged into Wave). This table is slated to go into chapter 1 of the first edition of The Complete Guide to Google Wave, so give me a shout if you've got ideas for how to polish it up before we rev up the printers.

Today we’re debuting lists in Google Bookmarks, an experimental new feature that helps you easily share those sites with friends.Bookmarks are a great way to keep track of your favorite content across the web and we want to help you share them with your friends. To use lists, visit Google Bookmarks at google.com/bookmarks or by clicking “Manage all” in your Google Toolbar. From there, select the links you want to share and click “Copy to list.” Lists are private by default, but once you’ve created one you can share it with specific friends or even publish it to the web. For example, if a friend of yours is visiting Seattle for the first time and you have some local attractions bookmarked, you might want to create a new list for “Seattle attractions” and share it with your friend.

Google will algorithmically analyze your list to identify other potentially relevant links, such as the Seattle Aquarium. Similarly, when we detect that a list is relevant to a specific region, we provide a map of those places and relevant info for each place, such as addresses, hours and reviews.

Theoretical Framework for a Future Computational Collective Intelligence 1) Difference between Collective Computational Intelligence and Computational Collective Intelligence To avoid any misunderstanding I would like to begin with a clear distinction between what I mean by Collective Computational Intelligence and Computational Collective Intelligence.  a) Collective computational intelligence involves collaboration between software agents, with a new level of computational intelligence emerging form their collaboration. These technologies involve swarm intelligence, ant colony simulation, web services, grid computing, distributed cloud computing and multi-agent computing in general.  b) Computational collective intelligence is a more multidisciplinary field. Its subject is the understanding of human collective intelligence and its augmentation by the means of ubiquitous distributed automatic symbol manipulation. Even if computational collective intelligence involves the use and development of collective computational intelligence, its scope is broader because it is not concerned only by computer engineering but promotes a strong collaboration between computing on the one hand and humanities and social sciences on the other hand.

central site whose owner has access to all data.

we envision a paradigm shift from client-server to a peer-to-peer infrastructure coupled with encryption so that users keep control of their data

Mark Fletcher

it's easy, it's clear, it's got good social design and it's real time.

SnapGroups makes it really easy to create a group discussion around a particular topic, invite people, set variable privacy controls and then participate in that conversation as part of a whole "newsfeed" style stream of updates from all your various groups in one place. Fresh comments, likes and dislikes get pushed to your browser live using a home-made bit of AJAX and the whole thing couldn't be much simpler. It's a lot of fun to use, in fact.

Share. Earn. Gather. Share your expertise, advice and views on the news of the day Reach millions of interested readers and build your brand Earn money writing about what you love Find a variety of perspectives on topics that matter to you Join the conversation

Elgg: a powerful social engine. Elgg empowers individuals, groups and institutions to create their own fully-featured social environment.

lgg plugins If you would like to add extra functionality to your Elgg network, check out the plugins repository.

Elgg demo site

A young UK-based startup called Favilous has joined the crowded social bookmarking space. It hopes to differentiate itself from the legions of existing bookmarking services by building a community behind the bookmarks, so users can share descriptions of sites and help each other discover new online destinations (see a clip from one of their tour slides below).

On the site, users can see other users’ popular bookmarks as well as the most popular bookmarks in various categories, including “Top Sites” and picks for categories such as food, entertainment, and travel. Once you sign up, you pick a number of categories, for example, blogs or music, that are of interest to you. Favilous populates the top sites in each of those categories, and to edit this list, you need to expand the category to see “all sites” and narrow it down from there, or else enter in a URL manually.