Case Story: Different Presence For Different People

Summary
Group / workshop	Digital Identities	Status	seed
Project details...

Situation

What was the setting in which this case study occurred?

On a typical Social Network (SN) a user connects with various kinds of friends, colleagues, coworkers. In some cases it is possible to specify the nature of connection (friend, schoolmate, etc.). It is quite logical to expect that users might want to have a different appearance for their boss than the one they show to their closest friends. For example I want to have a serious picture representing me to my boss, and a funny one for my friends. Then I want those two (or even more) categories of contacts to see different status messages, different presence statuses (busy, available) etc.

While the implementation of this scenario is quite straightforward on one SN or online community in general, problems arise when we try to generalize the scenario to the Web as a whole.

Task

What was the problem to be solved, or the intended effect?

First, a lot more has to be done in order to enable the presence data flow across different SNs and other online communities. We need semantic representations and we need mechanisms.

When we reach the point where a user can communicate the nature his/her presence to contacts from another SN (the idea of distributed SNs) we remain with the question how to enable the flow of rules defining who can see what. If, for example, I have defined a status message "working" for colleagues and "having fun" for friends on Facebook, how can I trust that MySpace will not provide my colleagues with access to the "having fun" status message (if we assume there is a data flow between Facebook and MySpace)?

Actions

What was done to fulfil the task?

There are some semantic representations that can be used for the flow of online presence data across SNs and other communities:

FOAF - modeling user profiles http://www.foaf-project.org/

OPO - modeling basic elements of online presence(dynamic aspects of user profiles) http://www.milanstankovic.org/opo/

RELATIONSHIP - modeling relationship types http://vocab.org/relationship/

There is still a need for generally accepted way to represent rules about who can access which information, and an easy to implement way to exchange the rules and enforce their application.

Existing work of Trust and Access Control research communities might help.

Results

What happened? Was is a success? What contributed to the outcomes?

Lessons Learned

What did you learn from the experience?

There is a need for users to be able to present themselves differently to different types of contacts (e.g., colleagues, friends). There is a need to reach contacts spread over different SNs and online communities, and finally there is a need to propagate those different appearances to different SNs and online communities.

Licensing

This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Licence.