Do You Know? Recommending People to Invite into Your Social Network

Ido Guy, Inbal Ronen, Eric Wilcox, IBM

Summary

How many times has it happened the last time you paid a visit to your favourite social networking site (SNS) that you would get a recommendation to connect/poke/wink/befriend/link a person that the site thinks you would be interested in. My guess is a lot. This paper discusses a novel UI for presenting these recommendations in an explanatory way.

Details

Authors created a “Do You Know” widget for IBM’s company directory Fringe to connect to people the widget believes they already know. For this the network relies on SONAR which aggregates data from other applications such as organisation chart, publications co-authorship, mutual connections and blog comments. Each such activity is assigned a score which is used to finally make a recommendation. In addition to recommendation, users are also presented with an evidence summary listing the sources (which can further be visited) using which the recommendation was made.

For evaluation purpose, a user study was done over 4 months. SONAR was found to have caused 278% increase in invitations and received several positive comments from study participants. The average no. of connections per user jumped from 11.6 to 39.1 over the period of the study. Despite the fact that people recommended were already known, 31% and 47% found the evidence summary very much and somewhat useful.

Some of the improvements suggested for the widget were enhancing the “No thanks” feature to allow permanent or temporary removal of recommendation, showing only a few random recommendations at a time and allowing multiple recommendation approvals easily.

Review

The interface presented is very nice and clean. It is debatable if such extensive information as was available to SONAR through company intranet is also available to SNS. The solid principle however behind paper is enabling access in a compact interface to the information used for making a recommendation to the user.

Also it would be interesting to see this principle being extended to people who may not know each other but are linked through common hobbies or interests. For ex. the recommendation could read “You would like this person because you share interest in soccer (link to other person’s blog on soccer)”.

Disclaimer

The work discussed above is an original work presented at IUI 2009 by the authors/affiliations indicated at the starting of this post. This post in itself was created as part of course requirement of CPSC 436.