People Search Digest

Google is officially taking over the Internet, and quite possibly the world. The name “google” has even transformed into a verb. What? You haven’t “googled” something today? With its increasing popularity, it’s no wonder that their next step is to create a social network. This up and coming site, called Socialstream, is a result of a Google sponsored capstone project within the master’s program at Carnegie Mellon University’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute. When starting at the drawing board, the students decided that there were three goals they need to accomplish with this project:

1) Rethink and reinvent online social networking.
2) Discover the users’ needs relative to social networking and explore how a unified social network service could enhance that experience.
3) Create a service for users to seamlessly share, view, and respond to many types of social content across multiple networks. It was also directed to help improve the other Google affiliated social network, Orkut.
The creators decided to focus on how users over 20 could use social networking, as this is the largest growing sector of such services. The actual design of the site is extremely user friendly, and much more streamlined than other networking sites and it is based on the concept of a Unified Social Network (UNS)—a single network that provides social data to other science as a service. This service model allows many social networks (i.e. Facebook and MySpace) to be linked together, sharing both the content and the nature of the relationships of the people who use them. Essentially, all the participating sites would be working together by sharing info with each other, making it easier for the user to manage all contacts from different sites on one page.

The Socialstream team also recognized that people use browsers in different ways. To remedy this discrepancy in preference, they have created what they are calling “interactive visualization.” That is to say, the user has the option of either a time line with serendipitous exploration of content, or a more structured contact list. The highly anticipated Socialstream will definitely bring something new to the social networking scene. Watch out for the hype; it’s the iPhone of social networks.