Page n > of2 256 CHAPTERS SocialComputing Social Networking Websites A social network is a social structure composed of individuals, groups, or organizations linked by values, visions, ideas, nancial exchange, friendship, kinship, conict, or trade. social net- ? working refers to activities performed using social software tools leg, bloggin g) or social net- working features (e.g., media sharing). Social networking allows convenient connections to those of similar interest. A social network can be described as a map of all relevant links or connections among the network's members. For each individual member, that map is his or her social graph. Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook originally coined this term to refer to the social network of relation- ships among Facebook users. The idea was that Facebook would take advantage of relation- ships among individuals to offer a richer online experience. Social networks can also be used to determine the social capital of individual participants. Social capital refers to the number of connections a person has within and between social networks. Participants congregate on social networking websites where they can create their own profile page forfree and on which they can write blogs and wikis; post pictures, videos, or mu- sic; share ideas; and link to other web locations they nd interesting. Social networkers chat using instant messaging and Twitter, and they tag posted content with their own keywords, making content searchable and facilitating interactions and transactions. Social Vnetworker converse, collaborate, and share opinions, experiences, knowledge, insights, and perceptions with one another. They also use these websites to nd like-minded people online, either to pursue an interest or a goal oriust to establish a sense of community among people who may never meet in the real world. Participants who post on social networking sites tend to reveal a great deal of personal information. As a result, if they are not careful, bad things can happen. Table 9.1 displays the variety of online social networking platforms Social nonworking websites allow users to upload their content to the web in the form of text, voice, images, and videos These social networking sites produce a massive amount of information'uploaded by their users. As you see in lT'sAbout Business 9.1, startup Banjo has developed software to integrate and analyze all this information. Enterprise Social Networks MIS Business-oriented social networks can be public, such as Linkedln.com. As such, they are owned and managed by an independent company. 'I' ZOOM + Page of 2 ZOOM + Web 2.0 257 of all their approximately 1.2 billion friends on their social net- POM Here are more applications of Banjo by media out- works. Banjo 2.0 harnessed the power of its reach to 1.2 billion lets. Sinclair Broadcasting Group (www.sbgi.net), which owns 162 people and their ability to capture images, videos, and text through television stations in 79 markets, uses Banjo as a sort of remote re- their mobile devices. porting team. Banjo informs its newsrooms when a story develops. Banjo maps a grid over the whole world, consisting of more A news director can visit the scene virtually, following a real-time than 35 billion squares, each about the size of a football field. stream of all the posts of photos, videos, and commentary from Since 2011, Banjo has continually observed every square in real users at that location. The newsroom can then connect with the time, overlaying every mobile public post onto its grid. The soft- authors of those posts without needing to tweet or e-mail, and get ware knows what the usual characteristics are for each square: this permission to broadcast their content, without having to send a square is in a wheat field; this square is in a war zone with smoke reporter to the scene. Sinclair can use Banjo to create a time line and fire; this square is in Disneyland, and so on. of events that occurred before a certain activity, such as an album Every minute, Banjo's software analyzes thousands of geo- of images and videos that happened just before the Charlie Hebdo located mobile posts, examining data on linguistics and location, attacks in Paris in January 2015. The technology allows Sinclair to and classifying photos and videos. When the data indicate an syndicate its newscasts to licensees economically. abnormality from the baseline, such as unusual activity in a nor- FIN Banjo technology is also disrupting the business world. mally quiet area, Banjo alerts company staff, who investigate the In November 2014, Banjo analyzed images of a fire at a diesel pipeline alert and either ignore it or notify users. As Banjo's software accu- in Saudi Arabia. Its photo algorithms twigged to the incident. Custom- mulates more data and can "learn," staff need to intervene less ers working in the finance field used the information when trading on often. oil in less than an hour after the photos were flagged. Two hours after Banjo's analytics include not only the ability to identify loca- the initial Banjo notification, when the media picked up on the story, tions and photos, but to "rewind" the state of each square on each the price of oil futures rose by $2 a barrel. Clearly, traders could make social media network. (The rewind function means that users can huge amounts of money with the lead times provided by Banjo alerts see what occurred before a particular event occurred, for example, Banjo is quick to point out that its goal is not to gather all the just before an earthquake. personal information about users and sell it to advertisers. Instead, Rather than users trying to make sense of their social media it generates and sells intelligence from the content that users will- feeds through hashtags and keywords, they can have an integrated ingly provide. view of their feeds, from any location on earth. Users enter their Social media is not the be-all and end-all source of informa- location (plus any desired keywords), and the Banjo maps resizes tion. It doesn't provide all the data needed for Banjo's intelligence to scale. All the relevant public posts for that location are shown as gathering. Therefore, the startup is adding new data sources, such as pins on the map, with links to text, photos, and video. This process weather data from various countries, including the National Weather occurs in real time. Service (which has approached Banjo about constructing an alert Traditionally, users have asked, "How do we mine social me- system) as well as satellite imagery. Furthermore, Banjo notes that dia?" Banjo integrates social media from the perspective of mobile in an Internet of Things environment, sensors in physical objects phones, which are in specific locations in the real world. As a result, such as vehicles and buildings also emit data worth collecting. Banjo asks, "How can we know what is going on in a specific place at a specific time?" Sources: Compiled from "Banjo Gives Away Crystal Ball to Members of Naturally, such a treasure trove of data could be a privacy the Media," Banjo Press Release, September 24, 2015; B. Golden, "How an Innovative Mobile App Uses Location to Track Events," CIO, August 26, 2015; minefield. Banjo has tried to protect users' data by developing a D. Pierson, "Banjo's Ability to Track Events in Real Time Gives Clients Com- patented system of automatically searching its database and re- petitive Edge," Los Angeles Times, June 20, 2015; J. Paduda, "Will Banjo Be moving any posts that have been made private or deleted by users. the Social Media App that Revolutionizes Insurance?" joepaduda.com, June 3, 2015; D. Macmillan, "Banjo Raises $100 Million to Detect World Events inPage