A User Similarity Calculation Based on the Location for Social Network Services

The purpose of this study is to explore the experience of the consultant’s usage on social-network and the subsequent decisions made To this end, the following four issues will be the focus of this research: the motivation and current state of the consultant’s usage on social networking sites; the consultant’s personal decision-making considerations on social networking sites; the challenges faced by the consultant on social networking sites; the consultant’s perspective on “the usage on social networking Accordingly, the research methods used will be purposive sampling and semi-structured in-depth interviews. First, six consultants would be invited to participate in the research on the usage for social networking sites. Next, the data collected through interviews would be organized, summarized and analyzed with grounded theory. Finally, the results of the study will be discussed comprehensively. Interviewee responses to the research questions: 1.The motivation and current state of the consultant’s usage on social networking The motivation for the respondents to apply for a social networking site is to interact with friends. The current state of the respondents’ usage on social networking can be summarized as follows: respondents who have long term experience in social networking will have more than one personal site; the direction of writing and the presentation of content, will be affected by the features of social networking sites, which also affects the relationship with the audience. Furthermore, the micro-blog type community site has become an integral part of the respondents’ lives. 2.Consultant’s personal decision-making considerations on the usage on social networking There are several considerations that factor into the consultants’ decisions when using the social networking sites: openness of the community site itself, ease of to spreading on the network, convenience for browsing, privacy of their own and others, personal confidentiality and protection of personal rights and interests. Furthermore, the potential ability of social networking to influence others is an important consideration for consultants due to their roles and responsibilities. 3.The challenges faced by the consultants on social networking (A)Respondents experienced negative emotions after prying into certain cases on social networking out of curiosity. (B)Respondents with the aforementioned experience tend to readjust their perspective and actions on social networking sites. 4.The consultant’s perspective on “the usage on social networking sites (A)Consultants should not be denied the right to use social networking due to their profession. However, consultants should use such with professional integrity. (B)The ability of consultants to understand the purpose of using social networking and the information to be conveyed would enable them to have a clear concept of appropriate message content. (C)Consultants would be able to avoid posting inappropriate messages on social networking if they have a good sense of self-awareness, and are able to reflect and assess the issue on hand. (D)Consultants need to pay attention to the content of messages on community websites as they have no control over the audiences’ interpretation of it. (E)Consultants should remain professional on social networking and this includes refraining from criticisms and inferences. Discoveries derived from analysis of the interview data: 1.Psychology consultants deem that social networking have become an interactive tool that is indispensable in both life and work 2.Psychology consultants’ value of individual privacy and are conscious of their input on social networking site. 3.Psychology consultants create an identity and role for themselves through the Internet and social networking 4.Psychology consultants are affected by their professional role and ethics responsibilities when using social networking sites. 5.Psychology consultants tend to be concerned over how individuals perceive the information they posted on social networking sites. 6.Psychology consultants believe that their messages on social networking may subconsciously affect the discussion on these sites. 7.Psychology consultants are influenced by their training in ethics and this makes them extra cautious when using social networking sites. 8.Psychology consultants tend to attempt to separate the “professional” and the “personal” on social networking sites. The following conclusion can be drawn from the above research and analysis of the results: 1.Recommendations for consultants (A)The importance of the effects of personal network-related messages on the consultant’s profession, work and case relationship (B)The intention usage, and function of social networking requires care and consideration. (C)In cases of ethical dilemma, consultants should seek advice and discussion with other professionals. 2.Recommendations for consultants’ training programs (A)Inclusion of Internet knowledge in training programs so consultants are familiar with its potential. (B)There should be a focus on the ethics training of consultants. 3.Recommendations for the future research (A)Public opinion on consultants’ usage of social networking sites. Consultants’ years of service can be included as a factor in the study.

In the social media era, the ever-increasing utility of Online Social Networks (OSN) services provide a variety of benefits to users, organizations, and service providers. However, OSN services also introduce new threats and privacy issues regarding the data they are dealing with. For instance, in a reliable OSN service, a user should be able to set up his desired level of information sharing and securely manage sensitive data. Currently, few approaches exist that can model OSNs for the purpose, let alone a model the effects that attackers can have on these networks. In this work a novel OSN modeling approach is presented to fill the gap. This model is based on an innovative game-theoretic approach and it is analyzed both from a theoretical and simulation-oriented view. The game-theoretic model is implemented to analyze several attack scenarios. Honeytokens, which are an information security tool based upon deception, are defined and identified as a security tool that could help in OSN security. As the results show, there are several scenarios where OSN services are very vulnerable and hence more protection mechanisms should be provided to secure the data contained across these networks, including the use of honeytokens. In this work we introduce a novel OSN modeling approach for optimal data sharing based on innovative game theories, considering the states/optimal policies of data sharing on OSNs and possible confrontations between the attacker and the user. After we develop the theoretical framework, we conduct experiments, integrating our ideas with honeytokens in several attack scenarios. Finally, we analyze our experimental results and discuss recommendations based on the results.

Social network service is very popular all around the world. Global social network service assists Chinese users to have more friends from different countries. Friend-making on social network service is not systematically documented and reported for Chinese. Making friends in social network service and making friends in real life include similar activities such as invitation, knowledge sharing and communication. Almost everything users can do in real life can be done through internet. For example, in social network service E websites such as Facebook users can share a photo with their friends as they do in real life. The difference between making friends in social network service and in real life exits on the way how these activities are done. For example, in real life photo sharing is usually accompanied with a face-to-face talking while in social network service it is mainly the online comments on the photo. Therefore it is interesting to find if Chinese user behavior on social network service is consistent with that in real life.Thus it is necessary to design social network service with consideration of Chinese usage pattern. For example, as Chinese tend to have more virtual friend social network service websites can recommend. Social network website can use online activity such as “campus star” to require Chinese user to explore other’s home page or use “explore” button to have user randomly go to strangers’ homepage. More virtual communication style can be added to increase ease of use. For example voice and video message can be applied in social network service in addition to text message.The result indicates that the Chinese participants have more virtual friends than German participants while German users contact their friends more often in real life. There is no big difference between Chinese and German participants on communicating with their friends and sharing information. The result shed light on future research on Chinese friend-making behavior on social network service and user interface design for Chinese.

In the context of growing interest in both Mobile-Internet convergence and Web 2.0 social technologies, this article investigates the business opportunities derived from offering Social Applications in the convergent scenario, particularly regarding Social Network and Content Sharing services. Given the business model structural deficiencies identified in literature for this type of convergent services, the investigation is oriented towards the role of the technology delivery channels (either Internet and/or Mobile) and revenue appropriation strategies. A mixed-methods research strategy was employed consisting of a cross-sectional survey of 124 Social Application services offered in Spanish language and seven case studies with representative Social Network and Content Sharing services. While the aim of the survey was to map and identify the overall main characteristics and business model dimensions of Social Applications, the case studies' objective was to understand the strategic reasoning behind business model design and evolution. The research offered a detailed view on the dynamics of Social Network and Content Sharing services, showing how the revenue strategies are tightly linked to the technological delivery channel. Finally, six critical success factors for business models of Content Sharing and Social Network services were identified.

Relationship between the level of intimacy and lurking in online social network services

The increase in use of Smart mobile devices has allowed for an ever growing market for services providers. These services are increasingly used to connect to users' on-line private information through social networking sites that share and personalise on-line information. This leads to the problem of privacy leaks stemming from an application's non-adherence to a predefined set of privacy policies. This paper presents a formal methods tool to reliably restrict the access to content in on-line social network services. The Poporo tool builds upon a previous work in which we provided a predicate calculus definition for social networking in B that models social-network content, privacy policies, and social-network friendship relations. This paper presents the implementation and the functionality of our Poporo tool through a running example in the domain of social networking sites.

Online social networking services are hot in the recent years, but most of theses services in China aimed at the college students and business people, ignoring that Chinese migrant workers could be one of the biggest potential user groups of mobile social networking services in the future. This paper presents an ethnographic user study on Chinese rural-urban migrant workers' social networks in daily life and proposes a new mobile social networking service concept design for helping them to improve their social networks in daily life.

With the widespread adoption of cloud computing, it is increasingly popular for online social network (OSN) service providers to leverage the public cloud as a back-end to manage their services for the cloud’s well-understood benefits. However, the cloud is also notoriously subject to a wide attack surface, making it an imperative need to embed security in the cloud-backed OSN service from the very beginning. In light of this, in this paper, we design, implement, and evaluate PeGraph, the first system simultaneously allowing private, efficient, and rich queries over encrypted social graphs. PeGraph is aimed at safeguarding the confidentiality of the social graph at the cloud, while preserving the functionality of social search, a key enabler for quality OSN services like friend discovery and user targeting. PeGraph is built from a delicate synergy of insights from social graph modelling and lightweight cryptography such as searchable encryption and additive secret sharing, supporting rich social search queries like exact queries, fuzzy queries, and mixed queries. PeGraph also allows the cloud to obliviously render the encrypted social search results in a ranked order according to their importance, as per users’ preferences. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PeGraph can securely process a wide range of practical social search queries within 1 second, over a real-world social graph consisting of millions of entities.

Increasing numbers of smart phone users and Social Network Services (SNS) created a new pattern and characteristic called Social Lifestyle, the way of smartphone users to supply and consume various social media contents. Many SNS services provide individual solutions to group users within a physical location or those who share a common interest in order to exchange and share personal knowledge and contents. Although some of the web-based open platforms are trying to integrate the individual social applications and APIs, there are limitations of sharing social contents and social network information across the separated service providers and platforms. In order to solve such limitations and complexities, there needs to be a generalized model which supports a unified way of social content sharing as well as the system architecture for support the cross social media sharing mechanism. To do so, the paper initially proposes the Place-Content-Social Network based content sharing model (PCS Model) which supports a sophisticated way of connecting user interests for sharing contents within the boundaries of the locations and social network information. The PCS model also provides a social trust for sharing contents based on the analysis of the attributes of the social contents including the user participation, communication patterns and contents sharing activities called the Social Activities.

Whether in terms of social media platforms, mobile pay apps or an increasing acceptance of RFID chips in humans, technology has transformed everyday life for consumers. Social networks have experienced enormous growth as online personal networking media. Social exchange theory (for motivation and social reward) and theories of collective action can be applied in order to understand how an individual’s behavior may exert effects on or receive influences from other users with regard to the continuance usage intention of social apps. First, this study aims to examine behavioral characteristics of the Millennials, and takes flow and social reward systematically so as to explore SNS users’ continuance based on SNS characteristics. Targeting Millennials SNS users, this study empirically examines users’ continuance intention at individual level and simulates users’ continuance behavior at group level, which are expected to be influential as a next generation of purchasing group, focusing on social network services (SNS) usage. Second, this study tries to suggest strategic implications by identifying key factors that dominate SNS users’ behavior in the process of experiencing SNS. For the empirical purpose, this study analyzes the relationship between SNS characteristics (motivation to use, density, and centrality) and usage behavior (flow, social reward, and continuous intention to use). As a result, each construct of motivation to use SNS, SNS density, and SNS centrality are positively linked with flow. Motivation to use SNS and SNS centrality are positively associated with social reward, however, SNS density does not have a significant effect on social reward. In addition, flow and social reward turn out to have positive linkage with continuous intention to use respectively. The findings of this study are expected to provide implications for researchers and operators in related fields to identify various factors that explain the SNS usages of the Millennials, especially the major factors that sustain SNS involvement and activities. This study can enrich both SNS continuance theory, and help SNS operators to manipulate resources effectively to attract and retain users.

The present study examines the assumption that online users would be influenced by widely reported privacy threats; namely, that public servants might monitor personal online communications between instant messenger users, and compel the Korean domestic social network service (SNS) providers to cooperate with their surveillance efforts. Utilizing uses and gratifications (U&G) theory, we integrate previous research on government surveillance, privacy concern, and motivation variables regarding SNS use. A survey of South Korean users reveals that privacy concern is mediating the relationship between governmental online surveillance and SNS switching intention. Structural equation modeling results suggest that SNS switching intention is predicted positively by interaction motivation and negatively by convenience motivation. Privacy concern mediates the relationship between governmental online surveillance and SNS switching intention. These findings illustrate the measures that users take in response to telecommunication policy actions, particularly those that might logically pose a threat to online privacy. Study findings thus help provide support for a novel theoretical framework that illustrates the utility of media U/G variables in the context of online privacy conceptions stemming from perceived threats of online government surveillance. We conclude by discussing implications for policymakers stemming from user remedies to circumvent state surveillance initiatives.

Background: It is crucial for companies to understanding users’ choices and learning behaviors, and the corresponding influencing factors and cognitive patterns regarding social network services to communicate with potential customers.Methods: In this study, a casual structural model was constructed and developed to model and characterize the relationships between problems to be resolved as antecedent variables and success factors as consequent variables with the intermediary variables based on human learning behaviors, whereas the concept of social network service was introduced to summarize the current issues of social network services and empirically factors affecting effectiveness of social network services.Discussion: This study highlighted the corporate need to examine the intelligent role and learning effectiveness of social network services when studying social creativity and intelligence in a social networking environment. Firstly, the framework and hypotheses of social network services were introduced to summarize the current issues of social network services and the main influencing factors affecting the working patterns of social network services. Subsequently, the empirically established model was further tested to explore the possible meaningful relationships among those variables used.Results: The study revealed that the social network services provider and the customer should improve their social creativity and community collaboration; these could be expanded and enhanced by increasing the social intelligence to raise the social network services’ effect and the customer’s externalization. Furthermore, social intelligence, community collaboration, and customer externalization were factors significantly influencing customers’ social creativity, while the customer externalization and community collaboration were the two important factors affecting social intelligence.Conclusion: The study implied that social network services providers should provide more and more intelligent and inspiring services for their customers.

Online social networks—Paradise of computer viruses

The intensive development of new information and communication technologies (ICT) has led to major changes in society. The widespread use of smartphones and mobile communications has allowed today to create new programs and services to improve human life. This development changes the established habits of human communication, the relationship between society and the environment. A social networking service (SNS) is a service (on a website or through a mobile application) that allows users to share a personal profile and establish contacts with other users. Social networking services affect the territorial organization of society and can be used for the development of both settlements and entire territories to make their development more sustainable and balanced. The study of social networking services is currently on the rise. The joint efforts of many sciences (sociology, psychology, geography, mathematics, statistics, computer science, etc.) are needed to understand the subject essence of the phenomenon and to analyze data. Approaches to the study of social networking services can be divided into three large groups: 1) in terms of human relations and relationships; 2) in terms of content distributed on the network; 3) in terms of spatial aspects of the functioning of the social network. In Ukraine, there are no detailed studies of the spatial aspects of the spread of social networking services at the local level. In the Ternopil region, there is a pattern of concentration of the majority of Facebook and Instagram users in the largest cities, namely Ternopil, Chortkiv, Berezhany, Kremenets. Buchach, Borshchiv, Zalishchyky, Terebovlya, and Shumsk districts stand out among the districts by the number of users. An important indicator that characterizes the spread of social networking services is the penetration rate of the social network, which is calculated as the ratio of the number of users in a certain territory to the population living in it. Cities of regional subordination differ in terms of the penetration rate of SNS. The highest values were observed in Chortkiv, Ternopil, Kremenets cities. The penetration rate of social networking services in the administrative districts of Ternopil region is much lower. A relatively high rate (over 30%) was recorded in Buchach, Berezhany and Shumsk districts. Extremely low penetration rate (less than 5%) is in Zbarazh, Chortkiv, Zboriv districts which are adjacent to the cities of regional subordination. The social networking service Instagram is inferior to Facebook in level of development, and its main users are mainly young people. However, in the territories where the rate of Facebook penetration is the lowest in the region (Ternopil, Zbarazh, Chortkiv, Zboriv districts), the predominance of Instagram is noted. Thus, the main patterns of spatial distribution of SNS’ Facebook and Instagram in Ternopil region are: concentration of users in the largest cities, especially in the regional center Ternopil City (half of Facebook and Instagram users in the region); the number of users is proportional to the population in the territorial unit; small number of users and low penetration rate of the SNS’ in the administrative districts adjacent to the cities of regional subordination Ternopil and Chortkiv; among administrative districts, higher indicators of social network development are typical for northern and southern districts in comparison with central ones. Key words: social networking service (SNS), penetration rate of the SNS, Facebook, Instagram, Ternopil region.

This paper aims to construct a social network among e-learning learners on the basis of the location information of the learner and the instructor obtained using GPS sensors, etc. For this, we suggest a system that supports the construction of a social education network service using the location information of the smart-phone in e-learning. This system provides a mechanism to form a social network service among students who take the same on-line course or have similar interests. Through this system, e-learners can create communities for learning and exchange help among them. The support of a location based social network service in our system would increase interactions among e-learners and improve satisfaction regarding their mobile learning environment.