Toward the next generation of social networking applications

Citation

Schwartz, D.G. (2009), "Toward the next generation of social networking applications", Internet Research, Vol. 19 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/intr.2009.17219caa.001

Toward the next generation of social networking applications

Article Type: Editorial From: Internet Research, Volume 19, Issue 3

Fundamental to Web 2.0 is a change in social interaction. New technologies have engendered new behaviours that are establishing new social norms. Our challenge as researchers is to identify and understand those behaviours while suggesting and testing ways in which they might be harnessed. Yet before we can effectively study such changes we must first have the proper tools with which to perform meaningful analysis.

In “Statistical inference from power law distributed web-based social interactions” Raban and Rabin set their sights on explaining behaviour in social networks. They begin by explaining the nature of power law distributions that are scale-free, asymmetrical, asymptotic distributions in which the same network contains nodes or people whose attribute of activity differs by orders of magnitude, but can still be described by the same distribution. Finding that the analysis of partial data sets that exhibit power law distributions will misrepresent relationships between variables, they suggest that research following naïve sampling methods may achieve misleading results. They then demonstrate a new method for statistical inference on data from power law distributions that can be used to accurately explain behaviour and social phenomena.

In “A study of members’ helping behaviours in online community”, Chu suggests that the knowledge shared within an online community in support of product purchase decisions may be effectively leveraged for product development decisions by an organization. He then develops a theoretical model that enables us to examine the antecedents and consequences of members’ helping behaviour in online communities and proposes how it is then mapped to play a role in innovation and new product design. Social interactions end up directly contributing to organizational business needs. Perhaps the business in question should pay the participating members for their useful interactions? How might that be accomplished?

The monetization, and hence further stellar growth, of social and Web 2.0 applications has been hampered by the lack of fee-tracking mechanisms that go beyond advertising, subscription, and purchase transactions. Addressing one of the primary obstacles to friction-free electronic commerce, Ruiz-Martínez, Cánovas, and Gómez-Skarmeta present the “Design and implementation of a generic per-fee-link framework”. In addition to describing the components needed for supporting the framework they also test its feasibility through an implementation that facilitates payment for web content. Their approach provides a real alternative to advertisement or subscription business models and could enable a new wave of non-standard web-based transactions to emerge, including the potential to monetize the types of interactions described in Chu’s article above.

Moving from the web’s social potential to classic enterprise analysis, this issue of Internet Research presents a study of the 1,250 largest firms in Greece. In their article Papastathopoulou and Avlonitis develop a new behavioral approach for “Classifying enterprises on the basis of WWW use”. Five distinct enterprise profiles have emerged from this work that see parallels in similar work done in user classification. The enterprise usage profiles of “E-merchants”, “Information seekers”, “E-purchasers”, “E-transaction adopters” and “WWW experimentalists” present us with a classification scale that enterprises can utilize for self-evaluation, planning, and comparative purposes.

One might argue that the enterprise equivalent of the social network of individuals is embodied in interorganizational relationships. How do relationships between organizations affect e-business adoption? Chong, Ooi, Lin, and Tang discuss the “Influence of interorganizational relationships on SMEs’ e-business adoption” and reveal that relationships such as communication, collaboration and information sharing were found to be most significant in affecting Malaysian SMEs’ decision to adopt e-business in their supply chain. This runs contrary to existing research that attributes the lion’s share of adoption influence on trust and trading partners’ power. Suprisingly those factors were found to have no significant influence on the adoption of e-business in the supply chain of Malaysian SMEs.

Finally, we present Rowley’s most recent study, “Online branding strategies of UK fashion retailers”, which provides new empirical evidence that the potential of online branding is still underutilized. Applying content analysis to leading retails such as Sainsbury’s, Tesco, Marks & Spencer, and Bonmarche, this study gives an up-to-date glimpse at the state of online branding efforts by UK fashion retailers.

David G. Schwartz