Title: Re-examining social network services from sociability perspective

Authors: Zhongjie Wang; Xiaofei Xu

Addresses: School of Computer Science and Technology, Harbin Institute of Technology, 92 West Dazhi Street, Harbin, 150001, China ' School of Computer Science and Technology, Harbin Institute of Technology, 92 West Dazhi Street, Harbin, 150001, China

Abstract: The objective of social network services (SNS) is to fulfil users' social needs, and this is quite different from the traditional functional-oriented genetic services (GSs) which are leveraged to fulfil specific functional needs. We clarify the difference between GS and SNS and give the corresponding abstract models. Different SNS have different sorts of abilities of facilitating the social activities, so we propose a concept 'degree of sociability (DoS)' as a key attribute of SNS to depict such differences. On account that a user's daily behaviour sequence is intertwined by the usage of various GS and SNS, we import SNS into traditional service processes and to form a novel socialised service process (SSP) model that has the ability of satisfying users' functional and social needs simultaneously. Criteria for selecting SNS in terms of a user's social needs are briefly summarised. A real-world case study is conducted to validate this research.

Keywords: social network services; SNS; genetic services; degree of sociability; DoS; socialised service process; SSP; social needs; social networks.

DOI: 10.1504/IJES.2016.076104

International Journal of Embedded Systems, 2016 Vol.8 No.2/3, pp.107 - 118

Received: 13 Sep 2014
Accepted: 26 Oct 2014
Published online: 26 Apr 2016 *

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