Sociapedia : online collaboration over a social network

Abstract

This paper introduces Sociapedia, a collaborative social network application that encourages friends to contribute content about each other. Sociapedia is designed upon the same principles that allowed ordinary web users to construct the comprehensive encyclopedia Wikipedia, and is built on top of the largest social network currently in existence. Several lessons from the evolution of Sociapedia are discussed. In order to learn how people would use a collaborative social network like Sociapedia, a field study was conducted over the period of one week. We established that Sociapedia generates accurate information that is not otherwise present, and characterize the nature and structure of this information. We also compare methods for spreading applications in Facebook. Finally, we analyze Sociapedia's growth and offer several suggestions for increasing its reach throughout Facebook.