In this video, we show some basic features of Hive. Many features are not developed due to the time limitation. For example, the automatic tag system (When user types tags, the system can suggest the related tags).
The link of the video.
The success of our idea depends on the acceptance of the target market. We believe the value that we are offering is quite attractive andĀ fulfillsĀ an existing need of Web users. But in order to attract people to enjoy our new social network we will ensure that we choose appropriate steps to pass.
Diffusion of Innovations is a theory that helps how, why, and at what rate our new technology idea would spread through cultures. Everett Rogers, a professor of rural sociology, defines diffusion as the process that an innovation is communicated through certain channels over time among the members of a social system. There are four main elements in diffusion research: Innovation, Communication channels, Time and Social system.
We will focus on āRogerās adoption curveā which is also known as āRogersā 5 Factorsā.Ā Roger defines five factors that influence an individualās decision to adopt or reject a technology related innovation.
Here we examined the intrinsic characteristics of our new social network, Hive, against Rogersā 5 Factors.
| Rogersā 5 Factors – Hive | |
| Relative Advantage | We strongly believe that Hive’s idea to combine traditional social networks with interest-based social networks will have a big advantage from existing web sites |
| Compatibility | Hive will in some ways be similar to Facebook in that it is an online social networking site where users post about things, but with a completely different focus. Facebook has integrated itself into the lives of millions of people, and we are confident Hive can achieve this also. |
| Simplicity | Hive will provide it’s features to the users with the simpliest way as possible, so it is not complicated for users |
| Trialability | It will be easy for users to try Hive beforeĀ committingĀ to it. Hive will not only allow users to sign in using their existing Facebook account, but also import their interests from that account, or from other social networks, speeding up the set-up process of the new user considerably. |
| Observability | Hive will be visible to users through effective branding and possible interaction through other site, e.g. a Hive button on a web page with a possible interest could add that interest to the user’s interest list. |
Hive could offer advertisers the chance to advertise their brands/products on the website. It could be a basic service, with no audience specific targeting. Advertising may not be a very good source of revenue in a social networking site since it is very hard to distract users and make them want to click on adverts. This makes the āCost per Click/Actionā pricing model not very effective. And since Hive would be a new website with not very many visitors, it would be difficult to negotiate a āCost per milleā scheme. If the adverts could somehow be made to integrate itself within the user experience ā perhaps within the recommendations page, then maybe users would take noticeā¦
To help better understand our target audience, and to better design Hiveās features, we have conducted a survey on a group of 71 young adults. Below are the results and our analysis:
We found that 45% of respondents use only one social networking website on a regular basis, with fewer and fewer people using higher amounts of sites.
We also found that of the people who did not use more than one social networking site regularly, the majority said they did not because they thought that most of the sites available, did similar things, and so they invested most of their time on a single one. A significant amount also thought that using more than one site regularly would be too many to keep track of. This suggests that many people have difficulty maintaining too many relationships, and want them all to be in a single site for them to manage easily.
From the results so far, it seems that Hive needs to promote the fact that it is for a different purpose than sites such as Facebook, so that people feel it would be worth their time to use Hive alongside their other social networking sites, and to use it often.
Why People do not use more than one social networking site regularlyIt seems that a significant amount of people do not have online-only friends, or rarely speak to them, preferring only to communicate online with people they know in real life. These people avoid speaking to people they have not met in real life for a number of reasons.Ā Below are some of the most common responses:
People seem to either want to meet others in real life before communicating online or simply do not have the time for people without a āsolidā relationship. The latter can be dealt with ā Hive will need to help users build stronger relationships with others. Hive already does this inherently because it helps users find others who have a large amount of interests in common, helping them build relationshipsĀ by giving them many things to discuss and share with each other. Hive may also need additional features to help users build better relationships with others, and to encourage them to communicate with their online friends more.
The results show that almost 80% of respondents would like to or have already met their online friends in person. This suggests that a location element would be useful in Hive, i.e. users should be able to input their current town or city in their profile, so that location can be a factor when being recommended potential friends.
Additional features to help users meet up could be implemented in the future, but this would have to be discussed in the future.
The results show that people in general think that they share more interests with the people that they speak to the most. This supports how Hive will connect users ā by their interests, i.e. the more interests people have in common with someone, the more they will talk. The results also show that the increase in average interests is very little ā around 1-3 interests difference. This may be because the social networks people are a part of (Facebook) is not interest-based, supporting an earlier post āFacebook is not a place of interestsā, on this blog.
Very few people ā only 11.5% of respondents speak to around half or over half of their online friends regularly. This suggests that people add others as friends but hardly speak to any of them. This is something which Hive will try to fix ā by creating an environment for the user where all of their friends speak about things which interest the user; increasing the likelihood of them wanting to talk to the people they made friends with.
A large amount of users would consider joining an online social networking site for making friends such as Hive, but the majority would only do so if their existing friends were already a member. It is therefore a good idea to allow existing users to invite their friends to Hive, either through existing online social networks or via email, perhaps even offer some incentive for the user to do so. Existing users doing this may play a significant role in obtaining new users.
Here is a brief explanation of our plan for the Dragonās Den presentation.
First, we will have to make sure that the audience will understand what Hive is about and why a social network like Hive is needed. We have to make it clear that itās not about a traditional social network like Facebook and we are not trying to beat Facebook. Next we are planning to give a brief overview of existing similar applications and then we explain why Hive is so different to them.
Next, we will talk about the value of the new social network we are proposing. To do that we will give an overview of Hiveās features and what a user can do when registering in the web site. We will probably show some story boards that will help the audience understand better how the users will interact with our web site.
Making a good idea is good. Making money with that idea is better. Thatās why we will explain why Hive has the potential to become a successful social network and may bring some profit. So, we will discuss about the possible revenue models for Hive and also, we will discuss the legal issues that arise with a social network like this.
Next, we will present some future improvements that can be made to Hive, so the users will find more things to do and stay longer at Hive. These future improvements are not included in the current version because of the lack of time, but if they can be achieved they can boost Hiveās status.
At the end we will show a small video of the Hive prototype, to show how some of the basic features work. We believe that showing the video will make the audience more enthusiastic of our idea and they may see some features that they did not realize that Hive provides, getting a better idea of Hive.
In this post, we show some testing data that we used on our prototype. Based on every task we show the input and the expected behavior of system’s output. This is just a small sample of testing data that should be used on the final system.
| Task | Input | Expected Output |
| User Registration | Username,email,password | User becomes a member |
| Interest Declaration | Text that indicates user’s interests | Hive records user’s interests |
| Post something | User writes a post and tags it | Post is shown in user’s friend’s home page that has the particular tag as an interest |
| Add friend | User sends invitation to another user | Notification is sent to the user |
| Get recommendations | User’s declared interests | Recommend new friends |
| Notification of friends request | Invitation from a user | Notification is shown on user’s home page |
In this article, we will briefly introduce the backend technologies behind Hive.
Current web development adopts different development methodologies from approaches in the traditional software engineering field. The development process is much faster than it was before. User requirements can also change quickly which requires flexibility in production, essentially in programming. The complicated programming language Java is obviously not a good choice to keep up with a fast pace which is required for this project.
Several years ago, PHP was a popular choice to quickly develop a prototype into production in a few weeks. However, when the code base increased to a certain level, PHP code became very hard to maintain [1]. In recent years, Python and Ruby have become a better choice in terms of codeĀ maintenanceĀ and ecosystem support.
The reason that we chose Python over Ruby is simply because one of our group members is more familiar with the former.
Python has particularly strong support in web development. Numerous web frameworks such as Quixote, Django, web.py, Tornado, etc. provide a range of choices for developers to choose according to their own needs. These web frameworks greatly relieve the workload of developers so that they can invest their time in developing the application rather than dealing with low level logic such as raw HTTP requests. With the help from these web frameworks, simple RESTful web servcies can be built in a short time.
The appearance of Web 2.0 largely enhances the interaction between users and web applications. In other words, web applications need to serve a lot of client requests. The difficulty of handling many HTTP connections was raised as the C10K problem [2]. Tornado and nginx are good practices of the C10K problem, deploying non-blocking I/O models to handle the large amount of connections, especially when clients built up long connections with backend servers such as comet.
Hive uses nginx to serve static files such as JavaScript scripts, images and CSS files. Moreover, it acts as a load balancer to route the requests to app servers which are running on Tornado.
Tornado is a web server and web framework. It is purely written in Python and has shown good performance when serving FriendFeed which later was acquired by Facebook.
The final choice falls on the database. Many arguments have been stated in this area because of the NoSQL movement. NoSQL essentially is a type of database without SQL semantics as the name suggests. It usually provides simple keys-value data model and has good performance in heavy read and writes over large datasets. However, due to data model limitations, much of the data logic gathers at application level. This increases developer work and makesĀ maintenanceĀ harder. More importantly, most NoSQL databases have not shown their reliability in a large distributed environment. On the other hand, although traditional RMDBS such as MySQL has its limitations when scalability becomes important, careful application level partitions can avoid this drawback [3].
Since group members are more familiar with MySQL and NoSQL has not been persuasive, we chose MySQL as our main storage system. Although some NoSQL databases such as Redis can be a cache option when the system reaches its capacity.
In conclusion, we choose Python as the main programming language of the application, tornado as the web framework and server. Nginx is used to serve static files and act as a load balancer meanwhile MySQL serves other data.
Before reading this post, we suggest you read the following posts to become more familiar with Hive and how it works: “what makes Hive different?” and “The features of Hive”
Information we receive from user
How we use usersā information
How users control their information
How we protect your information
Childrenās privacy
Deleting and deactivating accounts
Hive considers itself responsible for the safety of users. Therefore, we would attempt to control the safety of our network in two main ways:
What are the red lines in Hive:
Violence and Threats
Threaten to harm others or organize acts of real-world violence is breaking the law. Hive would remove the content, block the responsible user(s) and may communicate the matter to law enforcement depending on the situation. Theft and vandalism are prohibited in Hive.
Self-Harm
Hive acts against any promotion or encouragement of self-harm.
Bullying and Harassment
Hive is open for users to freely express their interests as long as they do not bother others. Hive would strictly take action based on reports of abusive or offensive behaviours.
Hate Speech
Hive is place to let people express what they love. Attacking people and their beliefs would be banned in Hive.
Graphic Violence
Sharing unpleasant photos and videos or those for sadistic pleasure is not allowed in Hive.
Nudity and Pornography
Hive is strictly against the sharing of nudity or pornographic-related content on the site.
Identity and Privacy
Creating a fake account, using other peopleās name on the account or similar behaviour is prohibited in Hive because it is considered as harmful behaviour.
Intellectual Property
Sharing content requires the correct rights to do so. Hive respects copyrights, trademarks, and other legal rights and would not allow any one to breach it.
Phishing and Spam
The aim of us is to build a network for our user in which they can find valuable opinions and connect to people with the same taste. Therefore, we would try to stand against any threat to our usersā privacy and security. Contacting a user for commercial purposes or trying to make an unwanted connection is prohibited in Hive.
Hive, like other social networking sites, allow users to create a profile, connect with other people, express their interests, and browse other user profiles. Users are free to disclose their information via their profile to others. Specifically, in Hive, users express what they like to get the benefit of social network and get the comments about what they like, find people who have the same taste with them, and get news about their interest fast, because information spreads so quickly in social networks.
These features however – the core proposed value to our users, can put our users at the risk of privacy concerns. We would mention the most important threats to the usersā privacy here and clarify how we would cope with them in Hive to make Hive a safe and secure place for our user to enjoy the power of social networking.
The first concern is about the information that users decide to disclose on Hive. User’s shared information might be explored by unexpected people for unexpected use. This is not only a concern in Hive, but also a concern of all social networks. This threat is mainly because of the nature of the digital world in which information is searchable and easy to copy and store.
The second concern is about the amount of control that users have over their identity-relevant information. Because based on the information users share in their profile the real image of them in the real world could be resembled. It also includes comments, photos and videos that the user shares.
Hive can track activities of their users not only in the Hive network but also from other social networks that users give permission for. Therefore, another concern is that Hive would be able to gather unprecedented amounts of information about users from other social networks. It is also concerning that this data collection could sometimes be without the informed consent of the users.
There are also more general concerns. For example, the concern of governmentās access to the users profile or similar concern in which the right of free speech could be threatened because of political matters.
Furthermore, there are a number of other concerns about user privacy in social networks which Hive is excluded from. In more detail, one of the revenue models that social networks use to generate income is advertising. In order to make advertisement more beneficial for their partners they collect the users identity-relevant data and give the partners access to the information. The reason we believe Hive is excluded is because focused advertising in Hive would be based on the identity of a particular interest page. For example, there would be specific page for āTitanic Movieā therefore any related advertisement can be showed in that page without inferring the users personal data.
One more privacy issue that would not be a concern of Hive users is the concern of financial related issues, like credit card information, detailed address and such like. There will not be any financial transactions available on Hive, which cuts off the possibility of commence related crimes.
To meet the mentioned threats, and in order to keep our users safe and secure, we would impose and publish transparent membership rules and community standards to share our ideas, policies and attempts of taking care of our usersā privacy. Please read the draft in a later post.
