Group 7 : OrientExpress Blog

A survey was conducted to determine the viability and user acceptance for the app. And then link of the questionnaire survey is: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/​VWRB7MW

Most of the questions were asked with relation to the primary social networking website at the present moment, Facebook.

Here are some of the findings of the Survey:

1. An overwhelming 74 per cent of the total sample said they were unhappy with the security features available on Facebook. They were unsure that they were sharing something with exactly the people they wanted to.
2. Close to 60 per cent of the sample said they were unable to manage their friend lists properly on Facebook with some friends they don’t know very well.
3. 58 per cent of the sample was not satisfied with the speed (or lack thereof) at which they could obtain important information about their closest friends and felt annoyed at having to scroll down a wall indefinitely.
4. 64 per cent of the sample said they considered the people on their mobile phone contacts list as the people closest to them and the people they most frequently contact and vice versa. This forms the basis of our app.
5. 78.9 per cent of the user group (sample) said they would really like an alternative to scrolling down the Facebook Wall to get the relevant information. This is one of the highlights of our app as it provides a much more intuitive way to look at photos, videos, posts and other information by creating tabbed indexes subdivided into categories.
6. 68 per cent of the sample was excited about another novel feature of our app—GPS Tracking. They said it would be very helpful if they could have real time tracking of their close friends especially when there is no carrier signal.
7. 73 per cent of the sample said they would like to have a more advanced friendship wall than Facebook with more semantically available information.

These encouraging facts were one of the main reasons for us to go forward with this app.

Appendix: Survey Results of the Social Network App Survey

Smartr Contacts is a product of application developer Xobni. It is a powerful iPhone contact. It can be said that Smartr Contacts is a real all-in-one social network App and contact. Smartr Contacts can work with different social networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Profiles and other information can be imported to user’s Smartr Contacts automatically. Smartr Contacts provides the function of calculating the frequency of communication between user and contacts.

Users can search contacts by the search bar. The search bar shows the total number of contacts.

When one contact is selected, Smartr Contacts will show the information about this contact. In profile page users can call, send SMS, or email to friends. In history page, Smartr Contacts shows the communications between user and contact. In common page, user can see who you have in common with everyone.

Comparison and contrast between Smartr Contacts and our App:

Provide statistics of the frequency of communication between user and contacts.
Connect with user’s other social networks.
All in one app.
Download information from multiple social networks.

Smartr Contacts will import the contacts of user’s social networks into user’s Smartr Contacts. Smartr Contacts may generate a too big contacts, if there are two much friends in user’s social networks. Unfortunately, the Smartr Contacts do not have ranking and group function. It will be a hard job to find a right person from hundreds contacts.
Our App does not import contacts from user’s social networks. The size of user’s contact will be maintained. Our App provides ranking function which is based on the statistics of the communication frequency. The contract who you contact frequently can be ranked in priority.

MyPhone+ is an all-in-one phone dialer. Under normal circumstances, iPhone users have to add the profile pictures of contacts into their phone contact themselves.

After the installation of MyPhone+, the MyPhone+ can download the profile pictures of contacts from user’s social networks. MyPhone+ for Facebook is developed for Facebook technically. Hence, this App downloads information from Facebook only. After necessary information is downloaded, MyPhone+ can provide a photo dialer to the user.

Certainly, MyPhone+ is a social network browser as well. MyPhone+ automatically finds the matching Facebook friends for your contacts and downloads their data such as profile pictures, birthday, status, address, website, company, and job title. User can browse these profiles from user’s MyPhone+ contact. Necessary interaction functions are provided certainly, such as write on their Wall.

Comparison and contrast between MyPhone+ and our App:

Both two App are based on phone contact.
Download the profiles of contacts from their social network.
All-in-one.

Although both two App are All-in-one, the implement approaches are different. MyPhone+ developed different App for different social networks; however, our App integrated different social networks together.
Our App provides ranking function. It is easy for the user to know who are your closer friends in your contact and show their profiles of social networks in priority.

Description:
Phone calls tracker for FREE.
Remote management and security tools for your phone and your family. You can do more than only backup and restore call logs. Now you can track and monitoring everything from an Android device.

Features:
– Call logs tracker and monitoring (call tracker, call history, call timer, all calls data, previous call logs, history of calls logs)
– SMS monitoring and backup
– Contact list monitoring
– Find phone using GPS Location
– Find phone by cell phone tower signal
– Backup phone data
– Restore backup to a new phone
– Remotely wipe SD Card
– Remotely wipe phone data (contacts, sms, photos, videos etc)
– Web control panel (send commands to phone)
– Geofence alerts
– Callbacks
– Full history phone location

Most common uses of Call Tracker app are monitoring calls and sms messages, find my phone, find my friend, find my droid phone, locating of children, location kids, tracking phone, tracking husband, tracking wife, find a friend, find a phone, find a person and location tracker,.

For increased efficiency and comfort, we use both the signal emitted by the GPS as well as the carrier network’s data for location. Of course, you need Internet connection working on your device to get call logs and monitoring SMS messages remotely too.

(descriptions taken from android market)

Description:
The best way to enjoy your contacts! Now with FREE SMS 🙂
Contapps is a free contacts & dialer app that brings FREE SMS, Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Foursquare & more to your contacts. With Contapps, it’s fun to connect with your contacts!

Seamlessly send FREE & regular SMS messages from one place – without switching apps!
If your contacts use Contapps, FREE SMS will be selected automatically. If not, simply send regular SMS or INVITE them to Contapps to enjoy FREE SMS.

Features:
CONNECT WITH YOUR CONTACTS HOWEVER YOU WANT FROM ONE PLACE:
★ Send FREE & regular SMS
★ View contacts messages history in their profiles
★ Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin & Foursquare integrated in your contacts
★ Navigate to your contacts addresses from their profiles
★ Press & hold a contact pic to call from your main contacts screen

MAKE YOUR CONTACTS RICHER:
★ Awesome contacts UI
★ Dialer & call log (swipe left in main contacts screen to call log)
★ Contacts sync with Facebook
★ “Pinch to Zoom” to change pics size in your main contacts screen
★ Merge duplicate contacts (supports most devices)
★ Contacts widget
★ Birthdays reminders

EASILY FIND YOUR CONTACTS:
★ Fast T9 dialer & Gesture search
★ Grid / List contacts view
★ Groups & favorites contacts display
★ Sort contacts by A-Z, Frequency & Recent

(descriptions taken from android market)

Basic Theory Background
Dunbar’s number is an approximate number of social relationships that humans can maintain with stably over time. This theory is proposed by Robin Dunbar [1], who is an anthropologist in Oxford University of UK. It is derived according to ape’s intelligence and social networks. Dunbar’s number ranges from 100 to 150, defining the size of the group in which every member knows each other. It is determined by human’s mind capability. As the available capital of human’s mind is a constant [2], the number of close relationships is limited. In fact, people will let weaker relationships dissipate and spend efforts to maintain a core group of fewer than 150 or so. [3] In order to maintain a close relationship, considerable investments are required in both emotion and psychology.

Statistics from Facebook
Facebook’s own statistics suggests that the average number of user’s friends is about 130 [4], which is a fact that proves the theory of Dunbar’s number. Although the number of friends of different Facebook’s users is quite different (for example, some Facebook’s users have more than 500 friends), actually, in personal lists of friends, the number of friends that users contact with frequently is quite small and relatively stable. The more actively and closely friends contact with others, the less and more stable the number of such a group is.

Relevance to Our Project
Our social networking application based on mobile contacts aims to strength the interactions and relationships with user’s closest friends by ranking user’s social networks’ information. How to define user’s closest friends? Dunbar’s number tells us that most friends on our social networks are not people that we know and actually interact with most in real life. The closest friends are whom we care about and interact with in our daily lives and they are just in our contacts. Our project’s main idea is to calculate the relationship degrees between user and user’s contacts to quantify the relationships between user and contacts.

References:
[1] R. Dunbar. How Many Friends Does One Person Need? Dunbar’s Number and Other Evo-lutionary Quirks. Faber and Faber, 2010.

[2] Huiji Gao, Xufei Wang, Jiliang Tang and Huan Liu. “Network Denoising in Social Media”, Technical Report, TR-11-002, School of Computing, Informatics, and Decision Systems Engineering, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85287, 2011.

[3] Shyong (Tony) K. Lam and John Riedl, University of Minnesota. Are Our Online “Friends” Really Friends.

[4] See https://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics/

As a social networking application which built based on the mobile contacts, it will be possible to visualize the degree of relationship between you and your friends through our application. In order to add relevant credits with each person on mobile contacts based on every interaction, the contacts priority ranking algorithm can be adopted as the social ranking algorithm in this application.

The proposed algorithm is based on the Markov Chains Theory and Social Strength Calculation Approach, and the evaluation criterion mainly is the user’s mobile communication history.

Firstly, the social strength between the user and all his contacts will be calculated. The social strength is a numerical value which used to define the degree of relationship in the user’s social graph. The communication history log is presented just like the Table 1 below. The interactions mainly contain two categories, which including both mobile interaction and real interaction.

Furthermore, each frequency parameter f has three dimensions i, j and k, which i implies to communication service like mobile interaction or real interaction; j implies to communication tools like call, SMS or video chat; and k implies to the contacts (Figure 1) [1]. The main user is represented as U and the overall social strength of the user U is 1.

Then, the utility function can be used to formulate the social strength calculation. The utility function [1] is:

Where S(i,a) provides the strength of the user U with the contact a especially for the communication service i; q is the total number of communication tools in service i; value f(i,j,a) is the frequency record which has been mentioned in Table 1; parameter thres(i,j) is the threshold value estimated over the usage on communication tool j of the communication service i. After the strength of each communication service of contact a is calculated, the overall strength of that individual contact can be calculated accordingly by the following function [1]:

Where S(a) provides the overall strength of the user U with contact a, parameter thres(i) is the threshold value estimated over the usage of the communication service i.

After the social strength of all interactions between the user and his contacts are calculated, the application then will be able to adopt the calculated results to rank the contacts in a descending order.

References:
[1] Dudarenko, Natalia, Juwel Rana, and Kare Synnes. “Ranking Algorithm by Contacts Priority for Social Communication Systems.” Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 6249th ser. (2010): 38-49. Print.

[2] Rana, J., Kristiansson, J., Josef, H., Synnes, K.: “Enriching and Simplifying Communication by Social Prioritization”. In: ASONAM 2010: Proceedings of the The 2010 International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining, Odense, Denmark, August 9-11 (2010).

This news is mainly introducing the privacy problem of contact list used in social network. Many apps designed for contact list is to help users connect with their friends conveniently. In recent years many people are willing to accept broadcasting their location and information with others so that they can meet more new friends. Though contact list are always stored into users’ own mobile, there are many potentially security problems. From this news, authors take many examples to prove this kind of situation. An app of mobile the Path used contact list to realize the functions of social network such as sharing and transferring information. Due to the poor security function, the privacy information of users has been exposed. Thus more users begin realizing whether their privacy has been revealed through these social networks. Other content of this new is talking about another example of this problem. Therefore, in term of our apps, privacy is an inevitable point to consider carefully. After all, our app is based on the contact list to develop other additional functions.

Links: http://www.appolicious.com/tech/articles/11090-iphone-apps-storing-contact-lists-just-the-latest-privacy-debacle-in-the-mobile-industry

This news is focusing on the Path a successful contact list app in mobile. And there is some experience we can take them as examples into our app.

Path is an app based on contact list of mobile; it has a great number of user groups now. Though there are some problems occurred in early stage of Path such as charged by users due to the exposing their personal information, it also has attracted many users to try it. As we know, the most important key in social network is the user group. Thus, how to get the stable user group is a crucial point to learn from Path. From this news, Path attracts some active memberships from other social websites who has a large number of fans. I think is a good and efficient method to use in our app. additionally, there is permission for users when they first use the Path, which is good for terms of privacy. Depends on our app, it is necessary for us to make permission for users before they use the app and some security measures can be embed into our app. Path is a impressive app on contact list and its pattern has proved. However, comparison with our project: Rank First, Path cannot do the rank for customers. Rank is the most obvious function of our product. By using Rank First, customer also can do the actions like another SNS websites.

Links: http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/technology/story/2012-03-21/path-privacy/53694216/1

This news indicates a new address list social service. It is called Everyme. Like the Path, the contact list is the core function used in social service. Though our app take the relationships to describe the social service, some specifically extra functions supported by Everyme are remarkable. For instance, when customers use this app, they will get the much relevant information of their friends. Additionally, contact list is the home to close people so that it is convenient to communicate with those favorite people. I think it is the biggest advantage of contact list social service. Moreover, Everyme support a group message, it allow some friends talk with each other in a specially privacy space. In my view, we can use it for reference to add some similar functions. Also, its user interface is simple for users to understand and accept. Through collecting relevant news, I found that there are lots of similar social services based on the contact list. Thus, I think we need to highlight our own special originality. Though, Everyme emphasize on the ‘close friends’, it cannot analyze the level of ‘close’. As to Rank first, it not only can rank the relevant information for customers, also it can as a SNS service, you can bound with other SNS website such as Facebook, to do some ‘SNS’ actions (e.g.post photos, publish your blog).

Links: http://techcrunch.com/2011/10/18/andreessen-horowitz-crunchfund-tencent-back-intelligent-social-address-book-everyme/

Our app will not only focus on the innovation of technology, also it needs to consider about the commerce strategies. First of all， the SEO (Search engine optimization) always play an important role in the process of popularity increasing. This news indicates some useful information about Google page rank mechanism. Based on the news, though there are many optimizing tools SEO supported by some companies, some tools are not trust by Google. Taking the Yahoo Site Explorer as the example, some links are provided in order to increasing the rank in the result of searching. However, some links are not trust by Google so that these links are not counted. From the news, Cutts (an engineer of Google) said that there will be subsample of links to anybody for any given page or any given site and it is more fair method to judge more quality links included in the pages or sites. Thus, we must pay more attention on this problem. SEO tool is inevitable for future development of our product. We cannot just take some simple optimizing tools to realize the target; also we need handle and notice the key policies of Google.

Links: http://www.webpronews.com/google-on-how-a-lot-of-your-links-dont-count-2012-03

The main content of this news is to indicate a really current situation in Social network. For example, depends on Facebook, though many customers take advantage of it, most of their ‘friends’ are not the close friends or the friends who need not pay more attention. And, some friends who people calling or sending message are always necessary to regard as keeping close relationship. Thus, according to the writer, the mobile interaction often plays an inevitable role in social network. After that, writer also point out “mobile first, web second”, this kind of apps has highly growth in recent years so that customers obtain the more useful or efficient social relationship through their mobile contact. Moreover, many similar apps can be used IOS, Android and other mobile platforms by different APIs to deploy. Also, the writer takes Apple as an instance to describe its strategy in this field. Certainly, it is just more useful in people want share their photo, message or location with their close friends. In terms of this kind of app, using contact list as a brand new approach to realize the actual social graph can attract potential user group to choose it as a new platform to communicate with their close friends. Based on this news, our app can satisfy the basic requirement in this field and it seems to be a reasonable design. I will post more relevant news later.

Links: http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/04/mobile-contacts-social-network/;