Bob, on Facebook, talks about his neighborhood and his work as a community organizer. Linda, on YouTube, publishes pictures with descriptions of the depressed housing conditions in her town. Robin, on LinkedIn, lists her work experience as an urban planner focusing on revitalizing depressed downtowns. Although the interests of these three people are associated by content, there is no way for them to share information, or even know about each other’s work, unless each individual registers on all three of these networks. Is there a plan or strategy that will allow social network users like Bob, Linda, and Robin to easily share their interests and information across the Internet? Breslin and Decker explore the possibilities by which content in a social network can be shared across the entire Internet.

The Internet has traditionally been described as an information highway, the place where you can find out about “stuff.” Breslin and Decker talk about the limitations of today’s social networks in organizing and tagging a person’s stuff: emails, documents, thoughts, and links from each of an individual’s virtual spaces. The authors of this paper are participants in a growing community that discusses and offers solutions to these problems. They suggest ways in which the vast amount of content whose access is limited by present-day social network software can be accessed and used.

As far back as 1995, William J. (Bill) Mitchell from The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) described the Internet as an electronic agora, one that mimicked the public square in ancient Athens where ideas and gossip were shared. In his electronically imagined “city of bits,” Mitchell, an architect and city planner, argued that the crucial issue for fostering electronic agoras was not the structure of communications hardware, but rather how software could create electronically mediated environments for connecting people and ideas. Mitchell’s question, then, was how to shape such a city. He offered views on how people, through time, have engaged in various types of community for business, religion, work, the marketplace, and so on; how sharing dialog and information in a community can initiate change within it, exemplified by 17th century coffeehouses in London, where gossip, dialog, information access, and interactions amongst commodities traders over coffee led to the development of today’s stock market; and how such communities may be compared to present-day environments in cyberspace where information can be shared through gossip, dialog, information access, and interactions among groups with similar interests.

The past 12 years have shown that some of the shared environments Mitchell described have evolved into popular social networks, but also that issues of connection, interaction, linkage, and sharing among the communities in the Internet world are becoming an area of dialog and experimentation. Not only are issues of connectivity being explored, but also the type of textual content users employ to express ideas. People tend to “talk” on the Net through blogs, social networks, and email, eschewing more formal, literate writing as a means of expression. Internet interactions tend to follow the patterns of an oral culture. Breslin and Decker note that in the real world, people share information through mutual interests, where talk is often the communication mode--work, play, professional and religious organizations, through friends, relatives, and colleagues. They postulate that information in social networks should be sharable, as in real life, crossing the boundaries of one group or another.

According to them, one way that information can be made sharable is by tagging an individual’s relevant information items and annotating them with additional data. The data provided by annotations can be used for creating links and data access that can be shared. Breslin and Decker propose that semantic Web formats can be used to perform this function since these formats already exist to describe people, content objects, and the connections that bind them together. They describe and illustrate graphically how making social networking a shared component across an individual’s various desktop and Web applications would let him or her use all their social connections in any application.

Breslin and Decker note that semantic Web technologies have already been introduced into some social networks. Readers can explore the examples provided in which networks can create, reuse, and link content.

There is no question that social networks are one of the fastest-growing pathways for Internet togetherness. The construct of the “city of bits” has grown exponentially since Mitchell first described the need to think about its design. Breslin and Decker offer some interesting possibilities, adding to an ongoing interest in and dialog about people and the Internet--how we interact, access information, and join together in cyberspace societies.