SocialBrowsing : Augmenting Web Browsing to Include Social Context

In this paper we discuss SocialBrowsing, a Firefox extension that adds a social context to the web browsing experience. The extension works with external sources of social information to enrich a user's experience. It searches every document browsed for keywords related to specific social data, queries these aforementioned external sources, and produces a visual overlay that presents this relevant social information. We present an overview of the tool and its implementation, a discussion of the merits and drawbacks of such a system, and an outline of future work and analysis. Introduction Social networking on the web is a huge phenomenon, with nearly half a billion user accounts among hundreds of websites [4]. These numbers do not just reflect idle user accounts; several of the top ten most visited sites on the web are social networking sites [1], showing that people are actively participating. In many cases, users participated for entertainment, either directly through social interactions with other users, or via the features offered by the site such as blogging. However, users find that these social experiences, and the information generated as result, generally stay within the social networking websites. Put differently, social data is largely only presented on its respective social networking site. We believe that the next step in social networking is for this data to move beyond the websites it was created on. This data will benefit applications outside of the original social networks. We have previously investigated the use of web-based social networks for spam filtering [5]. [5][7] and [10] have all studied the use of trust from social networks in recommender systems. These are good first steps, but there is much more information that social networks can make available. For example, the recommendations produced by social applications may be applicable in other contexts. In this paper, we introduce SocialBrowing, a Firefox extension that integrates social networking information into a user’s browsing experience. As a user browses the web, the extension searches for items related to specific social data sources. When these items are located, the respective data source is queried for additional information. The extension then overlays this information in a seamless manner that may provide a richer browsing experience by displaying more detailed user specific social data. The first section of this paper introduces the extension and discusses the user experience provided. The second section presents the extensions internals. The third section touches on the motivation for creating this system of social and web data integration. The fourth notes related work and the fifth presents our conclusions. We end the paper with a discussion of possible future work. Extension Overview Firefox Extensions are add-ons for the Firefox Webbrowser. They alter and add to the ways a user interacts with the browsers. Existing examples include Adblock, which blocks ads on a webpage using regular expressions, Forecastfox, which adds a weather forecast to the feature bar, and Chatzilla which allows a user to connect to an IRC channel within Firefox. One extreme example is the Songbird music player which uses firefox as a base to create a full featured audio player. Extensions can use external resources and provide a rich user interface while utilizing a set of services provided by the browser itself. These services allow a developer to augment the browser's user interface and functionality. Our extension, SocialBrowsing, performs an analysis of a pages' contents and highlights words or phrases which have contextual social information. It then presents this information in a manner that enriches the users' experience. In this section we will describe the exterior of our extension and the user experience it creates in detail.