Briefs

The social networking landscape could change beyond recognition with technology that maps the skills and needs of users

Lee Bruno, The Guardian, October 23 2008

A new startup is helping reshape the social networking landscape by using artificial intelligence to automate the process of identifying, finding and retrieving specific types of information locked within online communities.

Over the past decade, social networks have become a powerful new force for attracting internet traffic. In the UK, Facebook is currently the second most popular website followed by Google, according to Hitwise, an internet research firm.

It's not surprising that the names of the various social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn have become common destinations for younger people as well as businesses.

But finding information and expert sources of knowledge quickly within social networks is neither easy nor efficient and valuable information is left buried within online communities.

SRI International based in Menlo Park, California, teamed up with military officers to build a new social analytics tool called iLink that generates models and helps streamline the process by which a specific expert in an online community can be found.

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