Social Navigation on the Social Web : Unobtrusive Prototyping of Activity Streams in Established Spaces

Abstract

Social navigation usage on the Social Web were studied by conducting content analyzes to see how prevalent such navigation is now compared to the Web's earlier years. The common characteristic of the types of social navigation we found in these sites were the reliance on peers for the information used in the navigation process. We therefore built on existing definitions of social navigation an provided our own definition which emphasized the essentialness of peers in the web site one is navigating in.

We found activity streams -- chronological listings of what all the individuals one is particularly interested in have recently been doing on a web site -- to be an interesting and seemingly useful technique of social navigation. A prototype of activity streams were built on top of the Urørt web site to test the usefulness of such a social navigation technique in a real world two-group experiment with a pre-post setup. The experiment results were somewhat inconclusive, partly because of high non-accomplishment rates and some ambiguous results. The high non-accomplishment rates seemed to have a strong connection to the technical prototype plattform we used as participants had a hard time trying to install the necessary software.