Criteria for Social Applications

Social networks are becoming increasingly important for a wide number of applications. This is in particular true in the context of the Web 2.0 movement where a number of Web-based applications emerged - termed social networking applications or services - that allow the articulation of social relationships between individuals thus creating social networks. Although Web 2.0 applications are a popular and characteristic class of such applications they are not the only representatives that permit such functionality. Applications in the Personal Information Management domain exhibit similar characteristics but have never been mentioned in the context of social networking. The increasing number and diversity of such applications makes their study, analysis and evaluation from a systems point of view critical and important as their study may help identify relationships that are useful when attempting to represent a community.  In this paper we outline a framework for analyzing applications that permit the construction of social networks. Our main focus is on the abstractions and mechanisms that a number of applications provide to facilitate the building of such networks.