Towards Usage-Centered Design Patterns for Social Networking Systems

The role of social networks is becoming increasingly relevant in the recent years. While social networks are becoming more ubiquitous, a profound approach guiding the analysis, design and development of such social systems is becoming increasingly important. This research focuses on deriving functionalities that classify behavior of social networking applications. This led to identifying three basic/elementary usage patterns which include;

interconnectivity

,

file

sharing

and

tagging

, while the intersection between these patterns led to other secondary/supportive usage patterns which include

content

authoring

,

content

remixing

,

content

aggregation

&

syndication

and

content

streaming

. By interlinking the proposed patterns of usage with underlying techniques and Web 2.0 tools we aim to provide insight into re-usable elementary building blocks common to any type of social networks. As a result a usage-centered roadmap is presented that identifies the intersection of several Web 2.0 tools and techniques used to realize the three identified social networking patterns of usage.