SocConnect: A personalized social network aggregator and recommender

Users of Social Networking Sites (SNSs) like Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter, are facing two problems: (1) it is difficult for them to keep track of their social friendships and friends’ social activities scattered across different SNSs; and (2) they are often overwhelmed by the huge amount of social data (friends’ updates and other activities). To address these two problems, we propose a user-centric system called “SocConnect” (Social Connect) for aggregating social data from different SNSs and allowing users to create personalized social and semantic contexts for their social data. Users can blend and group friends on different SNSs, and rate the friends and their activities as favourite, neutral or disliked. SocConnect then provides personalized recommendation of friends’ activities that may be interesting to each user, using machine learning techniques. A prototype is also implemented to demonstrate these functionalities of SocConnect. Evaluation on real users confirms that users generally like the proposed functionalities of our system, and machine learning can be effectively applied to provide personalized recommendation of friends’ activities and help users deal with cognitive overload.