A Comparison of Social Service Selection Techniques

This paper compares social service selection techniques and analyzes the advantages and disadvantages of several approaches. We support our analysis with recent social service studies as well as exploring studies of commercial usage such as eBay, Amazon, etc. The three traditional areas of social service selection-reputation, recommender, and referral-will be the areas compared in detail. Service selection techniques often return a single value representing the rank of a service. Users of the service, however, may not always have identical needs and may be interested in ratings based on multiple categories. We feel this is an important aspect when comparing social service selection techniques. To address this, our investigation will also include examining the issues of adding quality of service (QoS) factors with social service selection.