Beth Brownholtz

Motivations for social networking at work

The introduction of a social networking site inside of a large enterprise enables a new method of communication between colleagues, encouraging both personal and professional sharing inside the protected walls of a company intranet. Our analysis of user behavior and interviews presents the case that professionals use internal social networking to build stronger bonds with their weak ties and to reach out to employees they do not know. Their motivations in doing this include connecting on a personal level with coworkers, advancing their career with the company, and campaigning for their projects.

People Sensemaking and Relationship Building on an Enterprise Social Network Site

This paper describes a social network site designed to support employees within an enterprise in connecting and learning about each other through personal and professional sharing. We introduce the design concepts and provide a detailed account of the first three months of usage, involving nearly 300 users. Our findings suggest that employees find the site particularly useful as a way to perform people sensemaking of individuals and to connect and maintain relationships with others on the site.

One-hundred days in an activity-centric collaboration environment based on shared objects

This paper describes a new collaboration technology that is carefully poised between informal, ad hoc, easy-to-initiate collaborative tools, vs. more formal, structured, and high-overhead collaborative applications. Our approach focuses on the support of lightweight, informally structured, opportunistic activities featuring heterogeneous threads of shared objects with dynamic membership. We introduce our design concepts, and we provide a detailed first look at data from the first 100 days of usage by 20 researchers and 13 interns, who both confirmed our hypotheses and surprised us by reinventing the technology in several ways.

Spreading the honey: a system for maintaining an online community

As online communities, such as social network sites, mature, they face challenges in sustaining user engagement. To address this, we designed and deployed a rating system to encourage a broad set of users to promote a diverse set of content on a social network site. By evaluating the impact of the promotions on the sites content and users over time, we found that the system successfully promotes more diverse content and encourages new social interactions between users.

Activity explorer: activity-centric collaboration from research to product

Activity Explorer is the first product from IBM that supports the notion of activity-centric collaboration. This new collaboration paradigm organizes and integrates resources, tools, and people around the computational concept of a work activity, with the goal of increasing work quality and efficiency. In essence, activity-centric collaboration is an important and compelling example of contextual collaboration. Activity Explorer emerged from a multiyear research effort on activity-centric collaboration. This paper presents an overview of the most significant milestones of this research program and highlights the most interesting findings. The research behind Activity Explorer is based on many empirical studies, design explorations, and infrastructural engineering and technical simulations. We demonstrate how our research not only influenced product direction, but also the IBM vision for activity-centric collaboration.

Use and reuse of shared lists as a social content type

Social networking sites support a variety of shared content types such as photos, videos, or music. More structured or form-based social content types are not mainstream but we have started seeing sites evolve that support them. This paper describes the design and use of structured lists in an enterprise social networking system. As a major feature of our shared lists, we introduced the ability to reuse someone elses list. We report the results on the use and reuse of shared lists based on three months of usage data from 285 users and interviews with 9 users. Our findings suggest that despite the structured nature of lists, our users socialize more around lists than photos, and use lists as a medium for self-representation.

FeedMe: a collaborative alert filtering system

As the number of alerts generated by collaborative applications grows, users receive more unwanted alerts. FeedMe is a general alert management system based on XML feed protocols such as RSS and ATOM. In addition to traditional rule-based alert filtering, FeedMe uses techniques from machine-learning to infer alert preferences based on user feedback. In this paper, we present and evaluate a new collaborative naïve Bayes filtering algorithm. Using FeedMe, we collected alert ratings from 33 users over 29 days. We used the data to design and verify the accuracy of the filtering algorithm and provide insights into alert prediction.

Patterns of media use in an activity-centric collaborative environment

This paper describes a new collaboration technology that is based on the support of lightweight, informally structured, opportunistic activities featuring heterogeneous threads of shared items with dynamic membership. We introduce our design concepts, and we provide a detailed analysis of user behavior during a five month field study. We present the patterns of media use that we observed, using a variety of analytical methods including thread clustering and analysis. Major findings include four patterns of media use: communicating, exchanging mixed objects, coordinating, (e.g., of status reports), and semi-archival filing. We observed differential use of various media including highly variable use of chats and surprisingly informal uses of files. We discuss the implications for the design of mixed media collaborative tools to support the work activities of small to medium sized work teams.

It's all 'about you': diversity in online profiles

User profiles on todays social networking sites support only a small set of predefined questions. We report on an alternative way for users to richly describe themselves, by entering not only responses, but their own questions as well. Data from 10 months of usage shows that users of a social networking site created thousands of diverse questions and reused existing questions from other users. Our findings suggest that those with highly diverse user profiles have a higher number of friends.

Chat spaces

Chat Spaces are rich persistent chats that provide light-weight shared workspaces for small to medium-scale group activities. Chat Spaces can accommodate brief, informal interactions (similar to Instant Messaging), and can also support longer-term complex threaded conversations including large numbers of people and shared resources. Our design maps a hierarchical thread representation onto a time-ordered two-column user interface. This mapping allows a user to follow the global dynamics of the entire thread in the chronological column on the left while being able to participate in a selected topical branch in a second column on the right. We also present a dynamic thread map that provides an overview of the entire conversation and supports quick navigation of topical branches in the thread.