ContactMap

Abstract

Modern work is a highly social process, offering many cues for people to organize communication and access information. Shared physical workplaces provide natural support for tasks such as (a) social reminding about communication commitments and keeping track of collaborators and friends, and (b) social data mining of local expertise for advice and information. However, many people now collaborate remotely using tools such as email and voicemail. Our field studies show that these tools do not provide the social cues needed for group work processes. In part, this is because the tools are organized around messages, rather than people. In response to this problem, we created ContactMap, a system that makes people the primary unit of interaction. ContactMap provides a structured social desktop representation of users' important contacts that directly supports social reminding and social data mining. We conducted an empirical evaluation of ContactMap, S. Whittaker et al.comparing it with traditional email systems, on tasks suggested by our fieldwork. Users performed better with ContactMap and preferred ContactMap for the majority of these tasks. We discuss future enhancements of our system and the implications of these results for future communication interfaces and for theories of mediated communication.

Untitled

“…In terms of (cost-) effective social interaction, there have been some studies on the computerization of manual routines (Iacono & Kling, 1996), primarily focused on office automatization. A related area concerns maintenance of social relations at the individual level, that is, contact management (Nardi et al, 2002;Whittaker et al, 2004;Whittaker et al, 2002). There is, however, little research related to social interaction search behavior within highly distributed social networks.…”

RAIMA: a Framework for the Design and Analysis of Self-Adaptive Egocentric Social Networks

“…By an egocentric network, we mean that one that represents data about the relationships of a single person with respect to others. Contact Map [53] and [54] are examples of such systems. We plan to use egocentric networks to record user relationships and provide functions to browse the network and allow communications within the network.…”

Finding someone in my social directory whom i do not fully remember or barely know

“…First, our work is related to social relationship analysis, which mines one's communication or social networking data to extract and characterize one's personal social network [10,2,3]. However, most existing works focus on characterizing the structure of a personal social network, including connectivity [10,3] and grouping patterns [3,2,6]. In contrast, we characterize the pair-wise relationships between a user and each of his contact, including their interaction patterns and context, such as the topic and people involved in such interactions.…”