Diana MacLean : POMI 2020 Workshop

As people accumulate hundreds of "friends" in social media, a flat list of connections becomes unmanageable. Interfaces agnostic to social structure hinder the nuanced sharing of personal data such as status updates, photos, news feeds, and comments. To address this problem, we propose social topologies that represent the structure and content of a person's social network as a first-class object: a set of hierarchically organized and potentially overlapping social groups. We contribute an algorithm for creating social topologies by mining communication history and identifying likely groups based on co-occurrence patterns. We use our algorithm to populate a browser interface that supports creation and editing of social groups via simple drag-and-drop interactions. A user study confirms that our approach models subjects' social topologies well, and that our interface enables intuitive browsing and management of a personal, social landscape.