Poster

Tagging people for relationship management

Maryam Najafian Razavi, Lee Iverson

Access control in social software is often defined in terms of 'networks of friends' relationships, in which all `friends' are created equal and are often required to be reciprocal. We argue that the potential audience for various kinds of personal artifacts in social software must be defined in a user’s own terms, based on a variety of kinds of relationships, some of which are one-sided.

We propose tagging people as a lightweight mechanism for managing relationships in social software. By tagging people in their social network, users can define egocentric groups of friends or collaborators, to which they can grant or deny access to various pieces of information in their personal space. Each new tag applied to a person has a distinctly specifiable visibility, and people tagged with the same key word form a relationship group that can be used as an access control option for each piece of information.