Reference Architecture For Social Network Sites

Today and tomorrow I will be finalizing the reference architecture document below. “Templates” illustrate infrastructure and act as blueprints organizations can leverage as they make decisions on IT architecture. The focus on architecture makes templates one of my more favorite documents to work on. While I can’t share the lower-level analysis and specifics that describe the architectural components of a social network site (clients will be able to access this information when it comes out on the Burton Group site), the introductory portion of the report is contained below. I feel that it is important to openly “share back” this level of detail since the document extends some great work undertaken by danah boyd and Nicole B. Ellison.

Some terms below (e.g., infrastructure services model, service end points, and activity services) would actually link to other documents that discuss those topics. I removed those links to avoid confusion (those documents are only accessible by clients). If you are a client, I encourage you to schedule a dialog to discuss social networking trends in general, or specific project(s) you are undertaking in this area.   

My original concept for this document was outlined here in case you are curious to see how my thinking evolved during the writing process.

Templates always begin with a question (often based on what clients are asking us):

What are the architectural components of a social network site?

A social network site is a web site that:

• Acts as a destination hub for individuals to establish relationships with co-workers and by doing so, enable them to jointly build, or expand, their professional and social networks
• Includes different tools for people to interact with each other, contribute information to the site, participate in different site activities, and build a sense of community in an informal and voluntary manner
• Contains specific components that allow people to:
  • define an online profile (or persona)
  • list their connections (e.g., friends and colleagues)
  • receive notifications on the activities of those connections
  • participate in group or community activities
  • control permission, preference and privacy settings
• Is considered a service end point in terms of collaboration, communication and content infrastructure (respectively)
  • Service endpoints are applications or sites that interact with published interfaces of collaboration services entities.
• Draws on activity services in terms of collaboration, communication and content infrastructure (respectively)
  • Activity services help provide generalized automation services, including analytics, and event or pattern correlation functions
• Integrates with related infrastructure platforms to complete the end-to-end system (e.g., directory, security, and integration services)

Facebook’s soaring popularity has encouraged employees, human resource groups, line-of-business managers, and C-level executive teams to request an internal version of the popular consumer site (e.g., a “corporate Facebook”). However, there are no generally agreed-upon industry practices to guide IT organizations regarding what architectural components need to be included to qualify a web site as a successful intranet replica of the popular consumer site.

This template provides such a reference architecture model. It begins with a set of baseline requirements established by danah boyd and Nicole B. Ellison. The authors’ analysis identifies key repeating characteristics found across consumer social network sites. Their assessment helps establish a common baseline for architects to understand which capabilities need to be included within an enterprise social network site. Burton Group recognizes this baseline as a starting point for social network sites deployed for employees (“actors” in social network terms):

• A visible profile within a bounded system which describes the actor
• A public or semi-public display of connections between that actor and their relations (e.g., “friends”)
• An ability for people to traverse those connections (e.g., to view profiles associated with the list of “friends”)

Although boyd’s and Ellison’s research does not explicitly identify the following characteristics as core functions, Burton Group believes that the capabilities below should also be included within a social network site:

• A means for other members to participate, interact and contact the actor (e.g., e-mail, instant messaging, chat rooms, blogs, and message boards)
• An aggregated collection of entries streamed into a chronological feed that reflect the interactions and activities of an actor
• A set of permission and usage controls for that actor to manage their own visibility (search), relationships with other members (profile viewing), and how they prefer to interact or be contacted by other members (messaging)

Mapping these attributes into the architectural components listed below enables enterprise architects, infrastructure planners, application developers and user experience teams to implement a social network site that emulates consumer counterparts:

• Profiles
• Social Graph
• Participation Tools
• Social Presence
• Relation Controls

To orchestrate and manage these components, a social site application services layer is necessary (provided by a vendor or developed by the IT organization).

Social Network Site Template Diagram

Social Network Site Template Description

This template illustrates what architectural components should be included within a social network site, the relationship between those components, and how such components interact with other infrastructure services. A social network site is a web site that minimally includes the following capabilities:

• Profiles
• Social Graph
• Participation Tools
• Social Presence
• Relation Controls

To complete the list of required components, an application services layer that aggregates, manages, and delivers capabilities to employees is also required:

• Social Site Application Services

This template represents a logical architecture. The social network site model depicted in this template is one that is centralized. That is, all capabilities are managed by the social network site. Tools within participation tools however might not adhere to this constraint and can be a valid exception. Distribution of site components to enable social networking within other applications and on remote sites is outside the scope of this template. Finally, readers should note that while templates do not describe physical implementations, such efforts can leverage this document as an architectural guide.

Comments

[Eduardo Jezierski]

Nice to see some progress in the area of creating these reference architectures for this.

I have some questions -
1) Will there be an effort to create a reference implementation
2) Has there been an effort to identify and standards that are being/can be used between the interaction of the different capabilities identified in the architecture? eg openID, oAuth, RDF, DublinCore, etc?
3) How has the distinction of 'site' helped at all? I see most of the capabilities you distinguish as elements of social networking services which may or may not be used by just one site. In other words, I think if you relaxed the constraints described in the last paragraph of the post you'd end up with an architecture closer to what enterprises want, and more viable in an environment where many applications may interoperate with one or more services (see question #2), and representative of the trend to have sites aggregate and federate each others' information.

[mike]

In particular I like the conclusion you've arrived at: following and paying attention to the right people can really make you more effective.
This says it all - knowing what the right people know is a commodity - it has always been the case but social networking now brings this concept into 3D.

http://partybizz.com

[Chandra]

I need help..
Can u describe that pic about Architecture of a Social Networking Site..
every section in the scheme..thanks..

Or send my email..ch4ndra_88@yahoo.com

[Samson W. Samuel]

What is the name of the author of this article. I would like to reference this document as part of my research paper on social networking within the work place.

Thank You
Regards
Sam