While looking at Wallop's design team, I noticed that one of the designers in the MS Research group, Steven Drucker, has written some interesting social-network related papers from 1999 on the The Social Life of Small Graphical Chat Spaces (PDF), together with Marc A. Smith and Shelly D. Farnham.
This data [..] illustrates the usage patterns of graphical chat systems, and highlights the ways physical proxemics are translated into social interactions in online environments.
The other paper is Visualizations of Collaborative Information for End-Users which illustrates some of Microsoft's early work with social network analysis (?) that, judging from the images and stories about the Wallop project, served its purpose well.
While network interaction media are increasingly popular, there are a number of problems facing their users. The interaction context, or information about the kind of space, group and activity taking place, is often missing or ambiguous in the spaces created by these systems.
Steven's colleague, Shelly Farnham has done quite some work in the social network arena as well and her 2002 paper on "Visualizing Discourse Architectures with Automatically Generated Person-Centric Social Networks" was one of the basis of a report that I read from Essex University: The Generation Gap: Managing technology-mediated personal social networks (Chimera Working Paper, Smith / Rogers / Brady in a PDF document)
Our research has shown that an overwhelming need for all groups is better support for the management of social contact and received content arising out of the mix of online communications people engage in. Furthermore, this should be able to transform what is normally perceived as time-consuming and onerous tasks into ones that are viewed as being more enjoyable pottering kinds of activity.
This happened at 3:40:47 PM or
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