Social Networks: Leveraging User Social Data to Empower Collective Intelligence

Online social networks such as Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn have become extremely popular and ubiquitous. However, users are facing problems such as the disconnected nature of social Websites, user privacy issues and the huge amount of information available for browsing. Consequently, a considerable part of interesting information remains ignored by the users. This chapter presents a possible answer to this problem based on a new approach consisting of aggregating relevant information from social networks to empower the collective intelligence shared by a given group of users. The solution is built on a user-centered approach, the main benefit of which is that each user can delegate to the system the tasks of aggregating his/her scattered social data and extracting information relevant to the topics of interest of the group. Moreover, the user is provided with helpful features to make the best decisions for choosing the information he/she is ready to share.