Re-examining social network services from sociability perspective

摘要

The objective of social network services (SNS) is to fulfil users' social needs, and this is quite different from the traditional functional-oriented genetic services (GSs) which are leveraged to fulfil specific functional needs. We clarify the difference between GS and SNS and give the corresponding abstract models. Different SNS have different sorts of abilities of facilitating the social activities, so we propose a concept 'degree of sociability (DoS)' as a key attribute of SNS to depict such differences. On account that a user's daily behaviour sequence is intertwined by the usage of various GS and SNS, we import SNS into traditional service processes and to form a novel socialised service process (SSP) model that has the ability of satisfying users' functional and social needs simultaneously. Criteria for selecting SNS in terms of a user's social needs are briefly summarised. A real-world case study is conducted to validate this research.