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Chapter 1: Social Computing
Figure 1-5
The user profile store provides the storage of individual data as well as enabling rich applications to be
built. This is why the user profiles are the center of most social applications. It provides the data needed
to display and connect users without requiring the user to reenter personal data every time they perform
an action.
Social Applications on the Internet Today
Dozens of social applications are available on the Internet today. In fact, there are so many social appli-
cations that a social application called FriendFeed was created to pull the various updates from all of
these disparate social applications into a single content stream. Figure 1-6 is the list of 43 social applica-
tions that FriendFeed allows content to be pulled from, and this list of social applications is far from an
exhaustive list of social web sites!
FriendFeed breaks down the four major categories of social applications a bit differently from the way
this book does it, but it is possible to recognize that social media includes the video, photo, and music
sites while the bookmarking and news lists both fall into the social bookmarking category. Conspicuously
absent from the FriendFeed list of supported applications are some of the world’s most popular social
networking applications such as MySpace and Facebook.
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