Abstract
As social web sites such as blog and SNS(Social Network System) became popular, many people have communicated with their friends on the Web. Meanwhile, several problems of social web sites were revealed recently: (1) messages of close friends are often buried in other massive messages, (2) messages and people are dispersed several web sites, (3) they have to check and browse the web sites consciously, and (4) it is difficult to find a particular person in the timeline. In order to solve these problems, we proposed an novel software, “SocialFaceIcon”, which allows users to easily access messages of their friends on multiple social web sites without being confused by massive nonsignificant messages. SocialFaceIcon expresses information of a user of social web sites as an “icon” on the desktop. Users can easily obtain latest/past messages of their close friends using this icon-style interface. Moreover, we propose simple visualization techiniques for expressing “freshness” and “frequency” of these messages.
