Lily Cheng from Microsoft Research is talking about how people represent themselves on line.

The closer the friends, the fuzzier they want the representations.

We need to make social tools fluid enough to account for the way people’s lives change.

We need easy access to friends and people important to us. We want sponatenous interactions.

Lily’s group went to a mall and asked people to draw their social interactions, and gots lots of circles and lines. Microsoft studied this and built a “personal map” that clusters people based on who they send email to (TO and CC) and how frequently. The system knows who is related to whom based on their interactions. Then Lily’s group mapped all the distribution lists at Microsoft, clustered around the inquiring individual; the app lets you see how to get to person C through person B.

Another presenter (missed his name) shows an app (Koala?) that shows me details about the people in my social network.

Will people use this, Lily asks. What effect would it have? Would it make people feel more connected? They’re going to do some research…

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