Collabio: A Game for Annotating People within Social Networks
by Michael Bernstein (MIT), Desney Tan, Greg Smith, Mary Czerwinski, and Eric Horvitz (Microsoft Research)
Comments: Brett Hlavinka
Summary:
The article studies the social tagging capabilities of a social tagging game. This game is Collabio, it was designed to motivate players to create descriptive tags for their friends in the Facebook platform. During its design, existing applications were studied and Collabio was unique in offerring full creative tag control to the player and it encourages social interactions among players.
Collabio implementation is by an interface built by an AJAX enabled ASP.net web application embedded into Facebook. It consists on 3 top level tabs:
1) Tag! - Game page to tag friends.
2) My Tags - Allows management of your personal tags.
3) Leaderboard - Two lists for the one friend in the group with the most unique tabs and friends who have tagged the most other friends.
Lastly, Collabio's success relies on the social involvement amongst friends and depends on social pressures to discourage cheating and tag misuse.
Then the researchers conducted a user survey on 49 participants who had tagged at least 3 friends, and had received 9 distinct tags from friends. The group then needed to rate their own 9 tags into 3 categories: Popular, Middling, and Uncommon. The survey demonstrated that the popular tags were also the most accurate and widely available. Similarly, the uncommon tags were also marked as accurate for majority of the participants. Thus, the majority of tags marked by players are correct. However, the survey could not confirm if social motivations alone could hinder tag abuse.
Also, the researchers conducted an exercise to determine if a player could create tags for a stranger only by information available online. The exercise showed that it was easier to generate the same tags for the popular category since it was usually information available on a public profile. Also, the fake tags were easily detected by the participant. It was the middling category that was the most challenging.
In conclusion, Collabio demonstrated accurate tag creation by players and a means to collect information about tag collecting. Collabio has tagged over 3800 people.
Discussion:
By the ever increasing social media platforms, social tagging allows easier access to remain in contact with your friends, family, etc. I like Collabio's approach of motivating friends to create tags for one another. It is more personal that choosing existing tags that are predefined. Also, by adding a leaderboard it allows for friendly competition. Lastly, the management of one's own tabs is its best feature - no one wants to be stuck with an incorrect tab.
It appears that Collabio could be easily extended to other social media such as blogs, email, or Twitter. Tags could be used to organize emails, music or your contact list. Social tagging appears to be an increasing trend then playing a game just makes sense.
