1,721,026 research outputs found
Social games and Blockchain: exploring the Metaverse of Decentraland
No full textOnline Social Networks gained a crucial role in people's everyday life, acting as the medium through which people can interact with each other. The introduction of blockchain technology prompted a new generation of social media based on the concept of Non-Fungible Token (NFT) and other Web3 technologies, giving birth to the Metaverse. Decentraland is one such platform, where users can explore a 3D virtual world and communicate with each other. The main feature of Decentraland is that the virtual world is divided into parcels, implemented through NFTs, that can be traded among users and where owners can create buildings or mini-games for other users to play with. In this work, we explore the virtual world of Decentraland by presenting the main details of the virtual world and by focusing on the economic impact of NFT trading on the description of the parcels. In detail, the parcel's description can be used to advertise the proximity of the parcel to infrastructures or special projects to attract potential buyers. This paper's findings show the impact and the magnitude of this phenomenon, highlighting entire quarters that adopt this technique throughout the map by overriding the playful aspect of the platform
A wealth-driven analysis of user engagement in Blockchain Online Social Media
No full textOnline social networks (OSNs) had a massive impact on sociality, but recently, due to increasing concerns, new solutions are being considered employing blockchain, giving birth to blockchain online social media (BOSMs). The primary motivation for using a blockchain is to introduce a reward system, which grants cryptocurrency to contributing users. BOSMs represent a new scenario, where social and economic activity is firmly tied, and therefore new user roles arise. In this paper, we propose an evaluation of user engagement in BOSMs by exploiting the users' wealth. In detail, we analyse how the rewards of blockchain-based social platforms affect user activity. We consider the users of Steemit, as a case study. Our analysis shows that it is possible to classify users according to their strategy to accrue wealth over time
From NFT 1.0 to NFT 2.0: A Review of the Evolution of Non-Fungible Tokens
No full textNon-fungible tokens (NFT) represent one of the most important technologies in the space of Web3. Thanks to NFTs, digital or physical assets can be tokenised to represent their ownership through the usage of smart contracts and blockchains. The first generation of this technology, called NFT 1.0, considers static tokens described by a set of metadata that cannot be changed after token creation. The static nature prevents their wide spread as they do not support any meaningful user interaction. For this reason, its evolution, called NFT 2.0, has been proposed to make tokens interactive and dynamic and enhance user experience, opening the possibility to use NFTs in more ways and scenarios. The purpose of this article is to review the transition from NFT 1.0 to NFT 2.0, focusing on the newly introduced properties and features and the rising challenges. In particular, we discuss the technical aspects of blockchain technology and its impact on NFTs. We provide a detailed description of NFT properties and standards on various blockchains and discuss the support of the most important blockchains for NFTs. Then, we discuss the properties and features introduced by NFT 2.0 and detail the technical challenges related to metadata and dynamism. Lastly, we conclude by highlighting the new application scenarios opened by NFT 2.0. This review paper serves as a solid base for future research on the topic as it highlights the current technological challenges that must be addressed to help a wide adoption of NFTs 2.0
SocialFi: towards the new shape of social media
No full textDecentralized Finance (DeFi) is considered a new vision of banking and financial services based on Peer-to-Peer technology, and in particular on the blockchain technology. Since 2020, DeFi has started to develop in the cryptocurrency markets. Then, with the increase in popularity of digital platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, and with the launch of the Metaverse, DeFi has been introduced into the Social environment by the combination of social networking and finance in the blockchain. This new shape of DeFi has been called Social Finance (SocialFi). SocialFi can be seen as the social influence on any medium that can be tokenized, allowing to get monetary benefits from being part of SocialFi platforms. In detail, SocialFi has a special feature that is decentralized, open and user-controlled, and it started to be adopted by the communities. The main component of SocialFi is the Social token used to reward people. In this paper, we describe in detail the concept of SocialFi, and we discuss its application on future Social Media platforms.</jats:p
Dynamic Community Structure in Online Social Groups
No full textOne of the main ideas about the Internet is to rethink its services in a user-centric fashion. This fact translates to having human-scale services with devices that will become smarter and make decisions in place of their respective owners. Online Social Networks and, in particular, Online Social Groups, such as Facebook Groups, will be at the epicentre of this revolution because of their great relevance in the current society. Despite the vast number of studies on human behaviour in Online Social Media, the characteristics of Online Social Groups are still unknown. In this paper, we propose a dynamic community detection driven study of the structure of users inside Facebook Groups. The communities are extracted considering the interactions among the members of a group and it aims at searching dense communication groups of users, and the evolution of the communication groups over time, in order to discover social properties of Online Social Groups. The analysis is carried out considering the activity of 17 Facebook Groups, using 8 community detection algorithms and considering 2 possible interaction lifespans. Results show that interaction communities in OSGs are very fragmented but community detection tools are capable of uncovering relevant structures. The study of the community quality gives important insights about the community structure and increasing the interaction lifespan does not necessarily result in more clusterized or bigger communities
HyVVE: A Voronoi Based Hybrid Architecture for Massively Multiplayer On-Line Games
No full textMassively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) have gained a lot of popularity in recent years. The problem of defining a proper architecture supporting MMOGs is still a research challenge because the classical client server architecture mainly adopted in commercial applications presents several drawbacks like unsatisfactory scalability and limited fault tolerance. This paper presents HyVVE (Hybrid Voronoi Virtual Environments), an hybrid architecture exploiting both server and P2P nodes. HyVVE exploits a Voronoi tessellation of the virtual world to distribute the load for the management of the virtual entities among the server and the peers. The paper presents a set of experimental results proving the effectiveness of our approach
OASIS ’21 Chairs’ Welcome
No full textIt is our great pleasure to welcome you to the 2021 Workshop on Open Challenges in Online Social Networks - OASIS 2021, held in conjunction with the 2021 ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media - ACM HT 2021. The diffusion of Online Social Networks (OSNs) has had a profound effect on the way we interact and a deep impact on society and business. OSNs have helped people to communicate, breaking down the geographical barriers that restricted communication. Through social networks, virtual communication, sharing of information, community participation is possible even among people in uncomfortable conditions. Today, OSNs are one of the main parts of daily life by affecting sociality, but they are also important channels through which information travels faster than ever. Analysis of OSN can help to foresee events to manage critical scenarios. The rapid growth in popularity has opened new challenging problems which involve numerous fields in computer science. These issues have implications on social graph analysis, trust and security, and so on. Moreover, privacy issues and the usage of mobile devices has opened new research fields in the design of decentralised online social networks, which can be considered one of the most important challenges. Furthermore, the current improvement concerning the study and the proposal of new approaches for Social Networks and Media involve not only complex network analysis, and, in particular, the decentralisation of social services, but also the introduction of new AI solutions
Analysis of Users Behaviour from a Movie Preferences Perspective
No full textDespite their tremendous popularity, Online Social Networks (OSNs) have several issues related to the privacy of social users. These issues have motivated researchers to develop OSN services that take advantage of the decentralized platforms (such as P2P systems or opportunistic networks). Decentralized Online Social Networks (DOSNs) need specific approaches to manage the decentralization of social data. In particular, data availability is one of the main issues and current proposals exploit properties of the social relationships to manage it. At the best of our knowledge, there are no proposals which exploit similarity between users, expressed with the term homophily. Homophily has been well studied in existing sociology literature, however, it is not easily extensible in Online Social Networks due to the limitations of real datasets. In this paper, we propose a preliminary analysis of similarity of social profiles in term of movie preferences. Results reveal that user’s friends are characterized by a different levels of similarity which can be exploited to propose solutions for the data availability problem
P2P architectures for distributed online social networks
No full textOnline Social Networks (OSNs) tipically exploit logically centralized infrastructure. The centralized nature of OSNs has several drawbacks including scalability, privacy, and dependence on a provider. Specifically, OSN privacy has become a major concern, particularly privacy and protection from massive data-mining and big-brotherly treatment of the users by the social networking service providers. In contrast to centralized OSNs, a distributed online social network helps to lower the cost of the provider drastically, and allows better control of user privacy. This has several consequences: in terms of privacy, no central data collection, nor any central entity that decides or changes the terms of service. In this paper we focus on the definition of P2P Distributed Online Social Network (DOSN) paradigm and propose a new approach to P2P DOSN based on Dunbar's number, which bounds the number of people one knows and keeps social contacts with
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