Firefox Extension for Applied Social Networking

wanderingstan writes "Outfoxed is my masters thesis project about trust. (Nutshell overview) The extension uses a social network for personalized searching, phishing/spyware protection, file/process validation and more. It's related to del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, and those Kevin Bacon things, but goes a lot further. Mathematically, it's based on the network behavior of small world networks (pdf). Built with Javascript, Python, SQL, and XSLT. 366 testers so far, but we need the network to grow!"

Comments

Using social networks for personalization

[glinden]

Chris Anderson (of Wired and The Long Tail fame) had a great post about why social networks might not be the best way to do recommendations and personalization. An excerpt:

No matter who you are, someone you don't know has found the coolest stuff.

The sad reality is that most of my friends have rotten taste in music (I don't hold it against them), while the music recommendations I actually follow are mostly from people I've never met.

The assumption that there's a correlation between the people I like and the products I like is a flawed one.

On the one hand, you trust your friends, so things your friends clicked on might be interesting for you to know about. On the other hand, friendships are not a good predictor for recommendations since your friends often have different interests from you.

It's a cool idea, but I'm not sure how many people would bother to set this up, how often this will change the search results, whether the changes will focus your attention on the most relevant result for your search, and whether you can scale a system that accesses data on everyone in your social network on every web search.

Re:Using social networks for personalization

[pizen]

What if all of the spyware companies submitted high recommendations on their links?

But those spyware companies aren't in your circle of trust so it doesn't matter what they think about their websites.

User != Others

[Iriel]

What I wonder is this: Yes it does seem like an interesting idea, but how many of your friends run the same software you do? I still have friends that I'm trying to convert from IE, but it's too easy for them use what's already there. I know plenty of cliques that hang together because they all like running BSD/Linux and deal with programming and such, but none of them use the same distro or the same preferences.

My bottom line is this: Look at your best friends computer. Do they have the same extensions that you do? Do they even run Firefox? The network can only be as expansive as the people that decide to jump on board.

Re:who are you going to trust?

[tdvaughan]

That's no problem. You just make trust decay. With every hop away from your own directly linked network the trust metric is reduced. So I might give my Dad a trust value of 10/10 (i.e. I would trust this person with my life), but I could assign second-generation hops (those outside of my control) 80% of the trust value that Dad gives them. Allowing users to tweak their own trust decay rates will let them manage the size of their trust pool and reduce the impact of malicious users (i.e. phishers, for example).