Social navigation

Abstract

Social navigation has been proposed [1,2] as a means to help users navigate large information spaces. Through making other users actions visible we can follow them through the space and this will help us navigate. By information space, we mean anything from the interface to a normal application to large hypermedia spaces or virtual reality environments. Other users actions can be made visible in various ways: through direct social navigation (talking to or seeing individual users act), indirect social navigation (seeing the aggregated user behavior as in recommender system advice), or readwear (seeing how an object has been used by other users through its texture).