It seems that social networking sites are almost “old news” these days. As a media platform, social networking sites (SNS) have been around since the late 1990s, and today the popular SNS Facebook.com boasts more than 350 million active users (nevermind all those people who’ve registered for accounts never to actually use them).

So what’s next for SNS? For 2010, geo-tagging and geo-targeting appear to be the latest trends. The AP recently reported on the emergence of the SNS Foursquare.com as one of the latest buzz-sites. What’s the buzz about? Foursquare – which currently has over 100,000 users in 100 cities – is basically a social network for your immediate circle of friends (and a way to meet people nearby). You report where you’re at currently, and where you’ve been recently, and it’s mapped and tracked on Foursquare. The catch is, you earn points for checking in to locations, and the most recent person to check in becomes the “mayor”. So you compete against your friends to earn points. It sounds simple, but can become very addictive.

Foursquare isn’t alone. A number of other companies are venturing into the geo-SNS space. Google recently launched Latitude, phones are increasingly supporting GPS, and Windows 7 and Mac’s Snow Leopard will soon be enable to actively report location for laptop users.

Not that this is anything new for academics. In 2007, Lee Humphreys (now at Cornell University‘s Department of Communication) wrote an article looking how users form social groups and social ties in mobile networks. What’s so new in 2010? For one, there’s a much large network of resources available for users of these networks. With more and more users having GPS-enabled devices, it’s easier to share your location with others. And the evolution of SNS has made people more comfortable with the notion that others will know where you’re at. Advertisers are tapping into this trend too, as Ad Age notes in an article this week. Geo-SNS and geo-targeting are allowing advertisers to target consumers based not only on what they do, but also where they are at.

Interesting right? And for us, as researchers, the relationship between “location” and “network formation” looks to be an area for future work. Happy Holidays.

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• Will Facebook buy Foursquare? (thenextweb.com)
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Even online, the neocortex is the limit

THAT Facebook, Twitter and other online social networks will increase the size of human social groups is an obvious hypothesis, given that they reduce a lot of the friction and cost involved in keeping in touch with other people. Once you join and gather your “friends” online, you can share in their lives as recorded by photographs, “status updates” and other titbits, and, with your permission, they can share in yours. Additional friends are free, so why not say the more the merrier?”

Read more in The Economist.

Interpretations of the Web of Data:

The emerging Web of Data utilizes the web infrastructure to represent and interrelate data. The foundational standards of the Web of Data include the Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) and the Resource Description Framework (RDF). URIs are used to identify resources and RDF is used to relate resources. While RDF has been posited as a logic language designed specifically for knowledge representation and reasoning, it is more generally useful if it can conveniently support other models of computing. In order to realize the Web of Data as a general-purpose medium for storing and processing the world’s data, it is necessary to separate RDF from its logic language legacy and frame it simply as a data model. Moreover, there is significant advantage in seeing the Semantic Web as a particular interpretation of the Web of Data that is focused specifically on knowledge representation and reasoning. By doing so, other interpretations of the Web of Data are exposed that realize RDF in different capacities and in support of different computing models.