Redefining Social Network Services: A Solution to Personal Information and Knowledge Management

Instead of aiming at the augmentation of human communication abilities as other social software does, social network services (SNS) provide better chances for people to enhance their abilities to handle interpersonal relationships, by deriving their theoretical foundation from social network theory. However, they are far from working perfectly as reflected by the defects in the networks - distrust, fragmentation, and duplication. This paper addresses such problems innovatively in the context of personal information and knowledge management (PIKM), which involves a series of activities in our daily life and work that can be well supported by restructured SNS. While our future efforts target an operable SNS system as the solution to PIKM, our research at current stage gives full consideration to the identified problems, and achieves an initial system model with four primary modules: Personal Profile, Collaboration Workspace, Knowledge Network of Practice, and Platform.