We're so social

Everyone's talking about social networking sites these days and, over the last 48 hours or so, it seems every blogger is talking about Socialstream. It is, according to well-known blogs such as TechCrunch--and some lesser known ones as well--a social networking site being developed by our Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII) and a little outfit known as Google.

The folks at Facebook and MySpace can rest easy, however. Socialstream was a project by HCII master's degree students in the spring of 2006 and was very well done in the eyes of our faculty. The students' report obviously impressed a lot of bloggers, most of whom ran with this story without checking with anybody at HCII. But Socialstream is  not, as far as we know, an ongoing Google project.

True, Google was the project sponsor, just as all of the HCII master's projects include a sponsoring organization to guide the students. Google might well have learned something from their diligent work. But Google doesn't own any of the intellectual property generated by the students. And, since the students published their work on a public Web site, it is in the public domain now - as well as all over the blogosphere.
            
      

Byron Spice