Interactive grouping of friends in OSN: Towards online context management

In Online Social Networks (OSNs), it can be difficult to maintain the context of a conversation or action, i.e. to know what the situation is and how to act appropriately. The resulting uncertainties may lead to privacy issues. We focus on one issue Context Collision in this paper, and motivate that a first step to address this issue is to help users distinguish groups of contacts within their OSN accounts. We conducted a small user study to investigate the criteria of users grouping the people they know. We summarized our participants' strategy of labeling the groups and found that they perform the grouping mainly by their connections with others. We used these results in the design of FreeBu, a semi-automatic and interactive grouping tool, which is based on mining friend graph data for community detection and profile information for labeling. © 2012 IEEE.