Social information access for the rest of us : an exploration of social YouTube

The motivation behind many Information Retrieval systems is to identify and present relevant information to people given their current goals and needs. Learning about user preferences and access patterns recent technologies make it possible to model user information needs and adapt services to meet these needs. In previous work we have presented ASSIST, a general-purpose platform which incorporates various types of social support into existing information access systems and reported on our deployment experience in a highly goal driven environment (ACM Digital Library). In this work we present our experiences in applying ASSIST to a domain where goals are less focused and where casual exploration is more dominant; YouTube. We present a general study of YouTube access patterns and detail how the ASSIST architecture affected the access patterns of users in this domain.