Social Information Retrieval with Agents

With the widespread adoption of online social networks as a crucial means for communication, social information retrieval is becoming one of the most interesting areas of research in terms of the large number of–theoretical and practical–issues that it encompasses. We argue that agent technology is central in supporting the decentralization of next generation online social networks and the synergistic pairing of agents and social networks is evident, if nothing else, because members of a social network interact as agents do in a multiagent system. In this paper we investigate the possibilities that agent technology can offer to social information retrieval and we emphasize the role that agents and multi-agent systems can play by presenting Blogracy, an agent-based online social network system.