Guest Editorial: Advances in Social Computing

Abstract

We are pleased to introduce this special issue of the Journal of Information Technology on advances in social computing. The social computing field is becoming a very important part of information technology as the rapid development of mobile intelligent devices, cloud storage, social media and so on. Various social applications such as blogs, instant messaging, social network services (Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.), wikis, and social bookmarking have been widely popularized where people interact socially beyond time and space limits. Social computing within an organization can empower and motivate employees' cooperation and as a consequence benefit for the business. It is also used to provide better services to their customers for sale promotion. Having such a wide range of applications, social computing has emerged as an exciting multidisciplinary area of research that broadly refers to computing-supported approaches for providing a deep understanding of user behaviors within a social context.