Doolu: a graphical social network service

Abstract

Started from the end of the 20th century, the Internet technology became more common among people's daily life. With the increasing number of interactions in the Internet and the improving web standards, "Web 2.0" appeared as a new generation of the web environment. While things are being digitalized widely, social network services were introduced to provide a space where people can perform social interactions with the others over the Net. This kind of service keeps growing and the social network built between people is now in a very large scale. A service user’s friend list may contain a few hundred friends and some users have even more. The list may sometimes be too long to be scrolled through but it keeps growing. At the same time, the news feeds on Facebook or the Tweets list in Twitter are also lengthy strings of text as the number of friends is becoming bigger. Doolu is a new idea to solve the problem of readability and user-friendliness of social network services. With the supports from the newly developed web standards and modern browsers, a visualized social network service with an interactive graphical interface is proposed. Doolu is designed with theories of social psychology and layout design. It aims to provide a better user experience in using social network service. A graphical interactive social network service would be built with Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) 5, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) 3 and PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor (PHP) and presented as the outcome of this project. With an Internet connection and a modern browser, everybody can enjoy the brand new browsing experience provided by Doolu.