Browsers to support awareness and social interaction

Information sharing and social interaction are the Web's main features that have enabled online communities to abound and flourish. However, the Web is lacking cues and browsing mechanisms for the online social spaces. The challenge of creating social browsing tools to access such social information and patterns is of interest as a visual analytic problem for two reasons. Browsers that combine social visualizations and tools let newcomers and visitors explore information and patterns. Here we present social browsers for two Web communities. In addition to the novel visualizations and representation of two facets of a group's identity, our work has three other notable contributions.