BACKGROUND

Privacy and security concerns persist in these communications both in personal and enterprise corporate social networking and messaging systems. Further, individuals may often end up publishing repeated information across multiple social networks and multiple group chat threads in order to engage the appropriate audience. Members that overlap across these group chat threads may become overwhelmed as they receive duplicate information from the user across multiple message threads.

Abbreviations and Definitions

SN is a social network.

MD is mobile device and may include tablets, smartphones, cellular devices, laptops, personal computers, cellular telephones, portable handheld devices, and other wireless or non wireless enabled devices. These devices may include wired and wireless capabilities and have various wireless modes of communication including wifi, cellular, Bluetooth, Bluetooth le, zigbee, or other wireless communication protocols and standards.

Cloud: may include one or more servers, containers, virtual machines, processing blocks, computing resources, private resources, public accessible resources, or other machines.

Content unit: may include text, messages, pictures, videos, mixes of pictures and videos, multiple pictures and videos, sequences of content, animation, gifs, web links, files, or visual information.

SUMMARY

The present disclosure teaches a variety of approaches for making social networking systems interoperable with mobile device and real-time messaging systems. The present disclosure teaches interfaces that allow information and feedback to be obtained from participants in a social or private network without repetitive or intrusive messages being sent to all participants. Further the present disclosure enables for #channels to be created dynamically using activity indicators across multiple users, group chats, locations, events and other factors. In some embodiments, content may be capture via mobile devices, wearable devices, smart glasses, and using video, pictures, and multi-media content.

It is an aspect of the present disclosure to enable users to effectively post messages publicly, privately, semi-privately to one or more channels, groups, people, and networks. It is further an aspect of the present disclosure to enable viewing of content efficiently and with proper authorization and with appropriate digital rights management. The viewing of content that is repeated across multiple threads may be collated and represented in different markings colors or synthesized out of channels for example. Obtaining proper authorization of content may be based on passwords, domain confirmation, and user account settings. It may further be enabled based on behavioral activities such as make posts at a certain rate and above a daily or monthly active threshold or within a certain location or making posts of high popularity likability or content or combinations thereof.

It is an aspect of the present disclosure to enable social networking and multimedia based messaging systems for use by laptops, smartphones, tablets, web enabled, HTML5 enabled, mobile app enabled and other communication devices. The social networking messaging systems may allow for text, video, audio, and multimedia to be passed between one device and another. In varying embodiments, the system including a server is enabled to seamless exchange data from various wireless devices using different operating systems especially without traditional wireless carrier based solutions.

The social network may be used as a personal network, employment network, professional network, family network, friends network, interest network, coworker network, location based network or private social network for a company, organization, team, or group. An overall social network may be available which includes sub social networks including those for family, friends, employers, and organizations. Additional subset social networks may be available including a corporation social network, a non-profits social network, a city social network, a neighborhood social network, an ad-hoc social network, a location social network, a time based social network, a concert or event social network, or other platform.

In some embodiments, once multiple message threads are created a user may selectively sharing information with targeted recipients that may be in various different groups or of different connectedness. The present disclosure enables the user to selectively post to multiple channels and groups dynamically and in one single action. A user that wishes to update multiple contacts across groups may post a message to one group but may to post the same message separately to each group separately and repeatedly or otherwise would post it to their user profile. As an example, if a user has a first friend group from college and a second friend group from graduate school, the user may wish to update both groups of their activities at the same time while maintaining the separation of contacts across these two entities. Alternatively, an employee may have a first group for their hierarchical team and a second group for which is a matrix organized team which includes people from other departments. In both these instances, it may not be appropriate to combine both lists into one list. However, a user may desire to send out information to both groups simultaneously such as a sales win and upcoming meeting or press release. In these instances, the user may be able to send out the post to both groups by identifying the groups or channels within a single posting line with command such as post: message #location @collegeFriends, @graduateFriends or post: presentation #allemployees, @salesTeam, @marketingTeam. In one embodiment, the user is enabled to hide the command posting of the element from the post itself. Hence, @collegeFriends would not see that the message has been also posted to @graduateFriends. Each of these groups would may see message @collegeFriends.

Group: It is an aspect of the present disclosure to enable groups that are open and closed in nature to a select group of individuals, bots, or entity accounts. Users may be invited to join a group or be granted access to a group based on a criteria including completing certain tasks or verifying employment, university affiliation or other factors.

Channels: It is an aspect of the disclosure to further allow channels in which posts may be created without requiring a closed form membership link. That is channels may collate various posts across thematic interests, locations, places, users, groups, or sets of groups. Membership to certain channels may be via an authentication mechanism, a company admin, or a group admin. These channels may not require the presence of individual members to be created but instead thematic or other tagged content in the areas. It is an aspect of the disclosure to enable channels to have an on or off archival feature. As an example, a user that was not part of the system initially that wishes to review old information in a channel may be given access to the channel which includes previous and archived messages from earlier conversations. A channel may be created by the system and comprise of one or more individuals, users, places, objects, or other accounts and allow for a conversation thread or central repository of all items associated with the channel. Channels may be identified with a unique identifier and a public identifier with a prefix such as an hashtag # symbol or a #CH:<name> symbol for example.

It is an aspect of the present disclosure to enable channels and group messages to be encrypted, password protected, geofenced, and securitized with one or more digital rights management systems. As an example, a channel may be set to be accessible only with a home environment, office environment, university environment, or conference hall. That is full stories, conversations, group chats, and channels may be geofenced. In addition, transport (TCP) and internet protocol (IP) and other networking aspects may be incorporated so as to assess whether a user is connected and should be allowed to access a group chat or a channel or direct message. For example, a user that is connected to a coffee shop wifi network may be allowed to access the group chat or online review board for the coffee shop. A user that is connected to an enterprise wifi network and/or within a GPS or other location that is associated with the office may be able to post and/or review comments.

It is an aspect of the present disclosure to enable the system or users to personalize posts within channels and groups to make custom playlists of content. For example, a user may specify the time or content and see a set of quick clips. A user which seems to receive national news may see the top 5 60 second clips from various news programs. A user that wants to see different perspectives may see a channel with a time duration of the first 5 minutes of various news networks creating a short series of news. Each news network or content provider may subscribe to the social networking channel to provide short clips of content.

The present disclosure enables ad-hoc popup social channels to be created based on trending topics and semantic analysis. As an example, if several users are posting messages, pictures, and videos across various groups, a super channel and a super group or virtual channel may be dynamically created so as to collate and curate top content from the various networks into channel. The channel may have a specified time to live associated with it or a location or other entry criteria to join the channel. Various channels may be created including for example: Top posts in the last 24 hours (ex. #trending24); local_coffee_shop channel (ex: #coffee_shop_523); shopping channel (ex: #brandAchannel); and so forth. The platform may dynamically create #channels for example by looking at overlapping posts across multiple groups. As an example, if several posts about a news topic occur in a first group and several posts around the same topic occur in a second group a new channel or a set of posts from those two groups may be published into a separate channel. In certain instances, it may be less desirable to have content shared from private group chats into more public channels. In these instances, the channels may be created with hashtag indicators to facilitate individuals to include the hashtag in their responses. Alternatively, a digest of trending topics may appear in the channel, such as now trending: “5000+ people are discussing the election primaries.” The channel creation may be done via a management tool for creating channels or via a decision engine implementation.

The present disclosure enables for channels to be created such that a user can post a content unit to all, some, private, or public channels at the same or different times. For example, a picture may be flagged to be shared with all channels such as the family channel, group1channel, group2channel, and a direct message to an individual. In each of these areas, the message may be appear to be unique to that group. Alternatively, if the user has already seen the content unit in a different channel then it may be hidden or collapsed. Or the content unit may appear as a direct one to one message communication when in fact it is sent to multiple participants. In various instances, if the message or content has already been read in a different channel or group it may be minimized, filtered out, set in a different color or indicator to show have the content focused on new postings that are original for the viewer.

It is an aspect of the present disclosure to enable dynamic ad insertion into group messages based on the click-thru rates of other participants on the chat. As an example, if an advertisement for one thread is viewed by a first set of people and is seen as not effective, the second advertisement viewed by a second set of people for the same group chat may be altered. Alternatively, a/b testing capabilities of ads may be done with different members of a group chat or varying channels

