A Qualitative Study of Stakeholders’ Perspectives on the Social Network Service Environment

More than 2 billion people are using the Internet at present, assisted by the mediating activities of software agents that deal with the diversity and complexity of information. There are, however, ethical issues due to the monitoring-and-surveillance, data-mining, and autonomous nature of software agents. Considering the context, this study aims to comprehend stakeholders’ perspectives on the social network service environment to identify the main considerations for the design of software agents in social network services in the near future. Twenty-one stakeholders, belonging to 3 key stakeholder groups, were recruited using a purposive sampling strategy for unstandardized semistructured e-mail interviews. The interview data were analyzed using a qualitative content analysis method. It was possible to identify 3 main considerations for the design of software agents in social network services, which were classified into the following categories: comprehensive understanding of users’ perception of privacy, user type recognition algorithms for software agent development, and existing software agents enhancement.