Do you know? Recommending people to invite into your social network

In this paper we describe a novel UI and system for providing users with recommendations of people to invite into their explicit enterprise social network. The recommendations are based on aggregated information collected from various sources across the organization and are displayed in a widget, which is part of a popular enhanced employee directory. Recommended people are presented one by one, with detailed reasoning as for why they were recommended. Usage results are presented for a period of four months that indicate an extremely significant impact on the number of connections created in the system. Responses in the organization's blogging system, a survey with over 200 participants, and a set of interviews we conducted shed more light on the way the widget is used and implications of the design choices made. Copyright 2009 ACM.