Social Systems: Can We Do More Than Just Poke Friends?

Social sites have become extremely popular among users but have they attracted equal attention from the research community? Are they good only for simple tasks, such as tagging and poking friends? Do they present any new or interesting research challenges? In this paper, we describe the insights we have obtained implementing CourseRank, a course evaluation and planning social system. We argue that more attention should be given to social sites like ours and that there are many challenges (though not the traditional DBMS ones) that should be addressed by our community.