Method to use like Gesture Detection for Social Network Searching Combined with Multi-Criteria Specification (03-Nov-2009)

Method to use like Gesture Detection for Social Network Searching Combined with Multi-Criteria Specification

Te chnology to practice the effective detection of gestures is known in the prior art. This invention uses known technologies to leveraging gestures to facilitate search functionality in social networks and communities. The following embodiment describes using gestures to search for a list of people in a social network and returning the results to the requester.

Social Network Searching

The social network application is extended to allow members of a network or community to manually define gestures associated with the network or community. This includes allowing a user to define specific gestures and allowing a user to select from a repository of predefined gestures provided by the system. Specific gestures could be automatically determined and then uploaded to the system for repeated use, or defined real-time.

The method would allow a user to leverage the extended functionality to locate another user. To accomplish this the user would provide a gesture input. For example a motion such as a

prescribed motion of the user's hand. The input system would identify, categorize and pass the

gesture to the social networking application system. The social networking application system would compare the gesture provided by the user with those defined the system. A list of people for each relevant network or community queried would be returned to the user. In the case that no relevant people could be identified, the system would send a stat...