Recently, many content sites have started encouraging their users to engage
in social activities such as adding buddies on Yahoo! Travel and sharing
articles with their friends on New York Times. This has led to the emergence of
{\em social content sites}, which is being facilitated by initiatives like
OpenID (this http URL) and OpenSocial (this http URL).
These community standards enable the open access to users' social profiles and
connections by individual content sites and are bringing content-oriented sites
and social networking sites ever closer. The integration of content and social
information raises new challenges for {\em information management and
discovery} over such sites. We propose a logical architecture, named
\kw{SocialScope}, consisting of three layers, for tackling the challenges. The
{\em content management} layer is responsible for integrating, maintaining and
physically accessing the content and social data. The {\em information
discovery} layer takes care of analyzing content to derive interesting new
information, and interpreting and processing the user's information need to
identify relevant information. Finally, the {\em information presentation}
layer explores the discovered information and helps users better understand it
in a principled way. We describe the challenges in each layer and propose
solutions for some of those challenges. In particular, we propose a uniform
algebraic framework, which can be leveraged to uniformly and flexibly specify
many of the information discovery and analysis tasks and provide the foundation
for the optimization of those tasks.