Social Media Research Blog

What is the Dunbar's Number for Social Networks?

Many folks are really excited about FriendFeed. Personally, I have found that there are a lot more comments when something gets posted on FriendFeed. Recently Yuval Atzmon's User21 blog released a list of most followed users on FriendFeed. Since I too had a crawl of FriendFeed running in much the same way as Yuval, I decided to look at the complementary question: "How many users do people follow on FriendFeed"? While the crawl is not yet complete (and complete statistics would have to wait), the numbers are really striking! Some users follow more than a 1000 "friends":

sthayden	3190
scobleizer	3087
juliomedina	2760
thomashawk	2557
jasoncalacanis	2447
theillife	2045
mrsth	1961
pookakoo	1814
czarphanguye	1736
brynyoungblut	1716
eposter	1562
susangrisantiguitarist	1550

I find this really amazing. Unlike Twitter, FriendFeed posts are accompanied with longer conversations so it can be more involved. I can barely keep up with all the information flying past me everywhere right now! I guess, 1500+ "friends" would be way too much for me!

Sociologists often talk about the Dunbar's Number which

is the supposed cognitive limit to the number of individuals with whom any one person can maintain stable social relationships.

In human contact network the Dunbar's number is said to be around 150. It might as well be the case that social tools and especially, microblogging is pushing this limit further. Studies on Twitter, Livejournal and other social networking sites seem to support this observation. I wonder then: what would be the Dunbar's number on social networks? 300? 500??? Any guesses? Perhaps some comparison across all the published papers that have studied different social networks might have some clues.

[BTW, I am akshayjava on FriendFeed]

Watching your Work

Via Marc Pickett I

Here is a cool script that Marc wrote to help improve productivity. It takes a screenshot every minute, so you can view a "timelapse" of your day (or week even). See how much time you spend on wikipedia, email, video games, and writing time management scripts vs. doing actual work.

The video is 6.8 hours crammed into 17 seconds. Marc says he was on the train from Cambridge, so he wasted less time on the internet than normal. So the apparent productivity was'nt perhaps cuz big bother was watching, eh?

But this is a really neat way to summarize how you spent your time during the day. Thanks Marc, for sharing the script and the video with us!

Download Watchme script

Email Interview: Nihaar Gupta, Youlicit

Nihaar Gupta, VP of Product development at Youlicit has kindly obliged to have an email interview with SocialMedia Research Blog. Following are the responses to some of the questions I had for him:

1) Please describe Youlicit to us?

Youlicit at its core is a discovery engine (http://blog.youlicit.com/?p=23). We want to connect you to the most relevant and recommended information as effortlessly as possible. As of now, we are building a technology that allows a user to find the most recommended sites (recommended by people around the web) related to a given URL. We believe that people are the best judges of content and more often than not, the information you are looking for has been found by someone before. Our goal is to aggregate that information and allow the user to access it with the click of a button.

2) Tell Us about your background, the team behind Youlicit and how started it?

Youlicit came about as a result of trying to solve our own frustrations with trying to find information on the web. With the enormous amount of user-generated content and annotations on the web, we saw a huge amount of valuable data that was inaccessible and fragmented. For the sake of brevity, the team bios & background are here http://blog.youlicit.com/?page_id=6

3) Please give us a brief overview of the technology behind Youlicit?

Youlicit aggregates user annotations of websites and other user generated content and analyzes it to create a URL-URL mapping of websites based on relevance and quality. Using this mapping we are able to deliver related and recommended sites to a user with a click of a button.

4) While using Youlicit plugin, I felt that one of the challenges is the coverage -- how do you plan to address this and build your current index?

We are constantly working on improving our coverage. There are two metrics we strive to maximize for our results, quality and relevance. In regards to quality, we’re always looking to increase our database of “quality sites” by tapping into the various kinds of user annotations (denoting quality content) that exist on the web (bookmarks, tags, votes, comments). In regards to relevance, we’re always researching novel ways to extrapolate connections between websites and map URL’s back to our database of “quality sites”.

5) How do you ranking the 'Enhanced Links' in the plugin? Do you also take into account how many users actually click through the suggested links?

Each result in the Youlicit More widget (and on Youlicit’s site) has a score based on the metrics above, quality of the site and relevance to the item being queried. We are looking into ways of scoring the results from implicit/explicit feedback that we get from users (clicks, recommends).

6) How do you ensure that the Enhanced links feature is non-intrusive?

The current version has manifested itself after a few weeks of alpha testing with a handful of bloggers. That said, we are still looking for feedback on the user interface and would love to hear opinions on how to make it more useful and less intrusive for bloggers/blog readers.

7) How would you compare the plugin to sphere's related blog posts?

While Sphere focuses related & recent blogosphere content, we, at Youlicit, are trying to provide the blog reader with more seminal information related to the blogger’s topic of conversation. For instance, if you are reading a blog entry on global warming, you are more likely to receive the most recommended articles (blogs, sites, essays) on Global warming from around the web rather than  recent blog entries on that topic.

8) What are the other features on Youlicit?

Youlicit’s primary product is a Firefox extension to access that allows a user to access our results during his/her browsing experience. We are in the process of redesigning our website and streamlining the current offering to focus on this button. Down the road we would like to be able to deliver personalized recommendations for users as well as connect users to people based on transient and long-terms interests (ideally using a person’s interests to enhance his/her social graph).

9) Would the plugin be adverting supported?

We do see advertising as a very possible source of monetization. Given the fact that we are providing contextually relevant information, the search model of advertising applies nicely. We are also exploring other possible means of monetization but as of right now the priority is to build something that people find useful.

10) What are the next things to look out for at Youlicit?

As I mentioned above, we are stripping down Youlicit to bring the focus back to its core; the Youlicit More functionality via the Firefox extension and blog widget. We expect to release a new designed website very soon. And as always, we love to hear feedback on what you think so far and how we can improve.

Youlicit: Search Less and Find More!

Youlicit is a new tool that helps you "Search less and find more". Often we forget that search is only one means to find what we are looking for. Even search by itself is not the endpoint of an information need or a query. This tool reminds me of the "berry picking model" of Information Retrieval that I had read about first in my IR Class. The model basically says that:

Information need is not satisfied by a single set of documents but by bits and pieces found along the way.

The paper  titled "The Design of Browsing and Berrypciking Technique for Online Search Interface" describes a searcher as

Moving through many actions towards a general goal of satisfactory completion of research related to an information need.

What Youlicit does is provide this ability implicitly, without the reader (or more generally a searcher) having to go through the trouble of navigating and mentally processing through hyperlinks or firing search queries to find related content. Youlicit takes care of all that on your behalf. By providing a simple plugin, the Youlicit widget automatically highlights some of the related, relevant links and provides useful suggestions -- all without your audience ever leaving your blog. I love the idea and the neat implementation that these guys have built. (The very same need was what lead me to hack this Wikipedia related widget a few weeks earlier.)

On the Youlicit site, you have lots more interesting tools. You can discover new content that is relevant to your interests, find related users and share links with them or follow their interests. Youlicit is paving the way for social browsing tools and is a neat concept that is well implemented. Their index does not seem to be very large at the moment and I feel that it would get better as they start to seriously scale up. In the interim, I feel that there might be stopgap solutions that they could be employ -- for example the Alexa related URLs for the links that are not currently in Youlicit's index.

In relation to this plugin, one tool that is similar is the  Sphere plugin that shows related blog posts. I feel that sphere serves a complementary need. From what I understand Youlicit aims to find the interesting blogs and Web URLs one might want to look into in relation to a given hyperlink.

Another plugin is the Snap plugin -- which shows a screenshot of the outlink. However, in my opinion snap does not really serve much purpose and is a bad tool from a usability perspective.

Youlicit is non-intrusive and you are gonna enjoy the serendipity of finding interesting new links! Give it a spin!

These Tweets are from Mars

I am really enjoying the tweets from @MarsPhoenix. Ofcourse this isn't the actual robot sending Twitter updates from millions of miles away, the researchers tweeting on it's behalf are definitely engaging in some interesting conversations. This is one fantastic example of how large organizations can engage in Social Media.

The thought that we are having a conversation with a tiny bot makes the whole experience rather exciting. It wouldn't have been half as much fun if it were for a human persona at the other end. This "bot persona" is more lovable, in part due to our collective imagination and desire of being able to have an intelligent conversation with machines -- our R2-D2s and WALL*Es.

This has been a fantastic experiment in social psychology as well as a superb publicity approach.  MarsPhoenix has about 20K followers  making it one of the most popular Twitter users. Accolades to JPL researcher Veronica McGregor, for this terrific idea and posting interesting updates.

I think that there is a lot more to this story. I imagine that soon we will have more devices that we can talk to directly on Twitter and IM. One idea I had recently was to rig up our lab's coffee machine, Mr. Capresso, with a temperature sensor so that he can automatically inform us when fresh coffee is brewed in the lab.

And at the cost of sounding much like Eliza, I think that for a limited domain, we might even have the capabilities to build Natural Language Generation tools that could automatically post Tweets. I am aware that there are many bots on Twitter. But the tools I would like to see are the ones that can do more than just post a message (like a new video on qik, etc) -- true interaction would come only from conversations. A really wacky (but simple) example would be a poetic bot (yep! people have researched on that too! ;-) )that would send intelligible rhymes in response to @ messages. Might be quite hilarious to follow it!!

How should Governments Engage in Social Media?

I had previously read reports that claimed the US government is "supporting" bloggers with favorable views by providing them more access to information and sharing publicity material with them. When I read the original report in the main stream media, I wasnt particularly that worried. I dindnt think it was so different from what startups or businesses would do to promote their products. To offer information or to make an elevator pitch about a new product -- so that bloggers might be interested in talking about it isnt something people normally frown about. While US citizens are protected by law from any PSYOPS campaign from their own governments (which even the authors of this report acknowledge), it leads to an important question - how should governments engage in social media?

Upon reading this U.S Military report titled "Blogs and Military Information Strategy", I am deeply concerned. I read it again to make sure that I am not getting something wrong here/misinterpreting it in any way. After all these are smart people whom we entrust with the security of our society. Here is the outline of the argument presented by the author of the Foreword in this report:

"Their [this reports authors] analysis rightly starts with the foreign information environment against which blogs would be generated. Here lies the crux of the issue: can U.S. bloggers properly use language and culture, and an understanding of how information is spread within a specific culture, to influence members or sectors of a population? This is an extremely sensitive topic requiring much finesse. The idea is so difficult to implement, the authors note, that it may require the U.S. to “clandestinely recruit or hire prominent bloggers or other persons of prominence already within the target nations, group, or community to pass the message.” Blogging for influence requires the ability to debate points that require inside knowledge about several topics. Insurgents, for example, have been instructed to explain on the Internet why advancing jihad is important and how to continue contrasting Islam from other religions. Major Kinniburgh and Dr. Denning offer guidance on how to conduct Web-log intelligence collection and blog operations and how such units might advance the cause of influence. "

The authors analyze how blogs can play a crucial role in combating terrorism/ as a tool to suppport military information operations. Commendable as it may be, what really worries me is the approach that the authors seem to suggest. While there is enough hand wavering to indicate that they understand the delicate line that they are walking on. However,

"information strategists can consider clandestinely recruiting or hiring prominent bloggers or other persons of prominence already within the target nation, group, or community to pass the US message."

An alternative strategy is to “make” a blog and blogger. The process of boosting the blog to a position of influence could take some time, however, and depending on the person running the blog, may impose a significant educational burden, in terms of cultural and linguistic training before the blog could be put online to any useful effect.

statements like these are troubling. Dissemination of information or message via pamphlets or propaganda material in war zones is not really unconventional. The part that is disturbing is running it as a clandestine operation -- in contrast to distributing pamphlets or saying something openly.The author's suggestions seems more like a government sponsored pay-per-post scheme and we already know how that worked  out for businesses. I think this strategy is surely risky and can backfire badly on the US government. 

IMHO, what the authors fail to recognize is that real bloggers are not motivated by money. They are there to tell a story, share their views and express ideas...in an open, free manner [even if you or I disagree totally and vehemently with them]. Its abominable that the terrorist groups are using the internet as a medium to recruit and influence young minds. But the way to fight them is not via a war of "pay-per-post propaganda" but by the power of truth. 

Rather than trying to buy your way into prominent blogs to pass the "US message" -- why not engage in conversations? For a start, why not make the official US Govt and Military blogs play a more prominent role? Just like software companies do, why not let the men and women in uniform express what they think and let their words and actions reflect their bravery. By letting bloggers and citizens interact with the military personnel and engaging in frank and open conversations, the citizens and bloggers across the world will rally in support. Unlike the complicated and risky approach suggested in the report:

Any blogs and bloggers serving an IO mission must be coordinated and synchronized with the overall influence effort in time and message.

Apparently, as of 2007, the US Army has changed it's policy with regard to blogs maintained by service personnel, but seem still a bit reserved. According to this article:

The Army also said in the fact sheet that soldiers may blog without prior approval if their topic is not related to the military, doesn’t represent or act on the behalf of the Army and doesn’t use government equipment to publish the personal blog.

This is a good start. What would be even better, is if US servicemen and women would be allowed to blog under an official military blog (just like an engineer at a software company could talk directly to customers on their official blog).

Ultimately, the blogosphere is not about "clandestine IO missions". The only way to win the "hearts and minds of the people" is by doing just that! Let the critical-mass or the wisdom of the crowd reign. Gather support not by PSYOPS and Intelligence operations or "hacking enemy blogs" [see report]

Hacking the site and subtly changing the messages and data—merely a few words or phrases—may be sufficient to begin destroying the blogger’s credibility with the audience. Better yet, if the blogger happens to be passing enemy communications and logistics data, the information content could be corrupted.

but by first winning the hearts and minds of citizens of the world. The only way to do that is by talking to them directly. I suggest that you let THEM be your spokesperson -- your "brand warriors". 

Finally, I feel that the government could harness the power of the blogosphere for intelligence gathering missions. There are many ways in which content analysis, link analysis and community detection techniques can be brought to bear on online terrorist networks to combat them. Moreover, looking at sentiments, opinions and geographical information from these blogs as well as the multitude of foreign media can provide access to a wide array of early warning systems that can be placed as indicators of any activity that needs careful attention or field intelligence effort. 

I feel that if the governments engage in social media and participate with their people, it would be more beneficial. To combat terrorism one needs to take radical new steps. The blogosphere, online videos and other communication channels understandably present a huge challenge. The abuse and misuse by criminals and terrorist needs to be combated with the a new approach -- one that involves gathering momentum by gaining support of ordinary bloggers -- the Long Tail. In my opinion, any covert attempt to pay "influential bloggers" [to write favorably] in these regions will ultimately backfire. 

Thanks to the controversy this report has raised .. it is now just being described as a mere "though provoking academic study" with no "actionable consequence".

The bigger question on my mind though is how should governments participate in social media?

[Thanks Justin for clarifying some of the subtleties of US politics and policies and discussions regarding this post]

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this blog are those of the author and do not reflect those of the University, Sponsors, Co-authors, Previous or Current Employers.

My First FireEagle App: Pizza Coupons Search

Yesterday, I discussed an idea around the FireEagle geolocation API. I was envisioning an app where you could have a mobile phone and as you walk down the Mall or any location, it would pre-fetch relevant coupons and offers from the local restaurants. Being a grad student, we always learn to find good Pizza deals online. So I decided to use the FireEagle API to develop a Pizza  coupon finder. The way it works is that it authenticates with FireEagle to access your current location and then fetches the coupons from Google Maps and then parses the output to display on your mobile phone or a browser. You can try it at the following URL  http://wikimatix.com/coupon/pizza.php
if you have a FireEagle account already. First the application will try to authenticate with FireEagle and request the appropriate permission to access the exact or approximate location information and then passes this to the Google Coupon Finder.

Finally you have all the coupons you need to order your fresh pizza. The Documentation and example walkthrough code on FireEagle's developer area is excellent. It took hardly any time to put together this demo!

I think that the possibilities that this opens up for mobile advertising are exciting. We should also keep an eye on Android -- this space is gonna be fun to watch. [Update: Fixed the broken link. Sorry]

Yahoo FireEagle: Geolocation made simple

This service is currently in alpha but thanks to Pranam Kolari I was able to get an invitation to Yahoo!'s FireEagle platform. FireEagle is an easy way to manage and share location information across many applications. Currently, I publish my location information across many different sites and applications and it is rare that I put in the actual effort to update it everywhere. For example I use Dopplr to publish my travel plans, twitter and Brightkite to update my current location and Facebook to indicate my home address and other details. I was impressed with how easy it was (using OAuth) to allow Dopplr and others to share and access information with FireEagle. If you have a GPS enabled phone you can even update the geolocation on the go! Damn! Thats is neat!

One really compelling application is Wikinear.com -- it shows you the nearest places of interest by matching the location information obtained from FireEagle with Wikipedia entries. This is great especially if you are traveling to a new location or a tourist spot and would like to know the places of interest nearby.

Another very cool application is Metosphere. (PS: I wish I had an iPhone!). With this app, you can leave a digital message for a given location, see places and events of interest and even report Graffiti and City Repair! This gives me a reason to believe that the next big thing is going to be mobile advertising. The advantage of easy availability of geolocation information specific to a user is immense. This reminds me of a project at eBiquity research group a few years back, called Agents2go,  that talked about a very similar concept. Imagine that you were walking down the during lunch and the agent on your iPhone would automatically collect coupons or find deals at the nearest restaurants as you walk by. The idea that we can have a query free, geographically relevant search is really exciting. Yahoo! is innovating and pushing hard on the open initiative. With the availability of an API it would be fun to integrate Google Coupons! (OK here is one more fascinating idea and little time at hand!)

Location is a very sensitive piece of information and the best part of FireEagle is that you can manage permissions and privacy settings or even temporarily stop sharing your location. You can allow a specific application to only access location information at a certain granularity: exact, zip, neighborhood, state or even country.  More at Techcrunch.

Samsung Viral Video Based Advertising

Check this out! It is a really cool video -- a two minute clip of 10 really cool optical illusions.

It is apparently sponsored by Samsung to promote their new soul phone model. Perhaps, they are trying to suggest "look at the kind of cool things you can do if you could take videos with our phone". In any case it is a really neat idea and definitely getting a lot of attention on the Blogosphere. If this is the new approach to advertising then I think it is something we will see more of. User generated advertising trend is on the rise. Check out this other crazy/funky video that could just as well be a levis ad

One thing is for sure - the Samsung video did grab by eyeballs and it was entertaining enough that I watched it a couple of times! Whoever said ads had to be boring 15 second "hooks" (avg length/increments in which TV advertising is sold) ?

News feed vs. blog posts vs. email

What is the difference in size distribution of a news wire vs. a blog post vs. email message?

The below three images compare the size distribution of news wires (Reuters collection) , blog posts (from the ICWSM dataset) and email messages (Enron Corpus).  The charts show the histograms of the size of the documents in these collections:

The three distributions above (ignoring documents smaller than 2000 bytes) were fitted using the matlab scripts for powerlaw fits (Thanks to Aaron Cluaset). 

The linguistic properties of blogs email and news stories are quite different and this has already been highlighted in several research papers. While the three data sets are quite different in many ways, here I am analyzing just the size distributions. The  important point to note is 

• News wire stories are quite short
• Blogs and emails are much longer and have a heavy tail distribution
• Power law exponents for blog size distribution and email size distribution are quite similar (around 2.7)

So...what does this mean? It is fairly obvious that news wire stories are quite short due to the nature of reporting. Sometimes the initial news story is quickly reported by agencies like Reuters/AP. These are at times brief and to the point to allow readers to get a quick gist of its contents.

In contrast the size of blogs tend to be much larger than news wires. Citizen journalism is full of opinions thoughts and punditry thus bloating the post. This also goes back to my previous analysis of the blog homepage size vs. Web page size. Indeed the contribution of blogs has been reported to be 4-5 times that of edited text (like the news wires).

What I had not expected was the similarity in the slopes for email and blogs. One thing to note however is that here the emails are aggregated across a number of different users. This is an important distinction. While a single user may receive a few hundred emails, they potentially have access to millions of blogs. Recently, industry's top usability expert Jakob Nielsen concluded that readers skim through and read at most 20% of the words on a Webpage. While there are millions of blog posts every day... there is very little time to read them all in detail. The volume of email is limited by a person's social network but for blogs the act of prioritizing what to read is entirely left upon the user. This essentially necessitates the use of Memetrackers and explains the popularity of filtering tools like digg, techmeme etc. By summarizing popular blog posts and providing blurbs for these, such tools essentially act as a  "social news wire service for the blogosphere".