Social Media Research Blog

Some things are just Semi-Social

Social Media is a lot about sharing. Prior to the growth of social software, it wasn't that people did not share stuff -- they just did it offline or via email. Now we share at a massive scale and a lot more easily. 

Some things we are willing to share "openly"

• Music playlists (Last.fm)
• Books we read (iread, shelfari)
• Calendars and Travel plans (google calendar)
• Status updates (via Twitter and Microblogging)
• Restaurant recommendations (yelp)
• Knowledge and expertise (via Wikipedia)

As we start to experiment with social software we realize that sharing is good and soon become open to sharing a lot more. There are some things though, that just seem semi-social. What I mean by Semi-Social is roughly "Thing I would not mind sharing with a small group of trusted friends and family members".

Until just a few years back there would have been a lot more people squirming if they were asked to share such 'sensitive data' with others. I see this perception slowly eroding away. There is a small, albeit enthusiastic bunch experimenting with new tools that fall into the category of Semi-Social. 

Some cases that I can think of are as follows:

• Investment portfolio: One example is Covestor. I have an account there but it is under pseudonym. I would not be that enthusiastic to reveal my pathetic attempt to bet on the stock market by watching (mostly tech) blogs. sigh!
• TV watching habits: I think Television as we know it today is completely broken. There is no social aspect to it whatsoever. At ICWSM, Noor Ali-Hassan presented a paper on "Social Media Scenarios for Television". What struck me about this talk was her statement that "Despite its social nature, there is a private aspect of TV that people want to preserve".
• Income and financial information: This is something we had least anticipated. How did we get to a point where I am actually not that scared while putting all my bank details and credit card information into a site like Mint? Mint is not a social site as such. But it reflects how we are now willing to part with some really sensitive data. In contrast, there are other examples of recruitment sites like SimplyHired where people reveal their salary information and can search for companies by salary. A more recent startup that is quite similar is Glassdoor.
• Location: Location can be an extremely sensitive piece of information. Fortunately, Yahoo's fireeagle provides access control for various applications and one can set the privilege that each app has to access location information (latlong, zip, state, country etc).

There will always be some who are at the extreme end of the spectrum and are quite comfortable with being completely (publicly) transparent about "sensitive data". However, most would still only dare to share some of this data with close friends and select people -- i.e. if there is enough value proposition in it for them. Some would be comfortable with aggregate analysis over the data as long as they are not personally identified or targeted in some way (advertising or otherwise).

Although it requires a great deal of courage (to work with privacy sensitive data), the opportunity to invent in the semi-social space may be quite a bit.

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!

"Personal Brand" Monitoring Tools

Dr. Finin pointed to this interesting post on "branding yourself with a blog":

“… Certainly personal branding isn’t a new concept, but the future of personal branding could be in at your fingertips—with a blog. One of the first steps in creating a brand for yourself is to make your blog visible. Post meaningful entries, comment on your industry’s top blogs, or simply gain a regular readership. “Visibility creates opportunities,” says Schawbel, a social media specialist at EMC Corporation. He believes that when you brand yourself, the competition becomes irrelevant. “The goal of personal branding is to be recruited based on your brand, not applying for jobs,” Schawbel says. …”

Many brand monitoring startups are helping big companies keep track of what their (potential) customers have to say about them or their products. While the space of corporate brand monitoring is  fiercely competed, one area that is overlooked is that of "personal branding" tools. Most of us are highly interested in knowing what is said about us online. As the TechCareers blog points out:

“You are the chief marketing officer for the brand called you, but what others say about your brand is more impactful than what you say about yourself,” says Schawbel.

Keeping an eye on what others have to say about you is not always easy. I started thinking about these issues and outlined how I try to keep up with this information. Here is my "Personal Brand Monitoring Toolbox":

1. Search Engines: The typical way for me to keep tabs on this is by setting up Google alerts for my name, projects, organization (University/workplace) etc. In addition, I frequently perform "ego searches" to forage for mentions of my name.
2. Statistics and Tools: One very interesting tool that I have found useful is Lijit. It provides you stats on who is searching for you, what keywords were used to reach your blog, etc. In addition I use Google Analytics to know more information about my visitors, most visited pages and time they spent on my site. If you are an academic like me, you would like to know who has cited your papers recently (Google Scholar) and the number of downloads, who has linked to your paper (Google link: search) and/or your blog posts (Technorati searches). Yessss! I admit! I have become a total statoholic! :-)
   
3. Comments and Scraps: Twitter is another important tool in our arsenal for personal branding and your replies say something interesting about you. Finally, the comments on my blog, Facebook messages, scraps and photos are all part of my "brand" and I take interest in replying to them just like I would to an email.

As our information spaces diversify, monitoring "your brand" becomes a part of the everyday online activity. I dont think we have exactly cracked the nut yet -- keeping track of your profile and "your brand " is a highly addictive activity and I think that the tool(s) that make it fun and exciting will enjoy a great deal of popularity.

Leaveraging Web and Social Media for Recommendations

Both Amazon and Netflix's business models rely on effective recommendation systems. The recommendations provided by such systems are based on the purchasing habits of millions of customers. As such, these systems are non-trivial and have evolved out of years of research in both academia and industry.

In addition to mining millions of customer transaction records, for many products there is a vast amount of information available online. While I do not have a lot of familiarity with recommendation systems literature, it seems obvious that the Web and Social Media is a great source of information that could be useful when building such systems.  Bloggers' profile pages, wishlists, netflix queues, book lists and the blog posts themselves are potential clues to learn which two items may be related to each other.

As a simple example, consider the movie "Pulp Fiction", by querying Google for all the inlinks to the IMDB homepage of Sin City Pulp Fiction and counting which are the other movies that are "co-cited" here is a list of five movies that are most likely to be related to "Pulp Fiction":

Most of these look quite relevant. Some critics have claimed similarities between Pulp Fiction and Snatch. One surprise though was LOTR, I wouldn't have expected it to be grouped with Pulp Fiction, but I guess I like them both very much -- so it seems reasonable in my case atleast.

Just for fun, here is another example with "Sin City" another one of my favorite movies.

Unless you have a large index of the Blogosphere or the Web, it would be quite inefficient to mine for such correlations (by passing queries to search engines) on a large scale. I do not know how much of the search engine information is leveraged in recommendation systems built by Amazon or Netflix.  It might also be worth looking into differences in the recommendations produced on the basis of "how people co-cite two products" vs. "how people purchase two products".

SocialDevCamp East: Local BarCamp Event in Baltimore

I am excited about the local BarCamp event organized by David Troy of Twittervision and Ann Bernard, Keith Casey from WhyGoSolo. It looks like a fun event and a great "UnConference" for local entrepreneurs, social media enthusiasts and researchers to get together and talk about the future, innovation of Social Media and the Web.

It promises to be an event that would

bring together forward thinkers – developers, social media gurus, bizdev types – to discuss and Chart the Next Course.

The Agenda and signup details are available on the PBWiki site. Some of the proposed session topics (From the Wiki):

• Mobile Application Development with iPhone & Android
• What are the implications of Geo-based web applications?
• How will Agile Development practices affect ideation and funding processes?
• Platforms Present & Future
• What will matter on the web a year or two from now?
• Where will information aggregation take us?
• Social Media is here to stay – so where will it go next?
• How will Google keep affecting development, the web and our lives?
• What are the next things web users will want from the web?
• What will be the impact of future generations to the current web we know today?
• Social Media in the workplace vs. in life
• How the Web is being broken apart into pieces - Justin Thorp

Fantastic! Cant wait to be there!

There are also some sponsorship opportunities (starting @ $250) available for this event. Also please note that there is no cost for participants (which is great for grad students like me!). :-D

For more details please contact Dave Troy or come and chat with us on Facebook.

Snimmer is EVIL

A number of sites online ask you for your email address and password. Most often, I tend to be skeptical and yet, being a sucker for a beta test, I often cringe and give in. That is what happened today when I unwittingly gave my credentials to a site called Snimmer. (I do not wish to link to it since I believe it should not be given any sort of links).  Bottomline Snimmer is EVIL. It sends out a clandestine invitation to all my friends on Gmail impersonating it as though it came from me legitimately. What is annoying is that it DOES NOT ASK FOR ANY CONFIRMATION.

Here is a snippet of the email it sends out:

SNIMMER - My Web IM Space
Hi, this is my IM Page on SNIMMER. You can chat with me there:
http://akshayjava.snimmer.com/

This really makes the case for the use of OpenID and OAuth. If you are aware of any other sites that are misusing user credentials, leave me comments and I will check on these to compile a blacklist of untrustworthy sites.

 

Cartoonist 2.0 and "Dancin Dubya"!

When returning a book at the library this week, I noticed an interesting talk titled "The Art of Political Satire". The speaker was none other than Kevin Kallaugher (KAL) who is the cartoonist with "The Economist "magazine, London. But more significantly, he is also the artist-in-residence and cartoonist at the Imaging Research Center at UMBC. Kal talks about his life experiences as a cartoonist both in the United States and U.K. His sense of humor is world-class and through a montage of his work over the years, Kal touches upon some delicate issues (911, war, world politics and the struggle to end of apartheid in SA) all while engaging his audience and making them smile.

I think Kal is what I would describe as a Cartoonist 2.0. He really gets the new media and realizes its potential. He talks about the decline in newspaper readership and the print advertising. How the new generation is more about flickr and YouTube and less about buying a newspaper or a magazine. So along with UMBC's IRC, Kal has set out on a journey to explore what it means like to be a cartoonist/journalist/political satirist in a Web 2.0 world. He is planning to take the essential elements of a cartoon strip and blend it with 3D animation and video. Starting from a clay caricature model of our very own Dubya and using motion capture technology, Kal can actually hold real-time conferences with the audience members asking Pres. Dubya Bush some serious questions! Well rest assured, you will atleast be get answers that make some sense! You can read more about it here and also check out the really cool video of "dubya press briefing"!  Oh! and here is Kal's fantastic version of "dancin dubya" ... quite close to the real version!
 

Well he is a real puppet arite!

Kal also plans to take dubya to live audiences and host a show soon. Soon we should expect to have syndicated, interactive 3D cartoon strips on many online newspapers! Good luck Kal, the maverick cartoonist 2.0!

My Twitter Visualization Featured in Technology Review

A few months back, I had been analyzing Twitter's social network. This meme was recently picked up for a photo essay in March/April issue of the Technology Review Magazine. You can read an online version here. It also has a number of really cool visualizations from other researchers who have been studying the "social graph". For this visualization, I had used the Large Graph Layout (LGL) tool to visualize the social network on Twitter. Following is a graph constructed using contacts from about 25K users.

One of the challenges in laying out large graphs and social networks is that it is often hard to interpret what these graphs signify. To get a better understanding of the information in such networks, we inevitably need to look into the underlying community structures. My paper titled "Why We Twitter: Understanding Microblogging Usage and Communities" tried to answer these questions.

Multiverse of Information Channels

Lets see, I was thinking about my information foraging habits. The extent to which we use different streams is truly remarkable!  Following is a (partial) list of channels that are typically "on" during any given work day:

• GMail is my primary email address. I also have a few other email accounts (2 ids from school) that auto-forward to gmail. This really saves a TON of my time. I pretty much have one tab in my browser dedicated to GMail.
• Gtalk I don't have Gtalk open all the time but I prefer to receive the IM messages in my GMail tab.
• Twitter This can be a real tricky one! While Twitter is all about streaming updates from my social network, it can at times be pretty distracting. Especially when I have it buzzing my GTalk every couple of minutes while I listen to music or work on my code!
• Facebook is my favorite time sink. I love to go there when I want to just relax or scrap on my friends' walls. Orkut happens to be another social network where I am not quite active but every once a while I keep getting either scraps or friend requests.
• Google Reader is mostly what I use for my feed reading. I have always loved Bloglines. But somehow feel that they have stopped innovating lately. I follow a good bunch of feeds and its getting even more difficult to keep up with it these days.
• Techmeme, like for many folks, is my staple diet. This is one tab always open in my browser. Google news is my source for daily news but I might perhaps go to it once in the morning when I come into work and later in the afternoon or at night while watching TV.
• Phone and SMS. I sometimes wonder why I pay $45 for a cell phone contract. I haven't been using the phone much these days. Occasionally I do tend to use SMS and for the price we are charged, frankly its ridiculous! It is quite frankly hard to believe that the phone is still not as "social" as one would expect. I used to receive my twitter updates on the cell phone until it became unmanageable since I started following too many people.
• Skype is working out great for my international conversations. I spend an hour or so once a week talking to friends and family on skype/Gtalk. For landline calls I use a calling card that is usually way more expensive.
• Late at night I watch the Daily Show while surfing the Web alongside. After a healthy dose of laughter its time for some more at Google Videos or YouTube.

These and many more sources have become so integrated into our daily lives that its almost difficult to get through the day without them. And I have not even mentioned the obvious ones that we take for granted everyday -- Web Search engines and Wikipedia.

The real challenge is how to deal with the constant stream of attention seeking memes that keeps coming at you relentlessly. I have found that an effective way that works for me is not to jump to react at each interesting meme that comes to me, but to let it accumulate for a while before I get to it. Sounds simple and obvious, but is often hard to stick to!

Social Media and Social Causes

Whoever said social network was meant only for people who were interested in dating and getting together with a bunch for friends for a beer? One of the most amazing Facebook apps I have seen is causes. It was developed by Project Agape . Causes is an application that lets me publicize and advocate for social causes I am most passionate about. It is truly amazing that the even just the top five social causes have raised over $119,469 on Facebook. 

 

More coverage on Techcrunch. Another noteworthy social good application is DonorsChoose. It connects donors to specific school projects that they can choose to help fund. It enables a personal level of involvement with the project and makes the donor feel connected to the cause.

Additionally Google posts certain public service advertisements. I am not sure if there is something like this already out there -- I think a not-for-profit advertising network that also let users decide which causes they chose to host on their blogs, would also be a worthy effort.

While some people prefer to be discrete about their social causes and donations, publicizing causes one is passionate about has its own merits. At the very least, they serve a greater purpose -- that of educating people in your social network about the world and what we can do to make it a better place!