Social Media Research Blog

Live Labs Social Streams

Very cool! Live Labs releases the Political Streams project. It is a lense into the people and places that are receiving a lot of attention on blogs and news.

You can read the post snippet and see neat graphs of how the attention changes over time:

Also browse through the related names and places as you explore different topics and blog posts/news stories. Furthermore there are profiles of people and places in news that are generated using Freebase.

 

This is really cool! If you looked at search trends, many of the search terms are in fact about places and people in News. Users go to a search engine to find out both why they are in news? and often who the person is? Social streams (right now, for political streams) let you explore this in a real time, interactive manner. 

Nice!

Social Network Visualization Eyecandy

Visualization of graph data is incredibly challenging, particularly when it comes to extremely large, scale-free graphs and social networks. A few simple searches on the Web and you will find some mesmerizing and very cool images. Perhaps the most cited and fascinating of these are Matt's "Mapping the Blogosphere" series.

Some of my favorite tools for graph visualization are LGL (see Twitter visualization using LGL), Prefuse, Guess and UCINet (no specific ranked order). I have also been waiting to get a chance to try out AT&T's large network visualization software. Two other promising tools that I have not played with yet are Tulip (TOTH Eytan!) and yWorks.  Following is an image I had generated a year ago (more here) using UCINet. This is a community of political blogs discovered using an implementation of Dr. Mark Newman's community detection algorithm:

One thing that I think would be exciting is visualizing evolving networks. Current tools force you to map blogs, social networks etc. into static graphs. This is a serious limitation. Their real meaning and value comes from seeing the temporal interactions between members, evolution of community structures,  changes in strength of ties over a period and detecting bursts. As far as my knowledge goes, this feature is not supported by any of the open source/freely available tools that I have explored. I would love to hear about other graph visualization tools that I may be unaware of.

Social Media is a Tasty Taco

via Dr. David Pennock

I have been a bit swamped after coming back from KDD, but should be back to posting regularly this week. stay tuned!

Del.icio.us + Google Custom Search = Delizzy

In my April 9, 2008 blog post on "Social Tagging and Vertical Search" I had talked about exactly this idea:

For quite some time now I wanted to build a mashup using the social tagging information from del.icio.us and combine it with Google's Custom Search engine. This is a neat way to build high quality vertical search engines. (For example we could use all the URLs under the tag "astronomy" to build an astronomy vertical).

Well, it was just waiting to happen. Delizzy (via Techcrunch), is a wonderfully simple idea but it is a super cool site built using del.icio.us and Google Custom Search. It lets you do what del.ico.us has surprisingly, still not yet provided -- A full text search over your bookmarked items. I believe this could be taken a step further and built into custom search engines or verticals for different topics. Imagine searching over only highly bookmarked sites for a particular topic like "AJAX" or "Ruby on Rails" or "Artificial Intelligence".

In any case Delizzy is pretty cool. Go check it out!

Bloggers are the Root of all Evil?

Lewis black just pronounced bloggers to be the root of all evil on his comedy show tonite. The judgment was swift and Ultimate Fighting didnt stand a chance against blogging in this amazingly funny episode! I plead Guilty your honor!

Moreover Patton Oswalt claims that the world will not end with a bang but with a .... Twitter!

You know that Twitter and blogging have turned into a cultural icon when comedians take a riff on it.

Rest my case!

Shiny New Toys at Searchme!

A quick note:

Searchme launches cool new Video and Flickr search tools. This is combined with the power of stacks. Stacks are a neat way to organize relevant results, be it videos, images or Webpages, into bundles. (how often have you wondered -- "if only I could recall that search term that gave me the right answer". Well now just stack it!) Searchme provides a feature that allows users to share stacks they have created on your blog or as a Facebook page. This is really neat. Whats even better is that since the stack is AJAX based, it is dynamically updated whenever new results are added to it. Check out the stack titled "Colbert" I created as an example. The best part of visual search is that you can quickly scan for documents and media and identify the stuff you are most interested in.

Another really neat feature in Searchme is its Classification engine. For example, did you know that another celebrity that shares a similar name is Claudette Colbert, a 1930's actress! Would never have found this trivia had it not been for the movies section that Searchme identified for my query "colbert"!

Searchme

Maximize stack view

Wordle: Create Beautiful Tag Clouds

Briefly; via Harry Chen:

Worldle is a neat tool to create pretty looking tag clouds. Enter text or your del.icio.us username.

Here is my tag cloud from del.icio.us

looks awesome, no?
Thanks Harry!

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) ?