Social Media Research Blog

Community-Driven Moderation in Twitter

Twitter played an important role during the mumbai terrorist attacks. The community that formed around the #mumbai tag, actively discussed how they felt and provided live, uptodate information filtered from different news sources. This was a tipping point for twitter that transforms it from a social tool to a news source. The most important factor here was that the dynamic community that emerged around the #mumbai tag was not constrained to discuss one single topic. Something that News sources struggled with as the developments happened so quickly in this critical event. Most news sources need to stay on a story for at least a few minutes before they can move on to another story.

As #mumbai became popular, trolls showed up on twitter and posted messages with the hashtag only to draw attention to their website or link to other sources of little or no relevance whatsoever to the current crisis. This made me wonder, what if anything could be done in Microblogging environments to restrict users from misusing hashtags. A quick glance over at the current use of #mumbai shows a number of such sources that should probably moderated. I am refraining from naming any particular users but this is something that could be better dealt with by the community as a whole.

One suggestion I have is to create a new hashtag like #ban followed by the user name and the hashtag for which the user should be banned. Once a particular user is #ban tagged by several people from the community -- Twitter can automatically ban the user from further posting on the specific topic. This would be a simple and effective means for a community driven moderation in twitter.

Twitter Election 2008

Check out Twitter Election 2008

It is a fantastic site that Twitter has put out! According to Twitter:

We’re filtering hundreds of Twitter updates per minute to create a new source for gathering public opinion about the presidential election and a new way for you to share your thoughts.

I love it! Unfortunately, there are so many updates that an RSS feed would be pretty much pointless. So I wish that there was some better way to provide an API to the election site with a  live stream so that data junkies like us could totally geek out and apps could be developed around the real time election twitter updates!

You're No One If You're Not On Twitter

too cool! ROTFL! :-)

Prosuming News

The future is now my people! And it is happening on Twitter+CNN: We are prosuming news.
The term Prosumer is described on Wikipedia as:

Prosumer is a portmanteau formed by contracting either the word professional or producer with the word consumer.
...
In the 1980 book, The Third Wave, futurologist Alvin Toffler coined the term "prosumer" when he predicted that the role of producers and consumers would begin to blur and merge (even though he described it in his book Future Shock from 1970). Toffler envisioned a highly saturated marketplace as mass production of standardized products began to satisfy basic consumer demands. To continue growing profit, businesses would initiate a process of mass customization, that is the mass production of highly customized products.

Incidentally, I first learned about the term prosumer from the book Crowdsourcing by Wired reporter Jeff Howe.

Over at CNN what is happening right now is (Via Venturebeat)

One anchor for the cable news channel CNN has become enamored with the micro-messaging service Twitter over the past several weeks. He used tweets (Twitter messages) to complement his coverage of the recent Hurricane Gustav and now the network has apparently decided to take it one step further, basing a whole show around the real-time citizen journalism/opinions that take place on Twitter.

CNN reporter, Rick Sanchez's Twitter updates are being followed by over 9000 users as of this date (which leads to interesting infrastructure issues over at Twitter -- see venturebeat post). I did watch some of the user questions from Twitter on CNN's coverage of the presidential elections and had planned to write about it earlier. Rick asks his Twitter audience about their opinion on things like

Which refers to Congressman Lynn Westmoreland's words about Barack Obama. News media is now all about citizen journalism and participatory audience. Emails, Web forms and premium rate SMS still work but Twitter is the new way to go to get the audience involved!

So, are we really that far off from watching our nightly news cast from some amateur reporter on YouTube who has stitched together news stories submitted by his/her audience? I am amazed at Toffler's visionary outlook on this.

The future is happening right  and we are prosuming it today!

UPDATE 09/12/08

Rick also has a facebook profile. (via Steve Rubel on FB)

FriendFeed Vintage Posts

So last month I had run a bunch of FriendFeed crawls. Due to various other higher priority tasks, I haven't yet worked on having the crawl run 24X7. Still the data I have continues to bring forth interesting nuggets. In this post I would like to share the distribution of the friendfeed posts per year.

Year    Number of Posts
2008    439949
2007    35920
2006    7996
2005    1782
2004    147
2003    3
2002    2
2001    1

I had fetched the most recent updated entries for each user. Upon examining the entry dates, I found that some posts dated back to even before friendfeed existed! This was basically due to the fact that FriendFeed is just an aggregator and when a user adds her del.icio.us feed old posts from del.icio.us, amazon and other sources are integrated into FriendFeed. Ofcourse, pretty much all of the recent entries for more prolific users are dated 2008. In case you are wondering, here are the links to the oldest 5 entries. (There were a few entries dated 1989 -- but I think maybe those might be date errors).

1. March 26, 2001 del.icio.us entry by Wilfred 
2. May 10, 2002 Amazon wishlist by Amber
3. Nov 3, 2002 Amazon wishlist by Jumagun
4. Dec 8, 2003 Stumbleupon entry by Michael
5. Dec 12, 2003 del.icio.us entry by Mihir

This is but a snapshot of FriendFeed data and is perhaps only representative of a few days worth of crawls. But what it shows is that at any point in time there are still some "vintage posts" in the FriendFeed cellar for us to enjoy and share.

Maybe there is some joy in reminiscing over old entries with your friends. Perhaps it is sort of the same feeling that one has when sitting down with an old shoebox full of pictures and sharing it with your family. Or... maybe those posts reminds us of a time few years back when we were all excited about del.icio.us, blogs and wikis -- or whatever else was the latest, coolest next big thing at that time!

So my question for you is -- when was the last time you looked for the oldest piece of post/entry you (or your friend) shared online and what do you think about it now? Is it funny now? perhaps even embarassing? :-)

Information Filters and Subscription Predictability

I read a superb blog post "Who is your Information Filter?". I think Hutch makes an important point here (text in bold is highlighted by me):

In an equal world, information shared by any of your friends will merit click-throughs and discussion. But the practical reality is that some people will be more “equal” than others in terms of driving the discussion agenda. There are two highly correlated components to that:

• Number of subscribers
• Reputation for identifying what is interesting

The sheer number of subscribers make some people Information Filters. The big power users on Twitter: Leo Laporte, Dave Winer, Robert Scoble, Jason Calacanis, etc. These guys really drive discussions around ideas, opinions and news. If you subscribe, you can’t help but be overwhelmed by the discussions they can kick off.

Subscribing to somebody's feed is like a commitment. On social network sites, your actions often speak for themselves. The posts one comments on or likes are quite predictive of who you subscribe to. This is what I found from the analysis of the "likes" in FriendFeed. The following graph shows the probability that a user A subscribes to a user B, given that User A "likes" k or more posts by user B. Typically, if a user has 'liked; more than 3 posts of another users there is over 80% probability of a subscription.

On one hand, this is because users are more exposed to posts from those whom they subscribe to. On the other hand, as the number of such actions between two users increases, so does the probability that there will be a continued commitment in terms of a subscription. Similar trends are observable from the "comments" graph.

The way I see it, an important implication of this is ensuring that the social network makes it possible for users to find and "try out" feeds they might "like". Findability and explorability of social networks allows users to initially explore posts from others and then decide which of these users they would like to pick as their "Information Filters".

Others Like You Too

Continuing with the FriendFeed comment and likes analysis. Here is a graph showing the percentage of self comments vs. comments from those you subscribe to vs. comments from others. This is based on roughly 700,000 comments and 200,000 Likes

Again, as noted by others the number of self comments are skewed by the fact that notes in del.icio.us and stumbleupon etc are treated by FriendFeed as individual comments. I have not compensated the data for this effect.

It gets interesting when we look at the Likes. I would have expected that the most likes would come from your friends. But likes from people you do not subscribe to slightly outnumber the likes from your friends. See.. others like you too!

That is the beauty of FriendFeed: discovering interesting memes from random people. Ofcourse it would be even more cool to see how many hops away most these people are. I suspect that they would actually be kind of close in the social graph.

Services That Attract Most Likes on FriendFeed

Over at FriendFeed, I have been having a superb conversation about my previous posts. John Duff asked me if I could run a similar analysis on the "Likes". Here it is, the most liked services on FriendFeed. Yep! FriendFeed is the most loved  raking in 50% of the likes. Closely followed by Twitter and Blogs.

Sharing good things is good. And FriendFeed makes it downright simple.

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!

Services That Attract Most Comments on FriendFeed

Indexing about 400,000 posts and over 650,000 comments from about 70,000 users on FriendFeed gives some interesting data. There are about 45 different services that FriendFeed connects to at this point of time. First, I wanted to see what were the absolute volume of posts were from each of these services:

Next, I pulled up the number of comments that every service draws during the time period of my index (which was built by fetching the most recent posts and comments from the API).

Note that this is not normalized for multiple updates by the same user. A few interesting points:

• Large volumes of updates are from URL sharing and bookmarking tools like del.icio.us, Google Reader and StumbleUpon
• Most Comments are attracted by posts that were made directly via FriendFeed.
• del.icio.us does attract an equally large volume of comments.
• While Twitter is not far behind and receives a significant share.

Finally, for the services that attract the most comments, I have calculated the average number of comments per post:

The above chart says something important. On an average, original content like what one would find on blogs, still attracts the most comments. Followed by conversation focussed services like FriendFeed and Twitter. Finally, images posted on Flickr get a lot of attention too. Bookmark sharing sites are now lower in the ladder. See some trend here?

The attention and appeal one receives in social networks is a function of the original content you produce and the value, insights you bring to the table when you share new stuff.