Social Media Research Blog

Geolocation and Twitter: Realtime meets Local

Recently, twitter announced that it was going to add support for geo annotations for tweets. The original announcement is on twitter blog.

One fascinating thing about Twitter is how the community is involved in shaping the way the product itself evolves. There are several examples of how this happens:

• For conversations, the community evolved method of @ replies.
• Retweets have become a great way to pass information along and attribute it to the person who provided this information.
• Hashtags are becoming even more popular, with almost a handful of hashtags landing up on the twitter homepage everyday.
• Location is'nt new either. Many users already provide the location information in their profiles. In addition several formats have evolved where L: is the most popular method for indicating the current location of a user. This was partly popularized by the Twittervision application.

By standardizing the support for geolocation in twitter, the service provides developers with several opportunities to build applications that are geographically relevant. One possibility for twitter is to capitalize on the wealth of user generated geodata:

1. Think realtime meets local: It would be great for instance, to know that there is a live concert that everyone in my town is talking about right now!
2. Local Advertising: This could be one direction that Twitter might be heading towards.
3. Hyperlocal News and Activism: Social media is defining new ways to share hyperlocal news and build community involvement. Twitter is being used by several NGOs, blood banks and Local Police as a means to bring awareness and build campaigns. Applications built using geolocation information can accelerate involvement and social good at a local level.

BTW, here is an interesting stat about twitter users: From a large collection of twitter profile pages I find that roughly 60% of them have some URL associated with the profile. AND of those that have a profile URL, 92% already declare some location for themselves (irrespective of whether the location can be resolved correctly or not). While many worry about the fact that our location privacy is being lost forever; like any technology, it will ultimately be up to the community to come to a consensus on what is acceptable. For most part, I think that users are happy to share their location at some level of general granularity, in exchange of some (perhaps perceived) social value (meeting friends, finding local hangouts or for simply being a bit exhibitionist about what you are currently upto!).

Hit me on twitter

A shout out to Mistah F.A.B for the new single "Hit me on Twitter"! ROTFL..

Interesting tweetweek with Oprah, Ashton and @CNNbrk making sure that everyone is partying on twitter!

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! :-)

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.

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]

The Microblogging "Lucha libre"

OK, since the release of Google trends for websites I guess, this was a graph waiting to be posted ... and perhaps it already has been(?), somewhere. In any case, here is a graph of Microblogging "Lucha Libre" (free fight).

Interestingly, despite the frustrating downtimes Twitter has been facing lately, it still reigns supreme. Whats more, others are no where close! One thing to note is that for the last few weeks twitter's trend has been downwards. As much as I love Twitter, I am afraid that it may be losing its momentum, unless they turn around quickly. Personally, it seems like there are fewer conversations happening there right now.

What appeals me these days is FreindFeed. I find that there is a lot more to discover there than on Twitter. Plus the rooms feature is absolutely fantastic and the whole system is built around conversations. No downtime and a quick turn around time for development and new features makes the site exciting and fun. However, any social network is ofcourse only as attractive as the number of active friends you have on it. And despite its nifty toys, friendfeed still has a much smaller early adopter audience. Ditto with pownce and jaiku. Plurk seems like the new kid on the block.

The following graph shows the fight between all the other players, trying to dislodge Twitters dominating position.

FriendFeed looks like it is going strong! But, I guess only time will tell who will be the microblogging champion!