Social Media Research Blog

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!

Feed Readership Growth Statistics

Arite! This is the post I lost earlier thanks to Typepad. There is something about a forced re-write. It never sounds as good as the original post. But here it goes any way:

I wanted to talk about how as social media enthusiasts we always assume that people understand what we are going all nutts about. Take for instance a simple question I have been asking my friends -- " Do you know what RSS is?". To my surprise, many of them did not use RSS or any feed reader. Upon showing them what RSS can do one friend commented that  she simply likes to "browse the Web" and RSS somehow boxes her.

Still, if Bloglines is any indicator there are a lot more people using feed readers. A study conducted in 2005 found that there were about 32,415 public subscribers and their feeds accounted for 1,059,140 public feed subscriptions. In 2006, we conducted a similar study and found that there were 82,428 users and 1,833,913 listed feeds they subscribed to. This dataset was also used to build the site "Feeds That Matter". In a long overdue attempt to revise the list, I ran another crawl of the Bloglines public directories. This time around, I found that there were about 209,125 users who subscribed to 1,875,027 feeds. Let us look at this data:
 
We find a significant increase in the number of people using Bloglines. There is a rise in popularity of feed readers, if Bloglines is any significant indicator. Next we look at the number of feeds:

Interestingly, even though the number of users significantly rose, the number of feeds are about constant.

Seen another way, here is a scatter plot of the above data (each dot corresponds to 2005, 2006 and 2008 respectively):

In my view, even though there may be 70 Million plus blogs, the ones that most people are willing to devote significant commitment in terms of adding them to their feed readers is actually around a Million or Two. I also think that the popularity of Twitter and FriendFeed around 2006-2007 time frame has changed how we find new information. Social filtering might work better for long tail content. This is only a hypothesis. It could just be an artifact of Bloglines. Moreover, Google Reader has a greater market share and perhaps FeedBurner has a more accurate measure of growth in feed readership.

Typepad Editor Woes

Unfortunately, I have to resort to posting about this on my blog rather than complaining to Typepad. I know I signed up for Typepad's beta version of the new editor, but frankly it is now getting to a point of frustration. Nothing is more annoying than spending 1/2 hour writing a post and the editor just kills the entire contents! Seriously SixApart -- you got to get this crappy, buggy editor fixed or scrapped! Aaargh!

"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".

Guest Post by Blazej Bulka: Social Networking That Went Wrong

(Guest post by Blazej Bulka. Thanks Blazej! Especially for translating and summarizing these articles for us non-Polish speakers..)

nasza-klasa.pl is currently the most popular social networking site in Poland. "Nasza klasa" means "our class," and the website is similar in design to classmates.com. It allows people to join schools, from which they graduated, and classes within schools. It also allows to build a social network by reconnecting to old friends, and post photographs.

Initially, nasza-klasa lacked any privacy controls because it was meant as a small, local project. After one year of existence, a sudden surge in popularity came. The number of registered users quickly exceeded 1 million, which started exponential growth. After a few months, the site had more than 5 million users. Currently, the site has more than 11 million users. (The population of Poland is roughly 40 million.) The unexpected growth choked the website, and the utmost priority of the developers was performance, and not privacy.

Right now, the website offers only basic privacy protection such as black listing, and restricting the visibility of the information in the profile. However, the biggest privacy problem are the users themselves. Most of them have had no prior experience with social networks before. The theme of the site is very encouraging to share as much personal information as possible. After all, the users are surrounded with their classmates, who are the people they usually trust, and with whom they shared their personal secrets in the childhood. They have not seen each other for multiple years; therefore, they are extremely willing to share a lot of personal information to make up. They also want their profiles to be easily searchable, in case another old friend should join the site in the future.

Unfortunately, many of the users are unaware that their information can be actually accessed by almost everyone, and not just their friends are interested in it. Moreover, because of their inexperience, they do not know that any information published on the internet may be copied endless number of times, changed, and may stay there forever. Sometimes, consequences of careless publishing of information on the site were quite surprising.

Below, I present an overview of five such unexpected uses of published information based on the articles published in press or on the internet (mostly in Polish).

1. Tracking users by debt collectors and law enforcement
(Source: "Nasza-klasa is a true treasury for debt collectors and law enforcement")
Debt collectors in Poland tend to massively use nasza-klasa to track the debtors. Nasza-klasa seems to be very good source of information for them. Personally, I also heard of cases when the debt collectors compare the friends' lists of the wanted person with the lists of their classmates. A classmate who is missing from the friends' list may indicate that a dislike existed between the two. Apparently, the debt collectors tried to exploit such dislikes to extract more information.

2. Police officers expose themselves and their colleagues
(Source: "Nasza-klasa.pl exposes police officers")

Irresponsible officers post at portal nasza-klasa.pl pictures from the educational institutions, from which they graduated. This reveals identities of undercover officers -- experienced officers say.

[..] The officers add themselves to classes, in which they studied [at police schools]; often, the classes specializing in police operations, investigations, or reconnaissance. And they add class pictures. "I hunt bad people" -- this is the profile information in "About me" section of Marek -- a graduate of a reconnaissance-operational police school in Pila. More experienced officers are disgusted by the behavior of the novices. At police internet forums, they write that such a database about police officers and their friends may be used to track a particular officer.

3. Police officers brag about their authority, and how they could abuse it
(Source:   "Give me their names, I will find them in the national ID registry")

A police officer from Grodzisk Mazowiecki brags on nasza-klasa portal that he can determine the addresses of his former classmates because he has access to the national ID registry (PESEL). [..] On the forum for the 2nd Elementary School, Jaroslaw B. writes: "If anybody of you has telephone numbers of our former classmates, please call them so that they sign up. I also have access to PESEL database. I need last names, and I will determine the addresses."
A former classmate asks him: "Jarek (i.e., Jaroslaw), where do you work, if you have access to PESEL database?"

The police officer responds: "the less you know, the better."
Another classmate writes: "(..) Now the whole school knows about Jarek's capabilities :) However, I propose not to use authority or even force to find our classmates :) (...) And maybe we should move our conversation to the class forum from the school's forum :):).)

In his profile, Jaroslaw wrote that he graduated from the Police University in Szczytno.

4. Intelligence agents should know better to be low-profile ... well, apparently not!
(Source:  "Our new secret service revealed themselves on the internet"; the article contains interesting pictures posted by the intelligence agents ...)

Pictures of six SKW (Military Counter-intelligence Agency) officers are shown without their names or rank. According to the SKW Act, this data is considered particularly sensitive. The officers themselves did not exercise enough care -- during their mission, they posted pictures showing them armed, both in uniform and disguise. They were posted in profiles registered with their real names. They did not mention that they are SKW officers, they only mentioned that they are officers of the Polish Military Force. But they did not try to conceal the fact that the pictures were taken in Afghanistan.

5. People brag about committing crimes and spreading hateful ideology
(Source: "Responsibility for 'Sieg Heil' (Nazi greeting) on Nasza-klasa")
One of the profile pictures is here and another "nazi" profile picture is here.

In February, the journalists from "Gazeta Wyborcza" noticed the son of the mayor of Leczna is one of the millions people who signed up with nasza-klasa. One of the photographs in his profile showed him with two baldly-shaved friends, with their right hands raised in the fascist gesture "Sieg heil". The faces of the two friends were covered with scarves with logo of the fans for soccer club Gornik Leczna.

[..] As the journal reports, the state prosecutor's office in Lublin has already contacted nasza-klasa.pl with an inquiry regarding the user profile. The investigators want to find out how long the picture was available on the site, and how many people may have watched it. Promoting fascist ideology may lead to a financial fine, and a penalty of imprisonment up to two years in jail.

Avg Size of a Web Document Compared to A Blog

I read this fascinating article (via Techmeme) that indicates that "the average Web page size has tripled since 2003". IMHO, average is still a problematic measure when dealing with Power-law distributions. I like the example that Clay Shirky mentions in the book "Here Comes Everybody":

If Bill Gates walked into a bar ... we'd all be Millionaires ......... ON AVERAGE!

Same holds when we are talking about web pages. Nevertheless, the study is quite interesting and provides a very good analysis of how Web content is changing.

This made me wonder:
"What is the contribution of Social Media content in tripling the size of an average Web page?"

While not a comprehensive study, I did a very quick back of the envelope experiment to see what this would be like. I fetched the top 400 Web pages, as ranked by Alexa. Similarly, I got a bunch of 400 blogs (from the Buzzmetrics dataset) and cached their homepages as well (wget -p <url>). Following is a graph that compares the sizes of the homepages from the two datasets.

Looks like the size of a blog is "on an average" is larger than the size of a regular Webpage suggesting that a good deal of the  increase in the size of a Webpage could be due to Social Media content.

I think a more detailed  study here would be insightful.

LiveBlogging Tools: CoveritLive

I had this idea, but turns out that CoveritLive does exactly the same thing and they have implemented it beautifully!

The current blogging tools usually fall short when trying to put up a liveblogging / running commentary post. The blogging software itself is supposed to be a reverse chronological listing of posts. Now when writing a live blog post of an event that the blogger is covering, what is usually needed is chronological listing of the news. (So its like an inverted blog within a post!). Mostly, people manage their own timestamps and formatting for the liveblogging post. This tends to be tedious and a distraction from the real event that one is trying to cover. Instead, CoveritLive is a great tool that handles all this for you!

The cool thing is that it also has features that support multiple authors, uploading media and rich formatting. Its a great idea and a fulfills a surprisingly obvious need. I think I am gonna use this for the next liveblogging event I cover. Do check it out!

SemanticHacker Challenge and Wikipedia Widgets

When writing a blog post, we create links to Wikipedia articles because it is an easy and quick way to provide information to readers, without having to go into too many details. It is not always possible to find, link or even know about all the articles that might be related to the post's topic.

Zareen Syed, one of my colleagues, recently presented a paper at ICWSM on "Wikipedia as an Ontology for Describing Documents". This paper talks about how Wikipedia articles can be used to associate the concepts with a given document. Over at SemanticHacker a similar approach is taken to find the "Simplified Semantic Signatures" for a document.  TextWise, is offering upto a Million Dollars in funding to any idea that can

Turn on the Power of Semantics

I liked their demo, API and tools they provide. Inspired by the effectiveness of Wikipedia in describing documents and my desire to play with widgets, I decided to mash these two goals together. If you look on the right column of this blog, you would find a small widget that displays the related Wikipedia entries for a given page/post and is powered by the SemanticHacker API. This was a quick hack and the system can be improved by

• focusing on the post content alone (right now I just pass the current page URL).
• Adding more features, like identifying people, places etc and highlighting them differently

While I dont think this by itself might qualify for a $1 Million challenge, I think there might be something interesting here. I have a couple of ideas around this and scant time to work on it. Finally, in true Web 2.0 spirit -- not sure what, if any, is the business model (I just built this for kicks; semantic hacker is looking for a bizplan from participants).

I dont think that the widget itself is ready for prime time -- it was an evening hack. But if you would like to play with it leave me a note in the comments and I shall provide a link to you so you can install it on your blog.