Social Media Research Blog

Share the Love

What makes social media so compelling is the ability to share information with others. ShareThis is a cool widget I use on my blog to enable users to share the posts with others and to easily post it on different sites like digg, StubleUpon, FriendFeed, etc or via email. Recently ShareThis commissioned a study conducted by Forrester Research, that analyzed the sharing patterns across a number of users. Following is an excerpt from their blog post:

High level findings:

• Email is still primary channel for sharing -- 69 percent of adults cite email as the primary source of receiving information
• Less than one-third of online adults said they learned about the new content from generally shared content sources such as YouTube, a wiki, or social networking sites
• 64 percent of adults and 60 percent of youth still use the traditional cut and paste  method to share a URL or information
  • However this is not trackable by publishers, making sharing by email tough to measure
• Though the primary motivation for sharing differs, 81 percent of adults claim that, when cutting and pasting content to share, they share to help others - believing that a person will benefit from the information they share

Surprisingly, email is still the primary channel for sharing and what was more interesting is that people still do it the old fashioned cut-and-paste way. The neat thing about using a tool like ShareThis is that it gives you a "one-click" way to share something with your network via email, IM or on any social media site. I somehow think that email is not quite the right format for sharing links and interesting articles. I like email to be more about actionable items: but then that is just me. I think FriendFeed, Twitter or Facebook is more suited for sharing links and other cool stuff.

There are a number of interesting nuggets on sharing demographics and differences in sharing behavior based on gender. From the post:

• The motivation for sharing amongst men differs than those of women
  • In general, men are more likely to share something to appear cool or to look like an expert
  • Men more likely to share product recommendations and video than women; 77 percent of adult males and 74 of younger males shared news and web links
• Women are more likely to share products or ideas they like via easy or direct sharing methods
  • Women strongly favor send to a friend feature; more than 60 percent of adult woman use the send to a friend feature on websites
  • Women are more likely to share directly, especially via cell phone texting
  • Adult women tend to face more obstacles when trying to share content online, with 40 percent saying they could find no ways to share the information directly from the Web page

I read through parts of the report I had received from ShareThis -- lots of nice stats there. The full report can be requested from [email protected] (Unfortunately, I cannot post it directly here.)

Wikimatix: Wikify and Disqus Hot Search Keywords

Introducing WIkimatix.com: A mashup for wikifying Google Trend's top search keywords. Moreover you can "disqus" and comment on recent hot topics being searched for right now!

Yesterday, while taking a break from writing my dissertation I was looking at the top search terms over at Google Trends. Few things immediately came to my mind:

1. I am a Wikipedia and News junkie -- no surprise there! Sometimes, I do not know a whole lot about the top search trerms and have to look up the wikipedia entry to refresh my mind about the topic or person. BTW, have you noticed that so many of the top terms are named entities? I also spoke about this in my earlier post on Intrestingness and Feshness in Search.
2. Google trends does not have an ability to discuss. I wanted something where I could comment on the terms in a digg like fashion? Perhaps talk to everyone about what I think of this whole "Big foot thing in the news". (Tip of the hat to the awesome widgets powered by Disqus)
3.  Finally, I would like to know exactly why something is in the News or has made it to a top 100 list. I just want a one or two line snippet/summary and a pointer to the most authoritative blog post/news piece about this keyword. While Wikimatix currently does not provide this -- it is something that can be easily extended.

Well, this was a quick hack ( ~150-200 lines of code; ~2 hours) and is meant to be a prototype/proof of concept idea. I think there can be a lot one can do with the idea of capturing the buzz using query logs and having discussions around the search terms and the latest news.

Note: Wikimatix updates itself every two hours. The disqus pages are associated with the individual search term and thus can be accessed even after the term is no longer buzzy.

Some possible improvements that might be good:

• Group related search terms like "big foot", "big foot discovery" etc
• Name disambiguation can be a problem. Sometimes the right person's Wikipedia entry is hard to determine without the context of the story.
• Simple heuristics might work rather well to identify the top categories that are in the news. For instance, today it is all about "Big foot", "Olympics" and a few other major events.
• For search terms, there might be a good video, photograph associated with it. It would be cool to display that as well.

Google Calendar Feature Requests

I have started a Google Calendar to keep track of events and conferences in Social Media. Some of you may have already subscribed to it. However there does not seem to be any way for me to tell exactly how many people are using it!

Feature Request #1: Show Number of Subscribers for a Calendar This would certainly be quite a useful feature to have and as it turns out I am not the first person to request for this. 

Feature Request #2: Allow Tagging; Sharing Calendars a User has Added Calendar as a shared resource for planning and organizing events in a community is an important tool. However, the calendar is still not as social as it can be! You can easily find new calendars to add. But what about tags? How about sharing? I would love to be able to create a tag cloud of events and a public list of calendars I have added.

Feature Request #3: Social Event Notification If a user has made his or her events public, then why not show that users friends an update on the event she plans to attend? I think that Dopplr does this at some level but given that Google Calendar is a good place to consolidate all the events and schedules and GMail is our universal contact list -- why not combine it to make it more social?

Anyways, these are just a few quick thoughts I had about Google Calendar. It is a great tool and has made my life much easier. To be fair, I have never used outlook so perhaps my view may be a bit skewed.

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]

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.

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.