Category Archives: Social Networking

Twitter as a predictor of movie popularity

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Fascinating paper by Sitaram Asur and Bernardo Huberman. Abstract reads:

In recent years, social media has become ubiquitous and important for social networking and content sharing. And yet, the content that is generated from these websites remains largely untapped. In this paper, we demonstrate how social media content can be used to predict real-world outcomes. In particular, we use the chatter from Twitter.com to forecast box-office revenues for movies. We show that a simple model built from the rate at which tweets are created about particular topics can outperform market-based predictors. We further demonstrate how sentiments extracted from Twitter can be further utilized to improve the forecasting power of social media.

PDF of paper available here.

Only connect…

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This morning’s Observer column:

My mother used to say that television had killed the art of conversation. One wonders what she would have made of Chatroulette, the current sensation du jour. It’s the implementation of a stunningly simple idea: live online chats with randomly chosen, complete strangers.

After logging in two frames appear on the left-hand side of the screen. The lower one shows you (or what your webcam is pointing at). The other is labelled “Partner”. Click “New Game” and you’re off. An image of someone or something appears in the upper frame.

“Connected,” says the status bar, “Feel free to talk now.” If you don’t like what you see, click the “Next” button and you’re instantly connected to someone else. And so it goes.

To anyone unused to raw, unmediated Net culture, Chatroulette will come as a shock…

Is Google Wave getting Buzzed?

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That’s the question being asked by by Tom Krazit.

If Google Wave eventually fails to live up to the promise and hype that accompanied its launch at Google I/O in May 2009, consider its demise an inside job.

Arguably one of Google’s biggest announcements of last year, Google Wave appears to be an afterthought among the tech trendsetters after the launch of Google Buzz in early February. Privacy concerns mostly laid to rest, Google Buzz is actually doing much of what Google Wave promised: collaborative discussion, media sharing, and social networking within an e-mail-like framework.

So what are Google customers and users to do with two Web communication platforms? Is Google Buzz simply a stepping stone to Google Wave, as TechCrunch suggested at its launch? Or is it something more, something designed to bypass its more powerful yet complicated corporate sibling?

Don’t expect a direct answer from Google. In all fairness, that’s because it simply doesn’t know: with Wave and Buzz, Google is essentially willing to let the best idea win.

“At the end of the day, we’ll find out what users want,” said Lars Rasmussen, engineering manager for the Wave project. “If we required every product we launched not to have any overlapping functionality, that would dramatically slow down our innovation.”

So: we’ll find out in due course. Personally I’m not convinced that users have a need for either Wave or Buzz.

The Facebook question

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This morning’s Observer column:

Is Facebook now “too big to fail”? I don’t mean in the sense that the taxpayer would have to pick up the pieces if it went under, but in the sense that the social networking service has achieved a position of such dominance in the online ecosystem that its eclipse is unthinkable. Is Facebook, in other words, the next Microsoft or Google?

The question is prompted by a couple of milestones recently passed by Facebook. The first is that it now has more than 400 million members. The second is industry gossip predicting that its revenues for 2010 will exceed a billion dollars. Other straws in the wind are estimates of the size of the “Facebook economy” – ie the ecosystem of applications, services and products that has evolved around the service; and the moral panics it now triggers in the mainstream media – a sure sign that they fear a competitor…

Chatroulette and common sense

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The moral panic du jour is about Chatroulette, and it’s tiresome. When reading some of the commentary that’s mushroomed around it I suddenly had the urge to see what danah boyd had to say about it, partly because she’s thought more profoundly about social networking than anyone else, and partly because she’s a rock of common sense in these matters. And, sure enough, she has a thoughtful post on her blog. Excerpt:

What I like most about the site is the fact that there’s only so much you can hide. This isn’t a place where police officers can pretend to be teen girls. This isn’t a place where you feel forced to stick around; you can move on and no one will know the difference. If someone doesn’t strike your fancy, move on. And on. And on.

I love the way that it mixes things up. For most users of all ages – but especially teens – the Internet today is about socializing with people you already know. But I used to love the randomness of the Internet. I can’t tell you how formative it was for me to grow up talking to all sorts of random people online. So I feel pretty depressed every time I watch people flip out about the dangers of talking to strangers. Strangers helped me become who I was. Strangers taught me about a different world than what I knew in my small town. Strangers allowed me to see from a different perspective. Strangers introduced me to academia, gender theory, Ivy League colleges, the politics of war, etc. So I hate how we vilify all strangers as inherently bad. Did I meet some sketchballs on the Internet when I was a teen? DEFINITELY. They were weird; I moved on. And it used to be a lot harder to move on when everything was attached to an email that was paid for. So I actually think that the ChatRoulette version allows you to move on with greater ease, less guilt, and far more comfortably. Ironically – given the recent media coverage – it feels a lot safer than any site that I’ve seen that’s attached to a name or profile with connections to people or identifying information. Can youth get themselves into trouble here? Sure… like in most public places. And there are definitely youth who are playing with fire. But, once again, why go after the technology when the underlying issues should be the ones we address? Le sigh.

There’s also an interesting interview in the New York Times with the kid who created ChatRoulette. What caught my attention is this excerpt.

Why did you start Chatroulette?
I was looking for a site like this, one that would let me chat randomly on webcams, and I couldn’t find it, so I thought I would try to build it.

How long did it take to build?
It took me three days. I built it on an old computer I had in my bedroom.

Then what happened?
Well, at first I showed it to my friends and they criticized it; they asked why anyone would want to use it. So I went onto a few Web forums and asked people to try the site, and I got 20 people to try it.

How many users do you have now?
Well, after the initial 20 users the site doubled and it continued to double every day since then. Last month I saw 30 million unique visitors come to the Web site and one million new people visit each day. It continues to multiply and I just couldn’t stop it from growing.

What were you thinking while this was happening?
I woke up one morning and checked my computer and saw all of these news articles about Chatroulette. I yelled to Mom to come and look at my computer. At first she was very nervous, but she doesn’t really understand it very well and asked me why I’m not going to school.

This resonates because I’m working on a book at the moment which is largely about how mainstream culture still doesn’t understand the essence of the Net. I’m arguing that a useful way to think about it is as a global machine for generating surprises. The Web was one such surprise; Napster was another; malware yet another. Chatroulette is a surprise in the same tradition: a smart idea implemented by a smart kid, at virtually light speed, using an old PC and in his bedroom! And without having to ask anyone’s permission. It’s an example of the explosive creativity enabled by the architecture. No wonder the Daily Mail (and New Labour) has such a hard time comprehending it.

Facebook bites back

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From today’s Guardian.

Facebook has threatened to sue the Daily Mail for damages after the paper wrongly claimed in a piece published on Wednesday that 14-year-old girls who create a profile on the social networking site could be approached “within seconds” by older men who “wanted to perform a sex act” in front of them.

The paper apologised in print today and online yesterday for the error, which the author of the piece, Mark Williams-Thomas, insisted had been introduced by editors at the paper despite being told it was wrong. In fact, Williams-Thomas – a retired policeman who now works as a criminologist – had been using another, unspecified social network.

But the giant social networking site, which has 23 million users in the UK alone, said that although the Mail has changed the headline of the article online – so that it now reads “I posed as a girl of 14 online. What followed will sicken you” – it had not at first changed the page title of the article online, used by internet search engines to index content, nor the URL of the piece, which is also a factor in search-engine indexing.

Location, location, location, and, er, burgle

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Much as I am touched by my online friends’ generous desire to let me know their locations at all times, I also wonder if their generosity is entirely wise. If they are letting the world know that they are currently at some interesting location are they not also letting others know that they are not at home? This thought has also occurred to the designers of Please Rob Me, a cautionary site.

The danger is publicly telling people where you are. This is because it leaves one place you’re definitely not… home. So here we are; on one end we’re leaving lights on when we’re going on a holiday, and on the other we’re telling everybody on the internet we’re not home. It gets even worse if you have “friends” who want to colonize your house. That means they have to enter your address, to tell everyone where they are. Your address.. on the internet.

Thanks to Gerard for the link.

Twitterature

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Smart thinking by two University of Chicago undergraduates. Some of the twittered books are really witty. I particularly liked their translation of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.