Monthly Archives: March 2009

Links for 2009 03 25

One identity (system) to rule them all

Lots of competition and activities for becoming the defacto identity system for the future Web.

faebook connect
Facebook pushes Facebook connect

Google friends
Google pushes Google Friend Connect

data portability
While MySpace Embraces DataPortability, Partners With Yahoo, Ebay And Twitter.

one ring
One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.

Flickr was a game but users drove it into a photo sharing site.

The typical example of a socio-technical system heavily influenced by its user (prosumer!) is Flickr. Maybe not too many people know that in the beginning Flickr was a Web-based game, called Game Neverending (GNE). Best summary of early Flickr history I found is in this interview.

The original interface of GNE (see below) was heavily based on Instant Messagging. You could drag game objects into an IM conversation and it would send to all the other members of the chat an image of the object.
THAT was the key feature! The creators of GNE thought “what if instead of game objects, you could drag and drop other digital objects into these conversations, like Word documents, or PDFs? Or maybe photos?”
So the first version of Flickr was just a stripped-down Game Neverending interface, with photos instead of game objects.

I think this is the perfect example of user-driven design. “I created a web game site –> users use it for sharing objects –> then I create a site for sharing photos.”

A screenshot of Game Neverending (from GNE Museum)
GNE flickr screenshot

And there was also a Social network explorer!

social network explorer

social network explorer

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Data mining for judging the values of employees and how to stop it

BusinessWeek publishes an interesting article on how data mining and social network analysys (SNA) are starting to be used by human resources department in order to automatically determine the value of each employee.

The strong-worded beginning (speaking about a social network graph) is:

Each circle represents an employee. Those who generate or pass along valuable information within the company are portrayed as large and dark-colored. And the others? “On a relative scale, they don’t add a hell of a lot,” says Elizabeth Charnock, chief executive of Cataphora, the Redwood City (Calif.) company that carried out the study for a client. The upshot for managers faced with a mandate to downsize: Small and pale circles might be a good place to start cutting.

Is there a way to stop this? I think the correct way is to inform employees precisely about:
* the information the tech tools they use (email, intranet, …) they use is generating about themselves and which information is stored and how
* the use the management can do and cannot do of this stored information (for example, if it can be used for anonymous statistical analysis of performance of tech tools).
* their right to ask the removal of any information about them from the logs (in Italy there is a precise law that gives you this right).

It is surely a tricky topic but the possibilities of control and tracing will only increase with time so it is important to start discussing it asap. What are your thoughts?

International politics 2.0 and … Obama is a genious!

Obama left a message on YouTube for all Iranians!
Points to note:
* emphasis on directly (“speak directly to the people and leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran”)!
* message posted on Youtube!
Now imagine the President of Iran, Ahmadinej?d, leaving a directly video message to all Americans on the web!!! We live in interesting time, don’t we?

Download .mp3, .mp4, or .mp4 with Persian subtitles  |  Read the transcript in Persian

In particular, I would like to speak directly to the people and leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Nowruz is just one part of your great and celebrated culture. Over many centuries your art, your music, literature and innovation have made the world a better and more beautiful place.

So in this season of new beginnings I would like to speak clearly to Iran’s leaders. We have serious differences that have grown over time. My administration is now committed to diplomacy that addresses the full range of issues before us, and to pursuing constructive ties among the United States, Iran and the international community. This process will not be advanced by threats. We seek instead engagement that is honest and grounded in mutual respect.

There are those who insist that we be defined by our differences. But let us remember the words that were written by the poet Saadi, so many years ago: “The children of Adam are limbs to each other, having been created of one essence.”

Following the complete transcript:

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Google Opens School of Personal Growth

Google wants to help Googlers grow as human beings on all levels. Emotional, mental, physical and ‘beyond the self’… (This) is why Google University instituted the School of Personal Growth, perhaps the first of its kind in a large corporation. We don’t just pamper Googlers, we want to help them fulfill their full human potential.”

With classes available entitled “The Neuroscience of Empathy” and “Search Inside Yourself,” Broecker said the end goal is to help Googlers be more creative by helping them be more relaxed and open to new ideas.

I found it as I was listening to one of the podcast of AudioDharma by Marc Lesser which lectures a course named “Search Inside Yourself” at Google. Quite a title! And I’m dreaming of setting up something like the School of Personal Growth in the research institute where I work

From webpronews.

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Insights into relationships on Facebook

Interesting blog post by Cameron Marlow, research scientist at Facebook over at overstated.net: Maintained Relationships on Facebook.

They start from a simple question: is Facebook increasing the size of people’s personal networks?

They looked at the communications of a random sample of users over the course of 30 days and defined networks in 4 different ways:

  • All Friends: the largest representation of a person’s network is the set of all people they have verified as friends. In research papers this number ranges between 300 and 3000. In facebook on average every users has 120 friends.
  • Reciprocal Communication: as a measure of a sort of core network, we counted the number of people with whom a person had had reciprocal communications, or an active exchange of information between two parties. In research papers, this numbers ranges from 3 as individuals with whom I can discuss important matters (for Americans) to 10 or 20 as ongoing contacts at a university.
  • One-way Communication: the total set of people with whom a person has communicated.
  • Maintained Relationships: the set of people for whom a user had clicked on a News Feed story or visited their profile more than twice. This is a sort of over-the-shoulder relationship, I’m “following” (this is the relationship type) the target user without she necessarily knowing it. This is a new type of relationship (not really available says 50 years ago), similar to reading the flow of thoughts of someone via a blog or just looking at the pictures uploaded on Flickr.

An interesting observation: “as a function of the people a Facebook user actively communicate with, you are passively engaging with between 2 and 2.5 times more people in their network”.

And another one: The stark contrast between reciprocal and passive networks shows the effect of technologies such as News Feed. If these people were required to talk on the phone to each other, we might see something like the reciprocal network, where everyone is connected to a small number of individuals. Moving to an environment where everyone is passively engaged with each other, some event, such as a new baby or engagement can propagate very quickly through this highly connected network.

facebook stats

Social Networks and Web 2.0 papers at WWW2009

The recently announced list of accepted papers at WWW 2009 conference is at the end of this post. I’m particularly interested in the track “Social Networks and Web 2.0” and in the following papers:

  • Ulrik Brandes, Patrick Kenis, Juergen Lerner and Denise van Raaij. Network Analysis of Collaboration Structure in Wikipedia
  • Yutaka Matsuo and Hikaru Yamamoto. Community Gravity: Measuring Bidirectional Effects by Trust and Rating on Online (mentioning the Epinions dataset, maybe the dataset I released on Trustlet)
  • Shilad Sen, Jesse Vig and John Riedl. Tagommenders: Connecting Users to Items through Tags
  • Jérôme Kunegis, Andreas Lommatzsch and Christian Bauckhage. The Slashdot Zoo: Mining a Social Network with Negative Edges
  • Cristian Danescu Niculescu-Mizil, Gueorgi Kossinets, Jon Kleinberg and Lillian Lee. How opinions are received by online communities: A case study on Amazon.com helpfulness votes
  • Meeyoung Cha, Alan Mislove and Krishna Gummadi. A Measurement-driven Analysis of Information Propagation in the Flickr Social Network

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