Paolo blog: Ramblings on Web2.0, Trust, Reputation, Recommender Systems, Social Software, Free Software, ICT4D and much more

According to stats published by Facebook, Facebook has currently 400,000,000 active users. This would make it the third most populous country in the world, after China and India.
Do you bet it will overtake India’s population (1,166,900,000)? In how many months?
(picture adapted from this image)

From NYTimes A Facebook Christmas Love Story, it seems loneliness is contagiousness and spreads to your social ties on social networks (just as another study has found about spreading of happiness and spread of obesity and smoking behaviour).

An article in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology presented the argument that feelings of sadness and isolation can spread from the folks who are feeling them not only to their friends but also to their friends’ friends.

Every research finding is so ephemeral nowadays. Maybe what we are doing is not science after all? Or maybe it was like this even years ago but simply it was slower, i.e. it took 20 years to get a new study confirming or not the previous one. Or better, every new study is just a small contribution in an ocean of possibilities and many of them will crystallize over time into “our comprehension of the Reality”…

From Facebooking Won’t Affect Your Grades, Study Finds. At Least Until Next Month’s Study Tells You It Will

It seems like every week there’s a new study about whether or not the sky is falling because of Facebook and other Web sites of its ilk. Now the University of New Hampshire offers new research that falls squarely in the sky-is-not-falling category, at least not when it comes to the impact of social media on students’ grades.
A survey of 1,127 University of New Hampshire students pursuing various majors found no link between how much time they spend Facebooking, tweeting, and YouTubing and how well they do in college.
The breakdown: 63 percent of heavy social-media users got high grades, compared with 65 percent of light users. The findings held up for academic slouches, too. Thirty-seven percent of heavy users got lower grades, compared with 35 percent of light users.
The university’s message: “Parents worried that their college students are spending too much time on Facebook and other social-networking sites and not enough time hitting the books can breathe a sigh of relief.”
Or not.
In April, a researcher at Ohio State University found that students who use Facebook reported earning lower grade-point averages than nonusers of the social-networking service. Then again, the researcher said in an interview with The Chronicle that she didn’t have enough data to determine whether Facebook use causes students to do poorly.
What research can prove is that when those students get married there’s a good chance Facebook might help cause their divorce. At least that’s the story until next month, when someone else is bound to tell us how Facebook is saving relationships.
Oh wait, someone already did.

Very clever use of Facebook by Ikea. Ikea created a profile for the director of a new store. He uploaded many photos of Ikea-furbished rooms. The first to tag her name over a product won it! Very clever!
Very cheap campaign (from Ikea point of view) and very viral!

Via woweffect

Great paper by Mikolaj Jan Piskorski (Harvard Business School) “Networks as Covers: Evidence from business and social On-line Networks” . Amazing which patterns everybody can unveil when (almost) all out social interactions leave electronic trails everybody can collect and analyze! Amazing and of course scary!

This paper proposes that networks can act as covers which allow actors to participate in markets while maintaining a plausible excuse that they are not. Most generally, a cover is any action which allows ego to signal to alter that he is of type A when in reality they are of type B.

Evidence from another network (the paper does not explicit which one but says “the network has been designed largely for people to keep in touch with their friends, and not for business purposes. Results indicate that almost 70 per cent of all activity on this on-line network is related to viewing profiles and pictures of others.”, so I might guess the network is Facebook, wondering why Mikolaj didn’t write which is the network… ): Men in particular look at pictures of women they do not know. Furthermore, regression analysis shows that men who publicly declared themselves to be in a relationship are more likely to examine profiles and pictures of women they do not know. Consistent with the view of networks as covers, (…) men in relationships and with large on-line networks are more like to look at women they do not know. In contrast, single men with large networks are more likely to look at women they do know. Implications for network theories as they pertain to organizations are explored.

Credits for picture: pagedooley from Flickr Creative Commons released

I presentation I gave on June 10th 2009 at Trentino Sviluppo, local agency in charge of developing local businesses. It is about the how and why (and why not) of using social networking systems such as Facebook or Twitter for small businesses. The slides are released under Creative Commons By-Attribution so share them, play with them, tear them apart! The only exception are the two photos below for which I don’t know who the copyright holder is. If you know please get in contact with me. Thanks!

Aggressive and creative marketing campaign by Burger King.

What would you do for a free Whopper? Now is the time to put your fair-weather Web friendships to the test. Install Whopper Sacrifice on your Facebook profile, and we’ll reward you with a free flame-broiled Whopper when you sacrifice 10 of your friends.

InsideFacebook reports that in one week, the app was used by 82,000 people to delete over 230,000 friendships on Facebook. Then Facebook placed some restrictions on the application and Burger King decided to conclude their campaign. In fact, Burger King got what it wanted: attention! In few days!
Creative use of social networking marketing!!!

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

Facebook pushes Facebook connect

Google pushes Google Friend Connect

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

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

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.

Interesting pie graphs highlighting demographic differences between Facebook, MySpace, Flickr and LinkedIn in terms of key demographics (gender and age).
From BuzzFeed.