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

Come to work with our research group (SoNet - Social Networking)! Read more at http://sonet.fbk.eu/en/work_with_us

Scholarship available (~1300 Euros after taxes per months).
Deadline: 5 February 2010!

The research activity will be about identifying requirements for a social networking platform for Associazione Trentini nel Mondo Onlus (thousands of people from Trentino who are currently leaving abroad) and in proposing different platforms and adoption strategies, following their deployment (carried out by developers of the SoNet project) and
in evaluating them.
The scholarship is for one year and activity will start 15 March 2010.

I could not have explained it better! ;)

The SoNet FBK research group is happy to invite you to two talks by David Orban on April 8th in Trento.
The first talk, “The Open Internet Of Things”, will be about OpenSpime. It will be interesting if you are interested in sensors, positioning devices and memory, social, Web 2.0-style services in the real world, green technology, tech applied to the environment, open hardware and software, communications protocols, and future in general.
The second talk, “Preparing Humanity For The Impact Of Accelerating Technological Change”, will talk about the Singularity University, a recent new initiative funded by Nasa, Google and more.
I’ll wait you on April 8th!

First talk: The Open Internet Of Things
8 April 2009 - at 10.00 - Conference Room - Fondazione Bruno Kessler - Povo (TN) (up in the hills, see the map)
If we want the the forthcoming Internet of Things to flourish, the distributed smart sensor networks which take the current infrastructures for granted and base their necessarily autonomous activities on massive data collection, then we have to adopt an open architecture. Only an interoperable approach to the design of the next generation of hardware and software systems is going to be able and leverage the dramatic effects, and express the value to human civilization that the network of tens, or thousands of billions of new objects, the spime network is going to shape. For more info see http://www.openspime.com

Second talk: Preparing Humanity For The Impact Of Accelerating Technological Change
8 April 2009 - at 15.00 - Conference Room - Fondazione Bruno Kessler - Trento (downtown, see the map)
The impact of advanced technologies on our societies is becoming more and more extreme, exposing new tensions in our models of human relationships, learning, and values in policies, politics, and business. While relinquishment has been recommended by some, it appears that the way ahead will be the use of more, not less technology, as billions of people aim to achieve a high quality of life for themselves, and their children. The Singularity University, recently formed on an open, international and interdisciplinary approach employs an advanced curriculum to analyze how the future leaders of enterprise, culture, and science can best prepare to face the serious challenges ahead.

About the speaker:
David Orban is an entrepreneur and visionary. In recognition of his lifetime contribution to exponentially advancing technologies, he has been honored with the position of Advisor and European Lead to the prestigious Singularity University.
He is a Founder and Chief Evangelist of WideTag, Inc., a high technology start-up company providing the infrastructure for an open Internet of Things. David cuts across the limits of deep specialization to contribute to the new renaissance. He explains, “My vision is at the crossroads of technology and society as defined by their co-evolution.” David Orban’s personal motto is, “What is the question I should be asking?” This concept is his vehicle to accelerating cycles of invention and innovation in order to build the new world ahead.

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.

There are some aggregators for Call for Papers. The ones I use for finding conferences and journals are:

• EventSeer
• WikiCFP

Check them. The amount of conferences organized every month is really amazing!
Do you use other services? Maybe with a recommender system in it so that they are able to directly suggest you the conferences relevant for you?

Wednesday October 22th 2008, in Trento there will be the kickoff meeting for the LiveMemories project, Active Digital Memories of Collective Life (in which I’m involved). The public workshop is open to everybody (it will be at least translated in Italian).
UPDATE: Now with blog in Italian http://lamemoriaaltempodiinternet.wordpress.com.
Check the program of the workshop or read it here below copy and pasted. There will be Ricardo Baeza-Yates, Director of the Yahoo! Research labs at Barcelona speaking about the Impact of Social Networks, Alessandro Cavalli - Professore di Sociologia, Università di Pavia, speaking about “La Costruzione Sociale della Memoria Collettiva”, Simon Delafond - Web producer - BBC, UK speaking about “BBC Memoryshare initiative” and presentations from the project partners and a collective discussion about “Quale modello per la libera circolazione della Memoria?”

I’m really looking forward for the event! If you are interested or you are coming, please let me know! See you!

Continue Reading

Some weeks ago Facebook released its source code as Free and Open Source Software.
I’m very curious about the consequences of this action. Initially I was to suppose this choice would have been a tsunami in the social networking sites world, but I haven’t found many mentions of this around. So I tried to look around and to answer the question “Which were the consequences of Facebook making its code opensource?”.
I don’t have a clear idea, but it seems very small consequences.
How many clones of facebook popped up? Are they used? I haven’t found any facebook clone worth mentioning.

How many people downloaded the code? How many code patches were provided to Facebook? I guess one of the biggest intended consequences was this one: Facebook getting bug fixes, and chunks of code or suggestions on how to improve performances. Also, it is now easier, I think, for Facebook hiring new developers because they can know them in advance from the commits and suggestions they write about Facebook code. But for example there have been any exploit from people reading the code and finding weaknesses? Probably not, it is much more meaningful, if you discover a glitch to send an email just to Facebook to explain it, there is a chance Facebook might want to hire you as security expert.
Overall, Facebook is better off or worst off after the decision to release the code as Free Software? I was not able to get too much information about this and I’m a bit surprised. Actually I haven’t yet downloaded the code in order to test it. I was about to do it but then for Webvalley we decided to use BuddyPress so “check Facebook code” is still in the todo list.

Some interesting links which might be worth checking in more detail: open source projects on facebook wiki, the portal for developers on Facebook code (interesting!), Project Cassandra: Facebook’s Open Source Alternative to Google BigTable, the fact Google recently released its Protocol Buffers as open source, Facebook did it much earlier with Thrift.

So, did I miss something? What do you think were the consequences of Facebook opensourcing its code?

From an email by Barry Wellman to the INSNA (International Network for Social Network Analysis) mailing list (reposted here because email is where knowledge goes to die)

Juan-Antonio Carrasco, Barry Wellman and Eric Miller. 2008. “How Far - and With Whom - Do People Socialize? Empirical Evidence about Distance between Social Network Members.” Transportation Research Record: forthcoming.

"Connected Lives: The Project" (Barry Wellman and Bernie Hogan and Kristen Berg, Jeffrey Boase, Juan-Antonio Carrasco, Rochelle Côté, Jennifer Kayahara, Tracy L. M. Kennedy and Phuoc Tran).This first paper from the Connected Lives project provides a preliminary view of the many linked paths that our research is following. The Connected Lives project is our third study of East York and the first to take the Internet (and other ICTs) into account.
[Chapter 8 in Networked Neighbourhoods, edited by Patrick Purcell. London: Springer, 2006.]