Days are coming...one day computer will understand our emotions ( anger, sadness, happiness, surprise and frustration) and treat us accordingly . Read more here.
Living VS Dead person in Facebook
I'd written an article (in Nepali) about the policies regarding dead person's email and their contents in email and social networking providers (available here) . Facebook, a popular social networking site, has a policy of making a person's page into memorial page after his death. When a person dies, his friends can make his page a memorial page after which the sensitive information like phone number, status updates etc. will be hidden.
As Facebook is new, number of living people in Facebook are higher than the dead people. But as it grows older, the trend will change. In an article it is mentioned that: "Perhaps someday there will be more memorial pages than pages for living people". So there will be more dead people in Facebook than living people huh !
Interesting Findings: Twitter text analysis
1. Verbs are much more common in their gerund form in Twitter than in general text. “Going”, “getting” and “watching” all appear in the top 100 words or so.
2. “Watching”, “trying”, “listening”, “reading” and “eating” are all in the top 100 first words, revealing just how often people use Twitter to report on whatever they are experiencing (or consuming) at the time.
3. Evidence of greater informality than general English: “ok” is much more common, and so is “f***”.
Source
Oxford-Twitter Analysis
2. “Watching”, “trying”, “listening”, “reading” and “eating” are all in the top 100 first words, revealing just how often people use Twitter to report on whatever they are experiencing (or consuming) at the time.
3. Evidence of greater informality than general English: “ok” is much more common, and so is “f***”.
Source
Oxford-Twitter Analysis
Regarding Twitter
All the contents in this blog posts are taken from this paper.
Twitter.com is a online social network used by millions of people around the world to stay connected to their friends, family members and coworkers through their computers and mobile phones. The interface allows users to post short messages (up to 140 characters) that can be read by any other Twitter user.
FRIEND : Here, a user’s friend is a person whom the user has directed at least two posts to.
Research Findings :
Twitter.com is a online social network used by millions of people around the world to stay connected to their friends, family members and coworkers through their computers and mobile phones. The interface allows users to post short messages (up to 140 characters) that can be read by any other Twitter user.
Users declare the people they are interested in following, in which case they get notified when that person has posted a new message. A user who is being followed by another user does not necessarily have to reciprocate by following them back, which makes the links of the Twitter social network directed.
Twitter users are able to post direct and indirect updates. Direct posts are used when a user aims her update to a specific person, whereas indirect updates are used when the update is meant for anyone that cares to read it.
Even though direct updates are used to communicate directly with a specific person, they are public and anyone can see them.FRIEND : Here, a user’s friend is a person whom the user has directed at least two posts to.
Research Findings :
- the number of posts initially increases as the number of followers increases but it eventually saturates.
- the number of posts increases as the number of friends increases
- the users who receive attention from many people will post more often than users who receive little attention.
- in order to predict how active a Twitter user is, the number of friends is a more accurate signal than the number of his followers.
- most users have a very small number of friends compared to the number of followees they declared.
- the cost of declaring a new followee is very low compared to the cost of maintaining a friends (i.e. exchanging directed messages with other users). Hence, the number of people a user actually communicates with eventually stops increasing while the number of followees can continue to grow indefinitely.
- users with more followers and friends will be more active at posting than those with a small number of followers and friends.
- a link between any two people does not necessarily imply an interaction between them. in the case of Twitter, most of the links declared within Twitter were meaningless from an interaction point of view. Thus the need to find the hidden social network; the one that matters when trying to rely on word of mouth to spread an idea, a belief, or a trend.
Conclusion:
In conclusion, even when using a very weak definition of “friend” (i.e. anyone who a user has directed a post to at least twice) we find that Twitter users have a very small number of friends compared to the number of followers and followees they declare. This implies the existence of two different networks: a very dense one made up of followers and followees, and a sparser and simpler network of actual friends. The latter proves to be a more influential network in driving Twitter usage since users with many actual friends tend to post more updates than users with few actual friends. On the other hand, users with many followers or followees post updates more infrequently than those with few followers or followees.
Real-time web search
I loved this article because it provided me an information about real-time web searching which is at its infancy. Real-time web searching means searching the real time content. For example, if a great politician dies, people generate content exponentially. Providing relevant information in real time is not so easy. Here I'm listing some of the points that I liked in the article.
- Now a delay of minutes on a breaking news story is unacceptable
- Real-time search starts by determining that something important is happening in, well, real time.
- Real-time search today is in its infancy, but it's the next stage in the evolution of Internet search.
- RT Searching should address how can the explosion of instant content produced by news organizations, blogs, and social-media users be organized so that results can be provided instantly
- what is "real-time" content?: -it centers on the concept of microblogging, or instant publishing of content to the open Web from social-media services. But in practice, "real-time search is still primarily Twitter search
- two components to real-time information: the actual content of the status update or post, and the link that is being shared within that update.
- Why web search providers want to buy Twitter's 'Firehouse' ?... Why spend the money? It's simply too difficult to crawl Twitter the way traditional search engines crawl the Web. All three major search engines (Y,G,B) at this point have inked deals to have Twitter push its content directly to them, saving those companies (and Twitter) time, energy, and money.
- deadlines are dead in the real-time world.
- So if search engines are to remain relevant themselves, they'll need to make sense of this content. And unless social-media networks are able to make their content discoverable, they won't turn into the types of content-discovery engines that their public-relations people like to imagine are already here.
- Expect the importance of real-time search to only grow over the next several years. For example, Yahoo's search deal with Microsoft does not include real-time indexing and ranking efforts, as the company believes that it's too important to give away.
- Oneriot.com - Assumes that the content based on on the premise that the link being shared within the status update is more relevant than the message itself.
- Wowd.com - An example search engine of real-time web searching
