Social

Austin Gardner-Smith

Product Trends of 2010

| January 5th, 2010

From a product standpoint, it’s hard to deny that 2009 has been the year of the Twitter explosion. For better or worse, the simple microblogging service has changed the way we think about social media, ingrained the phrase “real-time” in all of our brains, and left our centuries-old grammatical traditions rotting in the attic, sacrificed in the name of 140-character uber-brevity.

Twitter, with its revolutionary open platform, has also forever changed the way web applications think about their data and the possibilities that come from sharing it, instead of hoarding it. The implications of this are vast and I suspect will be long-standing. Many have and will continue to wonder if this decision will have positive or negative effects on Twitter’s revenue model, and perhaps only time will tell. But it has made it nearly impossible to create a product strategy that doesn’t involve an API.

Though this may be the most important product influence to come from Twitter, there are a few more that I suspect will make their way into many of the new entries into the consumer internet market next year. To be sure, Twitter isn’t the only thing to cause these trends, but it’s almost certainly the most important. Without further ado, here are the things I expect to see in profusion over the coming year:

- The dominance of the stream. While we may have already seen the stream format of content consumption take the wheel, 2010 will be the year it achieves total domination. In recent months we’ve seen stream-based models mosey their way into almost every corner of the internet, even penetrating the veritable Fort Knox of Google search results pages. With new services springing up on this model left and right and more and more people getting comfortable with their format and aesthetics, I wouldn’t be surprised if more than one major media outlet (read newspaper) moved entirely toward a stream-based interface. And I think they’d all be smart to adopt some version of it – the box and column layout of print never translated well to the web.

- Asymmetric social connections. It used to be simple: I’m your friend, so you’re my friend, right? Wrong. Twitter and every other social media service have brought us into the era of one-to-many communication – the “follow” model. I can follow you, you don’t have to follow me. While at first glance it seems to make relationships less meaningful, it can often make them more useful. From location services to music streaming, asymmetric connections are making all kinds of social services easier to engage with and more valuable.

- Stackable networking. This is the phenomenon I like to think about as ‘everyone plays nice with everyone else,’ and it’s almost – dare I say it? – web socialism. But the web has always been a symbiotic culture, of sorts, and the emergence of open data platforms and the adoption of a few open (err, mostly open, thanks FB) protocols is ultimately something that creates more value for everyone. Sure, some of these companies are probably bleeding value by outsourcing their networks, in a sense, but if that’s the case they probably aren’t going to make it anyways. The community of applications gets more powerful and more efficient, and ultimately the users are the ones that win. All in all it’s a good trend and one we’ll see continue in 2010.

- Privately created, publicly available curations. Twitter Lists is the easiest example to cite here, but there are tons of other examples of this phenomenon: music blogs and services like blip.fm and last.fm, product wish lists like those we find on Amazon and now others, and the thousands of lists of books, movies – almost anything you can imagine. I think we’ll see lots of ways to curate and then publish personalized content materialize in 2010, and we hope Pinyadda’s a big part of that trend. By giving our users a unique way to discover content from all over web and easily share what they’ve found, we hope that we might make the process of consuming content on the web just a little more enjoyable and social in 2010.

What do you think about the future of the consumer internet? Are we destined for a fundamental shift in the way we experience the web, or just a continuation of the trends we’ve already seen? And what will come of Twitter? Leave your predictions in the comments.

Posted in Product, Publishers, Social | 476 Comments »

Chase Garbarino

Tearing Down Bridges in Order to Connect the World

| December 16th, 2009
I recently had an interesting conversation about how the Internet is changing the structure of people’s social graphs that I thought I would share here. I have written before about the concept of the “weak tie” (WT) in network analysis and the important role they play in the dissemination of information through social networks (link to Granovetter’s Strength of WT paper). My recent conversation was about the extinction of “bridges” online. A bridge is formally defined as an edge within a graph that if deleted, would cause its endpoints to to lie in different components of a graph. An easier way to understand a bridge is to see the image to the right – the members of the two groups would have no connections to the other group if Bill and Mike did not have a relationship. Their connection is the bridge between the two groups.
Building your social graph has become relatively frictionless online – the click of a button on a social network or the sending of an email creates a connection between you and another person, most of which would be classified as “weak ties”. However, as our graphs expand and we interact with more people online, the concept of a bridge is beginning to face extinction. Interaction used to have physical limitations before the Internet, and as the web and specifically social media evolves, our interactions with people are increasing exponentially. While bridges are far from being extinct – our world’s population is around 7B and world Internet population is around 1.67B as of June 2009 according to Miniwatts Marketing Group – it will inevitably happen at some point. In fact, once global internet use rises above 50-60%, the extinction of bridges will be expedited significantly.
So what does this mean for theories like Granovetter’s and the overall social structure with regards to the dissemination of information? Well, starting with the first part of the question, Granovetter’s theory will still hold. Good information will still pass through weak ties, since your strong ties typically have access to much of the same information that you do which does not lead to the discovery of new things. Granovetter simply used the concept of a bridge to validate a weak tie within a network, so future studies of information dissemination will have to find more sophisticated ways to determine the strength of people’s relationships – such as measuring the amount of times people interact through different platforms, how they interact, what they share, etc. The range of measurements on ties will increase, and we will see many more relational classifications. Many fascinating theories and insights will come from these advanced studies. We will begin to see a rapid increase in these starting in the next 2-3 years.
The effect on the overall social structure that the extinction of bridges will have is already starting to show. It is democratizing. It allows for the free and open exchange of information and ideas that in the past was stymied by physical restraints of delivery and production systems, as well as oppressive people with power over others – the production and delivery restraints and pretty much gone, and oppression will struggle to survive as the world becomes mores connected. I believe movements like those seen in Iran will become more commonplace as coordination and communication between peoples online is very hard to prevent.
Bridge extinction is bringing incredible collaboration and competition to just about everything in the world. Typically in the past bridges were symbols of connection and progress, however in the digital age we live in, it is the extinction of bridges that is bringing people from all over the world closer together for good.

Posted in Social | 625 Comments »

Austin Gardner-Smith

The Future is Social (It shared that with me)

| December 16th, 2009

Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures wrote a post a couple days ago on his popular blog called “Why Social Beats Search.” In it, he alludes to Mike Arrington’s post about the rise of automated content production and its effect on the larger content ecosystem. I encourage you to read both posts in their entirety and filter through the comments thread, but in the interest of brevity here’s the nut from Fred’s post, which is actually a part of a comment he left on Arrington’s:

“social tools will allow us to decide what is crap and what is not. our social graphs will help us. search engines won’t.”

This has a lot do with what we’re working on at Pinyadda and I think the point is worth commenting on. While we can complain about “information overload” as much as we want, and bemoan the emergence of hyper-velocity content production, the fact is that these things are here to stay. Ironically, the rise of machine-generation is leading many of us, Fred included, to use a large community of human entities (formerly known as “people”) as a giant filter that helps us navigate this torrent of information.

Content is being produced at a volume and with a velocity never before seen by humankind. In the past, neither our social graphs nor any machine filters would have stood the test of the barrage. But digital social networks have made our graphs larger; their power more formidable. As these networks begin to make their utility felt, we’re becoming more comfortable with the concept of sharing, moving beyond the perception of narcissism it once connoted. In this new ecosystem, sharing is not the cause of distraction and overload but the antidote; no longer the noise but the signal. A subset of the population has seen this transition coming, but the sea change is just now truly beginning.

The internet, having first rescued us from the relative drudgery of human-to-human content discovery (“no more asking librarians!” we screamed), has now thrown us back into each others’ digitally enhanced arms, begging for the same sort of verification we used to get from our Dewey-Decimal-savvy friends (“can someone please tell me this is reliable?”). Search is still a good tool for some things and will continue to be so for a considerable time. But I have to agree with Fred’s general philosophy that in the long term, the volume of content will make even the most advanced search a less effective tool than the social referral of our trusted sources. The great thing is that the internet is spawning new applications and platforms that allow us to leverage our social connections in more powerful ways than could ever have been imagined before.

So bring on the explosion of content. In the end, the result is more (and more powerful) human-to-human collaboration than we’ve ever seen. Make no doubt about it, this a the beginning of a revolution in how people find information and media, and it will be global, instantaneous, and inherently social.

What do you think about the future of content? Do you trust your social network to bring you relevant information, or do you think search and other technologies will continue to reign supreme? Let us know in the comments, or send me an email at austin[at]pinyadda[dot]com.

Posted in Publishers, Social | 263 Comments »

Austin Gardner-Smith

Capturing the Cat-Herders

| December 11th, 2009

In my last post, I mused philosophical about the segment of media that exists between large media outlets (many of the “Old” variety) and the platforms that enable simple sharing and dissemination of all forms of media – for simplification purposes, the Twitters of the world.

The gap between the publication of “iron-core” original content and simple retweets is filled by cacophony of voices that represent the professional and advanced amateur segments of the blogosphere. These are the folks producing consistent, medium-to-high quality content, often using other media as a starting point or central focus. Generally speaking, this is the “here’s my take on this issue” crowd.

The value of this type of media production is the context it provides for larger issues, or the refocusing of those issues for other populations. The context can be subject-based (“what this means for science”), geographically-based (“what this means for western Kentucky”), or demographically-based (“what this means for hemaphroditic cat-herders”). In each case, the original value of the content has been augmented by way of analysis and personalization. It’s good stuff.

From the standpoint of the media industry, however, it’s a serious problem. People are repurposing content that cost good money to produce and disseminating it to thousands of niche audiences that are hard to find, nearly impossible to market to. Potential advertising revenue is flying out the door and into the ether, newspapers are closing, the proverbial sky is falling.

But the problem isn’t that value of content is declining – in fact, I’d argue it’s increasing. Instead, media is faced with the gargantuan problem of creating a new system to capture the value of a fast-paced, diffusion-based content ecosystem. From my perspective, there are three things that need to happen in order for advertisers to take advantage of these niche audiences and begin capturing some of the value being created by the landscape of content production.

1) Content Standards – Somehow, some way, we need to create some meta-data standards that allow individual content items to be discovered. This is not, like the AP’s failed attempt, a measure to increase ownership and prevent dissemination. It’s exactly the opposite – a measure to ensure that the cat-herders can easily find content that’s relevant to them, and so the marketers and advertisers can find the cat-herders and make relevant offers that add real value to their lives.

2) New Aggregation Systems – As sources become more abundant and more diffuse, expecting each of these small content publishers to exist as a standalone destination site isn’t realistic. We need new aggregation systems that go beyond simple source aggregation (the RSS model) and include the ability to aggregate content by topic, using the meta-data referred to above and more importantly, leveraging the power of the social web to help like-minded users discover relevant content. Think Digg meets AllTop meets a personalized RSS bundle. This is, in some ways, the cable channel model, where shows are packaged according to interests and subjects (Golf Channel, HGTV, Food Network, etc) with one key difference: the content produces aren’t subject to those that control the pipes, allowing for much more niche-focused content to be produced and discovered by its audience. The critical mass necessary to support topical programming is orders of magnitude lower on the internet than on television. Getting readers in one place, even if content comes for a thousand of them, will allow more of the value to be captured.

3) Intelligent Ad Networks – Where are the cat-herders today? What are they reading? These are the questions that the next generation of advertising technology will have to answer. Matching static display adds with individual pages or sources is a losing battle and can never achieve the kind of relevance the web demands. The internet is increasingly becoming a narrowcast ecosystem, and trying to apply advertising techniques from the broadcast world is a lost cause – but this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Instead of doing demographic surveys and guessing about who might be reading a publication, the increasing specificity of content production is doing the targeting for advertisers. It’s no secret who is reading the cat-herder blogs, but the advertisers will have to create new systems to reach them. Following the social media pulse and gathering real-time traffic metrics will be key to helping future advertisers find out exactly where their customers are, when.

This is a complicated market to tap, but the players (there will be many) who help to create solutions for an industry in the midst of disruption will reap vast benefits while at the same time helping both producers and consumers of content.

Posted in Publishers, Social | 828 Comments »

Austin Gardner-Smith

Trends about Trends – Content Density and the Future of Media

| December 8th, 2009

With all of the recent debate over the future of news as we know it, I have been thinking about the way media coverage is evolving. The idea I’ve been mulling is something I’m calling “content density”, and it’s related to a number of terms we’re already familiar with, such as “popular,” “viral,” “trend,” “meme” and a host of other names that seemed to be getting used almost interchangeably. When boiled down to their most fundamental level, they deal with the relationship between two variables: volume and time. When relatively high volumes of content are produced in a relatively short period of time, producing high “content density,” the result is a “trend” (I’ll try to stick with that term for the purpose of continuity, though it certainly carries proprietary connotations which I don’t necessarily mean to imply). Represented graphically, it’s the peak of the curve.

It’s important to recognize here that I’m using the word “trend” to mean the high point of total exposure across all media. The actual thing being exposed can be nearly anything: a news article, a viral video, a song, a particular brand or product, an advertising campaign – whatever. If it can be read about, seen, listened to, and shared (by means digital or otherwise), it counts.

Trends have been around forever and will continue to be around for a long time. It’s human nature. But the internet is adding all kinds of new twists to the scenario represented in the graph above. For example, while the time axis might previously have been measured in weeks or months, it’s now more appropriate to measure in hours, days, minutes – even seconds. And while we might have once measured the volume of content in sources like magazines and newspapers, the atomic unit of content is shrinking almost constantly, leaving us to measure in articles, blog posts, reactions, comments, tweets, text messages, even individual keywords. Though it comes as no surprise to any of us, what this means is that we are producing more content than ever, faster than ever.

But if we’re interested in content density, we simply adjust the scale of the axes and our graph looks pretty much the same.* But when we take a look at the composition of that content, we find that things have changed dramatically. Where is this content being produced? Who is producing it? And what relative value does it all have? This is where things get interesting. My money bets on a breakdown that looks something like the following graph:


There are several possible variations on this representation, each can be supported by case studies that detail where and when media influence was founded, how it traveled, and which of these tranches carried the load. For this post, suffice it to say that these relationships are changing every day and new models are emerging constantly.

The graph shows traditional “Old Media” producing the least amount of content over the shortest amount of time. I think that current market conditions and changing information consumption patterns will continue to exert downward pressure on this segment of the content landscape. I believe some of these institutions will survive; others, it seems nearly certain, will not.

The second and biggest tier I’ve labeled New Media and Value-Add Social Media. This needs a bit of an explanation. By “New Media” I mean blogs and other blog-like publications that are filling the gap being vacated by traditional media outlets and serving smaller niche markets that previously existed only in much smaller, more diffuse communities. “Value-Add Social Media” refers to any number of media activities that include the sharing, repurposing, and responding to of other original media. In short, it’s any form of media that uses and explicitly references a previously produced piece of content as its basis for creation or main point of contention. Examples of this behavior can be found on almost every “social media” platform, from Facebook and YouTube to newer applications like Twitter, Tumblr, and Posterous (though I think Twitter behavior more often falls into the third tranche).

The third tier I’ve labeled Simple Sharing, and it’s meant to represent the behavior of sharing content without modification or addition. In this category I’d put most Facebook shares, almost all retweets and a good portion of ‘regular’ tweets, and various other sharing actions that don’t add significant value to the content being shared. This is a hugely important tier in the total content volume makeup and it will continue to grow taller over time. But it’s important to realize that this segment and the one below it are complementary – that is, they will help each other continue to realize growth. Much to Rupert Murdoch’s dismay, this growth has negative effects for the Old Media cohort.

My point from all of this is that a few simple rules of media still apply. Where media is being produced and consumed, people will gather. Where people gather, influence can be gained, and wherever influence is being gained, from Jakarta to Brooklyn, advertisers, marketers, and salespeople will arrive in short order.

Let’s return to the graph, shall we?

Google is making loads of cash by advertising against search results and established media outlets that have audiences large enough to drive high CPMs. With enough eyeballs, any destination media outlet can drive revenues with advertising, and Google is quite happy to be the conduit through which that revenue travels.

Twitter (and to some extent Facebook, though it’s a different beast) is leveraging the top of the curve to harvest data that it believes is valuable. This is the real-time search, trending topics bet that’s gaining a lot of steam lately. Time will tell if these wagers will pay, but at the moment there are a lot of very smart people who seem to think they will.

Then there’s the middle. No gargantuan captive audiences, no oodles of instantaneous reaction, but lots and lots of high-quality media being produced. The supply is so large as to drive the market price of this content to zero, and the breadth of suppliers and their lack of retention mitigates the effectiveness of broadcast marketing. In other words, individual entities find themselves in a conundrum: they’re not quite unique enough to generate subscription revenue, not quite big enough to live on advertising. But the content is there, and the composite audience is there. In the aggregate, this market may well be the biggest of all.

In my next post, I’ll elaborate on this concept and make an argument for the type of entity that’s necessary to take advantage of this opportunity and help create a new media ecosystem that’s distributed, egalitarian, and economically revolutionary.

*Data supports an argument that the volume of content is increasing at a significantly greater rate than its velocity, but for the purpose of this post, I’ll assume the rates of change are about the same. I’m more concerned with the composition of the total content volume, whatever its relative scale.

Posted in Social | 708 Comments »

Chase Garbarino

Man vs. Machine: Google, AOL and the Future of News

| December 7th, 2009

Earlier this month, there was word of Google filing a patent entitled Systems and Methods for Improving for Improving the Ranking of News Articles, which organized and ranked news links partially based on a quality score of the news source. Last week, I came across an article on Pinyadda fromMediaPost AOL Readies Its Robot News-Writing Army, which discussed a similar strategy AOL is implementing with regards to an automated, algorithmic process for picking news stories for the site. These are hardly the first two instances of automated editorial services – The Huffington Post has a very clever way of automating A/B testing for article titles. Editorial boards shifting from man-power to machine powered is coming rapidly and causing a great stir among original content producers. Anybody who has wifi has sure followed the Google-NewsCorp feud over the past several weeks.

While I can understand the frustration of pouring time and resources in to making content and have its value diminish quickly as content is pumped out at break-neck pace all over the web, I think those trying to fight the changes brought about by the Internet by insisting on pay walls and resisting distribution technologies such as Google have the wrong focus. Many journalists are nervous that real-time search may make them extinct, but I believe we will see quality producers who create content strategically for an on-demand world thrive as technologies emerge that help users organize the torrent of information and cherry-pick what is most valuable to them. Where content publishers need to be focusing their efforts is on developing better forms of advertising that align with the content they produce along with better information architectures that help drive user’s to valuable advertisements.
For example, as displayed in the graph below, sites such as NYTimes.com, WashingtonPost.com and HuffingtonPost.com receive collectively receive around 30 million unique visitors per month. This is an awful lot of traffic that is not effectively being monetized because of poor advertising practices and lack of innovation on behalf of the publishers. Take a trip to NYTimes or WashingtonPost and click on the Sports sections. I perused each for about five minutes and was only displayed one sports related advertisement – the rest were for cars and financial services. At the very least, news sites like the Times and Post need to be serving contextually relevant ads to begin monetizing their large amounts of traffic. Imagine if Google’s search ads weren’t relevant to the search query entered by a user – would they make nearly as much money as they do if this were the case? Of course not.
I will put together another post in the coming weeks digging in deeper to the architectural and contextual failures of online pubs such as the Times and the Post but before I do I would love to hear other’s thoughts on advertising you have seen on these sites. What do you think pubs need to do in order to monetize their traffic? Can these sites survive off of advertising alone?

Posted in Publishers, Social | 708 Comments »

Chase Garbarino

Facebook Starting to Understand the Value of Edges

| November 17th, 2009

Last week, MediaPost noticed that Facebook now allows advertisers to target friends of people who are connected to their Page, group, event or application. As long as user privacy is handled properly (you can block being displayed on ads in your privacy settings), this is a very smart move by Facebook. It shows that Facebook is starting to understand the importance of “edges” for advertisers for targeting different users within a network. An edge in graph theory (warning: embedded link is for nerds only) is simply a set of two elements – in this case the edge consists of the friendship connections of a user who is participating in some aspect of an advertisers Facebook presence.

As I have discussed on this blog before (here and here), a better understanding of graph theory, specifically with regards to edge values will be critical for developing better solutions for advertisers to disseminate information to users on SNS. While it is still a limited function, it gives people the first look of the future of advertising that will extend well beyond Facebook and to all web properties. By leveraging a user’s connections, advertisers can start to create “social micro-sponsorships” – meaning that an advertiser can use their regular, everyday supporters (i.e. you and me, my apologies if you’re not “regular” like me and are actually a big deal) as advocates of their products and services when advertising to these user’s social connections. In the future, Icy Hot won’t be limited to paying Shaq large sums of money to promote their product – rather, people who are Shaq fans and particularly are interested in his opinion with regards to analgesic heat rubs will will see Icy Hot referred them by the Diesel, but most of us will begin seeing Icy Hot referred to us Unlce Jim with the bad back who swears by it over BENGAY. Social micro-sponsorships can begin to transform ads towards becoming a form of word of mouth referral from people you actually know and have participated in some form with the product or service being promoted. What is yet to be accomplished is a way for this ad form to be produced through genuine social referral rather than sneaky tactics on behalf of different advertising systems to promote said sponsorship without user validation (cough, beacon). So far, the new option on Facebook’s ads seem to be relatively harmless, and if users begin to feel comfortable with this concept it will allow Facebook to dive much deeper in leveraging the power of user’s connections for the promotion of paid information. But trust will be key, which hasn’t been a particular strength for Facebook in the past, though my guess is they will be learning from their mistakes as they move forward.


Over the next few months, I will be working on developing some concrete definitions for some of the concepts and theories discussed on this blog with regards to social network behavior and analysis. If you are interested in collaborating on some of these ideas I would greatly like feedback and input from you – feel free to email me at chase at pinyadda dot com.

Posted in Social | 809 Comments »

Chase Garbarino

Social Network Content and the Lincoln MKS

| November 9th, 2009

As I was working on the whitepaper I am writing about the four “value components” of social networking sites (SNS) last night, I came across a situation while perusing Facebook that I had to write about now rather than wait to discuss it in the paper. The topic is regarding the content that SNS play host to that serves as the “real estate” upon which marketers pay to place their advertisements on and around. As you will see from the two pictures below, one a screen shot of an ad for the Lincoln MKS on Facebook and the other a screen shot of a Google search results page for the Lincoln MKS, the “real estate” is quite different.

As you will see, I have edited out the lewd gesture in the screen shot from Facebook, however if you have any imagination at all you should be able to guess what the picture shows. While in most circumstances this certainly is not content that would have a place on our corporate blog, I decided to go ahead and post the picture for learning purposes to prove a point and because if you speak with anyone from my generation they will tell you this kind of content isn’t far off from being par for the course on Facebook. In fact, this was one of several pictures along the lines of this kind of content that I came across in the same visit I considered using for this post.
Now just about anyone can see why the real estate on the Google search page might be more desirable than the real estate on the Facebook page for Lincoln as an advertiser here. For one thing, when advertising on Google you aren’t trying to sell a four-door sedan with Weir leather trimmed seats and an EcoBoost V6 engine to someone who is trying to figure out why this girl hasn’t untagged herself from this photo yet, let alone posted it in the first place. On the Google page however, the real estate is all high quality search results with matching information to the advertisements.
I like to think of content as the mechanism by which web properties channel and drive certain user behaviors. For example, Amazon wouldn’t be great at selling books if the content on their site did not contain information about books, such as reviews, pricing, vendor information, reading recommendations, etc. So after seeing the Lincoln MKS ad, I decided to go through Facebook and mark down all the page types with ads that I could find. Below is my preliminary list, please add pages I may have forgotten in the comments.
  • Profiles (Wall, Info, Photos, Boxes, and any other application tabs)
  • Groups
  • Pages
  • Applications (Including Facebook’s core apps such as links and notes)
  • Friend/People lists
  • News Feed
  • Search results pages
What I would be interested in seeing is the data on which page types have the highest click through rates on advertisements. My guess is the third party apps with specific information types driving a particular user behavior have the highest click throughs. Evidence of this could be the fact that Zynga, the second biggest advertiser on Facebook behind AT&T, spends approximately $2.5 million a month on Facebook advertising. Since users actively play Zynga games or other gaming apps while on Facebook, an ad for a new application would align with the content on those pages more directly than most other ads and pages found on Facebook. Again, I cannot say this for sure as this is simply a SWAG (scientific wild ass guess).
I believe moving forward allowing advertisers to have more control over what types of content their ads are paired with will be a good thing for social networking sites, specifically Facebook, in terms of developing better targeting for reaching users. What are your thoughts? What pages would you think are the best for reaching users through ads? Or do you think I am entirely off on this? Would love to hear your thoughts.

Posted in Social | 897 Comments »

Greg Gomer

Indexing Speed & Real Time Content

| November 2nd, 2009

First of all, I should mention that I’m a few days late in my post. Halloween is our favorite holiday here at Pinyadda, and I was entirely too busy playing tricks rather than treating you to Friday morning with Sliggity. So here’s my blog post for Oct 30.

As you know, the hype about the interweb nowadays is this thing dubbed “real time.” In context, I guess it makes sense – real time, meaning right now or when something really happened. But what if that thing never really happened and someone simply made up a rumor or published bogus content. My biggest qualm with this term is services like Twitter and oneriot utilizing it so heavily. Yes, when someone tweets about something it shows up right away on Twitter and with a slight delay on oneriot. However, I am more concerned with actual ‘real’ time ‘content’, meaning that it has value and can be verified. We’ll come back to this topic shortly.

Next item; indexing speed. I am running a test (as we speak) in order to measure Google’s content indexing speed and the time lapse until I receive a Google Alert. I will clock the time from the moment a content item is posted from this blog until it appears in Google search results and I receive my ‘Pinyadda” Google Alert. While I am doing this, you can entertain yourself with some side reading. Here is a post by Charles Heflin back in 2008 about clocking the speed of content indexing (I like how he touches upon page rank influence). To touch upon Alltop, an RSS-powered aggregator that (in their words) allows you to answer the question “what’s happening?” Well what’s happening when? Yesterday? 5 minutes ago? Right now? Well their answer is once every hour…boring.

Now take Pinyadda’s backend, which I like to call a ‘real’ time ‘content’ indexing service. I like it because you have to focus on real time, we are indexing new content within minutes of when the item is published, and then focus on real content, which is trusted and valuable to you.

Long enough here are the answers you have been waiting for:

2 minutes for search*
still waiting on google alert. UPDATE 2:52pm, what is the reason for the delay here?
not a controlled test b/c google owns blogger, will try again next week.

New sites this week:
The Blade, Tulsa World, Dayton Daily News, Press-Register, Akron Beacon Journal, Syracuse.com, Kentucky.com, Delaware.com, The News Tribune, Arizona Daily Star, Oakland Tribune, The Morning Call, Philly.com, The Advocate, Sarasota Herald Tribune, Wisconsin State Journal, The State, The Post & Courier, The Journal News. Phew that wraps up the top 100 News Publications by circulation.

What’s next? Tune in on Friday morning, Pinheads.

Cheers,
Sligs

Posted in Product, Social | 1,094 Comments »

Chase Garbarino

Expanded Thoughts on Twitter vs. Facebook; Value and Trust

| October 28th, 2009

The other day as I was searching to find the end of the Internet (no luck yet but I am still convinced it is flat), I came across a post on Danah Boyd’s (@zephoria for you Twitter-heads) blog titled Some Thoughts on Twitter vs. Facebook Status Updates. Clearly many other people saw this article as it has over 5,000 clicks tracked by bit.ly and from reading the comments it was apparent that the post resonated with many duel Twitter/Facebook users, as there was a litany of interesting comments about people’s personal use cases. Most of the conversation was focused around the types of crowds people interact with on the different networks, with my favorite description coming from Ian Kennedy who quoted Marry Hodder, “While Facebook is like having a dinner conversation with friends, Twitter was like getting up on stage at a nightclub on open mike night.” This is a great analogy and I think most people who use both networks would agree with the comparison.

What I find to be interesting about this Facebook vs. Twitter issue has less to do with who people are interacting with on the networks and what information they are sharing, but rather which types of relationship people find to be more valuable and more trustworthy. Now I know this is a bit like comparing apples and oranges since the two networks are used for sharing different information types (for the most part) with different networks of users, but let’s forget about these two issues and simply analyze this based on the two different graph designs of the networks.
It is commonly known amongst SNA geeks and many people who study social sciences that the most famous SNA paper published to date is The Strength of Weak Ties written by Mark Granovetter in 1973. Granovetter found that weak ties, basically more distant friends in his study, were positioned to be sources of new information more so than close friends. This idea comes down to the fact that you generally know about the same things as the people you spend a lot of time interacting with, and that new information typically disseminates through your weak ties (technically bridges), people who interact mainly with people outside of your network, who would be sharing different information.
Now considering the two social networking site’s (SNS) graph designs from a high level without getting into the different ways different people use the sites, let’s agree for arguments sake that one typically uses Twitter to connect with weak ties and one uses Facebook to connect more with strong ties (even though we all have “friends” on Facebook that we aren’t really friends with, but I will save the argument that a perfect SNS would have an infinite amount of relationship types for another day). So Twitter = weak ties, Facebook = strong ties. Immediately, the discovery of new and valuable information is more likely on Twitter, making it more valuable right? Well not so fast Ghostrider, some not so recent data (2008) for the real-time world that we live in found that far and away the most trusted source of information was “an email from someone you know“, with 77% of people validating this referral type. On the other hand, only 43% of people actually trust the social network profiles of people they know, making me wonder how much they would say they trust the information they receive from people they don’t technically know on a social networking sites (SNS) – i.e. a weak tie.
When Granovetter explored the topic in 1973, he considered only symmetric relationships as to not complicate his formal math experiments for his thesis (if you want to get into that go read the paper). Considering the expanded opportunity of developing new relationships on the Internet, it doesn’t really make sense to define a weak tie on a SNS the way Granovetter defined them in ’73 based on 1) amount of time 2) emotional intensity 3) intimacy (which he defined as mutual confiding) and 4) the reciprocal services which characterize the tie. Anyone who uses Twitter follows people with whom they are not intimate (based on Granovetter’s mutually confiding restriction) and by nature and purpose the services aren’t reciprocal, but the amount of time and emotional intensity for the follower could still be high, so how weak or strong really are the ties on these networks – sigh, the grey area expands.
This can all be boiled down to this: do you typically value a referral of some sort of information more from a symmetric “strong tie” on Facebook or from an asymmetric “weak tie” on Twitter? (Hold the information type constant in each situation). And secondly, do you trust a referral more from one tie more than the other? And without getting into semantics, yes the two are different (I did just kind of get into semantics huh?). Obviously there is no right answer considering it is somewhat of a subjective measure and a more complete argument would have to take into consideration different information types being shared, but I invite you all to share your own sentiments on the matter.
It is without a doubt in my mind that as we move forward and SNS’s evolve we will begin to make sense of some pretty amazing structural, “macro-level” patterns that happen in our society because of the data we will be able to extract from the microscopic relationships within social networks. I have said it before and I will say it again, we are only at the tip of the iceberg on this stuff.

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