Is Facebook a Rip Off of 16th Century Academics
January 28, 2013
To us, it seems Facebook has taken over the Internet. The giant social network that promotes sharing data and creating a web of relationships is a real innovation, rising above the crowd online and off. Or is it a ripoff of a 16th century monk? After reading “Facebook Concept Used by 16th Century Scholars, Researchers Discover” on Phys.org, we are not so sure.
The article states that our obsession with social networking is nothing new. Researchers say this idea of creating groups or networks and then exchanging information dates back to the 16th century where young scholars created nicknames and developed mottos and emblems to form groups where information was shared. We learn:
“Professor Jane Everson, Principal-investigator, said: ‘Just as we create user names for our profiles on Facebook and Twitter and create circles of friends on Google plus, these scholars created nicknames, shared – and commented on – topical ideas, the news of the day, and exchanged poems, plays and music.
‘It may have taken a little longer for this to be shared without the internet, but through the creation of yearbooks and volumes of letters and speeches, they shared the information of the day.’”
The discovery was made when a team of academics were cataloging the works of the Italian Academies. Too bad for the monks, this copycat system is alive and thriving with no thanks to these early scholars. We think the similarities between our societies is fascinating and salute these early monks for the innovation.
Andrea Hayden, January 28, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
Facebook Graph Search Finally Arrives
January 22, 2013
Graph search is finally here; the highly anticipated answer to Facebook’s abysmal user search experience. The announcement leaves users and experts alike wondering about the functionality, but on the surface, hey, you can now search Facebook. ComputerWorld offers a nice write-up in, “How Facebook Built Graph Search and What it Means to Social Media.”
After dealing with the user experience side of the coin, the discussion turns to the developer side:
“To create Graph Search, the engineers likely used some combination of open source tools that are available on the market, combined with internally-developed code written specifically for Facebook’s extremely unique use case, predicts Jeffrey Kelly, big data expert at The Wikibon Project. Tools like Apache Lucene Solr and Cassandra- used by Netflix to index its movie library in Amazon Web Service’s cloud. ‘FB doesn’t use straight off the shelf software and hardware,’ he says. ‘They can’t, they either customize open source technology or develops it in-house.’”
Open source continues to make headlines, and Facebook is of course a highly visible open source user. Apache Lucene supports a number of other highly successful products including an open source enterprise leader, LucidWorks. Enterprise search doesn’t always make the big flashy headlines, but it is an important lynchpin of successful, dependable business, and therefore a necessary investment.
Emily Rae Aldridge, January 22, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Complex Facebook Analytics Tool Available from Wolfram Alpha
January 22, 2013
Wolfram Alpha is famous for its knowledgeable tools and widgets that involve highly complex algorithms and computations. However, many may be surprised to hear about the Facebook analytics tool which is available from the systematic knowledge engine. The article “Use Wolfram Alpha to Dig Up Cool Statistics About Your Facebook Account [Weekly Facebook Tips]” on MakeUseOf tells readers how to get detailed facebook information about their account.
The article shares:
“With the Wolfram Alpha Facebook analytics tool, you can find out a huge amount of information about your Facebook account. It’s quite fun to see which of your posts or photos are the most popular, who your top commenters are, who is sharing your posts the most and more interesting tidbits. Plus, it’s easy to use this tool and completely free. Why not have a go?”
I decided to have a go with the Facebook tool, and was overwhelmed with the amount of detailed information I was provided. Wolfram Alpha told me everything from the moon phase at the time of my birth to statistical data about the top contributors on my page. Of course, all of this information is readily available to anyone with access to my page. This tool is fun, but may encourage others to consider resetting the privacy settings on their accounts.
Andrea Hayden, January 22, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
Yandex Creates Powerful Facebook Search App
January 19, 2013
We know that Facebook is very protective of its services/ products and that their practices concerning user data are questionable. What will Facebook do, however, with Yandex’s new search app? Tech Crunch announced, “Russian Giant Yandex Has Secretly Built A Killer Facebook Search Engine App Codenamed ‘Wonder’.” The search engine app allows users to ask what content and businesses friends visited. Facebook prohibits search engines to use its data without permission. A spokesperson from Yandex was not able to comment on Wonder, but did confirm the company as interested in mining social data and building social products.
Wonder works by allowing its users to vocally search for information and it lists whether their friends have searched for it as well. Yandex so far has limited themselves to the Russian market, but Google and other competitors have eaten away at its revenue and so they are turning to other areas. Some areas are mobile, maps, and app discovery for services/products.
What does Facebook think about this? Facebook tried to allow its users to search friends’ content with Nearby. Also Wonder might use too much of Facebook’s user data and Facebook does not volunteer user information to search engines, which Wonder might do. Facebook is taking its own steps to get into search:
“CEO Mark Zuckerberg himself explained at TechCrunch Disrupt SF that Facebook is getting into search:
‘Search is interesting. I think search engines are really evolving to give you a set of answers’’ I have this specific question, answer this question for me.’ Facebook is pretty uniquely positioned to answer the questions people have. ; What sushi restaurants have my friends gone to in New York in the last six months and Liked?’ These are questions that you could potentially do at Facebook if we built out this system that you couldn’t do anywhere else. And at some point we’ll do it. We have a team working on search.’”
There are various options that Facebook could do with Wonder: buy it, make a joint partnership, grant permission, etc. but we will have to wait and see what will happen. We do know that users are demanding Facebook create a better search engine and Wonder is making them work faster to develop it.
Whitney Grace, January 19, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
Facebook Search: How Disruptive?
January 16, 2013
Lots of punditry today. Facebook rolled out graph search. A registered user can run queries answered by content within the Facebook “database.” How will it work? Public content becomes the corpus. Navigate to the BBC write up “Facebook Unveils Social Search Tools for Users.”
A comment by Facebook’s founder which caught my attention was:
“We look at Facebook as a big social database,” said Mr Zuckerberg, adding that social search was Facebook’s “third pillar” and stood beside the news feed and timeline as the foundational elements of the social network.
The former Googler allegedly responsible for Facebook’s search allegedly observed:
On graph search, you can only see content that people have shared with you,” developer Lars Rasmussen, who was previously the co-founder of Google Maps, told reporters.
So no reprise of the various privacy missteps the GOOG made. Facebook wants to avoid some of its fast dancing over privacy too.
How disruptive will Facebook search be?
First, the Facebook users will give search a whirl. The initial queries will be tire kicking stuff. Once some patterns emerge, the Facebook bean counters will slip the switch on ads. That, not search, may cause Google some moments of concern. Google, like Microsoft, has to protect its one trick revenue pony. Facebook won’t stampede the cattle, but those doggies will wander. If the pasture is juicy, Facebook will let those cows roam. Green pastures can be fragile ecosystems.
Second, search sucks. Facebook could answer certain types of questions better than the brute force Web indexing services. If users discover the useful functions of Facebook, traffic for the weak sisters like Blekko and Yahoo could head south. The Google won’t be hurt right away, but the potential for Facebook to index only urls cited by registered users could be a more threatening step. Surgical search, not brute force, may slice some revenues from the Google.
Third, Facebook could learn, as Google did, that search is a darned good thing. Armed with the social info and the Facebook users’ curated urls, Facebook could cook up a next generation search solution that could snow on Googzilla’s parade. Google Plus is interesting but Facebook may be just the outfit to pop search up a level. Google is not an innovator, so Facebook may be triggering a new search arms race.
Thank goodness.
Stephen E Arnold, January 16, 2013
Facebook Mounts Technical PR Push
November 26, 2012
Info World recently reported on Facebook’s appetite for crunching data reaching new highs in the article, “Facebook Pushes the Limits of Hadoop.”
According to the article, since the social media giant has a billion users and a requirement to analyze more than 105 terabytes every 30 minutes, it has reached the upper limits of raw Hadoop capacity. The desperate need for more data crunching has lead to the company’s launch of the Prism Project, which supports geographically distributed Hadoop data stores.
In order to compensate for Hadoop’s capacity deficiency, the article states:
“Facebook’s business analysts push the business in a variety of ways. They rely heavily on Hive, which enables them to use Hadoop with standard business intelligence tools, as well as Facebook’s homegrown, closed source, end-user tool, HiPal. Hive, an open source project Facebook created, is the most widely used access layer within the company to query Hadoop using a subset of SQL. To make it even easier for business people, the company created HiPal, a graphical tool that talks to Hive and enables data discovery, query authoring, charting, and dashboard creation.”
Facebook plans to open-source prism soon but it is pretty urgent to start generating revenue from mobile in order to supplement the money it has lost in advertising. Will it succeed? We will see.
Jasmine Ashton, November 26, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
The Facebook Voter Experiment
September 28, 2012
Discover Magazine hosts in interesting read on the impact of information within social networks. The Not Exactly Rocket Science Blog post is titled “A 61-Million-Person Experiment on Facebook Shows How Ads and Friends Affect Our Voting Behaviour.” Blogger Ed Yong describes the huge experiment in which, on congressional election day 2010, Facebook worked with researcher James Fowler from the University of California, San Diego.
Fowler’s team wanted to see if they could influence Facebook users to vote by applying social (media) pressure. Almost everyone who visited the site on that day saw a special Election Day message which displayed an “I Voted” link, a link to find their polling place, and a counter with a running total of users who (claimed they) had voted by that point. The vast majority also saw the profile pictures of any of their friends who had already voted. One control group saw the election messaging minus the pictures of their friends. Another control group missed out on the special message altogether.
See the article for specifics, but the upshot is this: users who saw that their friends had cast a vote seem to have been prodded to head to the polls themselves. Mobilizing voters is indeed a noteworthy thing, and this was a clever experiment. I’m most interested, though, in the following glimpse of the future:
“The internet, and social networks like Facebook, could [allow] scientists to carry out research on an unprecedented scale. It’s cheap and the results have ‘external validity’, meaning that they’re relevant to what people actually do in life, rather than in a stark controlled laboratory.
“‘It’s a brand new world!’ says Fowler. He thinks that such experiments could help psychologists to do detailed studies on very specific groups of people. ‘[That] is the first step in understanding not just average human behaviour, but the behaviour of specific types of individuals in specific types of environments,’ he says. ‘There are many human psychologies, not just one.'”
Advancing psychological understanding is a worthy goal. But how do we all feel about being unwittingly, if anonymously, enrolled in such experiments? We had better figure that out, because I see many more coming our way. Figuratively, of course; we won’t know such projects exist until (and unless) they are trumpeted in the news.
Cynthia Murrell, September 28, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Facebook May Be Jumping on the Search Bandwagon
September 27, 2012
It is no secret that Facebook and Google have been duking it out for a while now. Google created GooglePlus in attempt to out social the social media giant. It seems only natural that Facebook would do the same. Business Insider recently reported on Facebook’s alleged search efforts in the article, “Facebook is Going to Build Its Own Search Engine!”
According to the article, when speaking at Tech Crunch Disrupt, Mark Zuckerberg candidly spoke of the fact that Facebook currently has 1 million queries a day and is pretty much a search engine without trying to be.
However, Zuckerberg hinted that they might start trying soon:
“He said that search is increasingly headed towards answering people’s questions. Facebook, which has a trove of data on users, is ‘uniquely positioned’ to deliver answers for users. Facebook has a team of engineers working on improving the search engine. He said, ‘At some point, we’ll do it.’”
Google has built its empire on search, if Facebook is able to do the same, it may be able to knock the search king off of its thrown once and for all.
Jasmine Ashton, September 27, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
How Facebook is Playing Close Attention to Your Internet Activity
September 24, 2012
Those who choose not to “like” anything on Facebook for fear that the social media giant will use our interests, gender, location and other information against us, you may be right. Business Insider recently reported on some disconcerting news in the article “This is How Facebook is Tracking Your Internet Activity.”
According to the article, Facebook is indeed out to sell your personal information to advertisers through the use of “trackers.” Trackers are defined as “a request that a web page tries to make your browser perform that will share information intended to record, profile, or share your online activity.”
Albine privacy analyst Sarah Downey explained why users should pay more attention to trackers, and block them:
“In addition to invading your privacy, these tracking requests can consume large amounts of data. And transferring lots of data takes time. Generally, the more tracking requests on a website, the slower that website loads. That’s why DNT+ gets you surfing at 125% of the normal speed and with 90% of the bandwidth, compared to a browser without DNT+ running.”
While not all cookies are used for tracking purposes, some are just used to store information. However, it is the broader scope of these requests that is proving to be both problematic and scary.
Jasmine Ashton, September 24, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Alternative Niche Social Networks Expanding and Succeeding
September 12, 2012
Social networking is here to stay. However, it seems the kings of the market, Facebook and Twitter, have some decent competition arising. “Six Alternative Social Networks” on ZeroPaid informs us of alternative social networks that have seen an increase in global market share. Obvious forerunners were Instagram and Pinterest, but other networks are also seeing a boost.
We learn in the article:
“[James Murray, Digital Insights Manager at Experian] also revealed that the future looks bright for alternative social networks, citing technological advancements as a key factor in the increased number of alternative sites:
‘Over the next 12 months, we expect to see a proliferation of niche social networks. Offering deeper functionality combined with a lower technical barrier to entry will mean new leaders in social media being created in a matter of days versus weeks and months.’”
While the numbers for the little guys arising in the social networking arena are nowhere near reaching the gladiators Facebook and Twitter, it is exciting to see where the community is heading. Newcomers are successful when they offer something different and identify a specific niche to reach consumers. No one is going to be the “next Facebook,” but there are still plenty of open opportunities for new networks.
Andrea Hayden, September 12, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
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