A Researcher Makes Social Media More Scientific
February 20, 2014
The article titled Can Social Technologies Increase Our Dunbar Limit? on Lithosphere is a continuation of a scientific approach to social media behavior. The earlier articles by Michael Wu, the author and Chief Scientist at Lithium Technologies, are The Relativity and Economics of Relationship and Where is the New Dunbar Limit? (Wu begins this article with the cautious suggestions of skimming the others prior to diving in.) Dunbar’s number, for those unfamiliar, is the number of people with whom one can form and maintain a social relationship (and the suggested number is about 150.) In the article, Wu grapples with the possibility that social media may enable this number to increase (largely due to technologies making our ability to socialize more “efficient”. The article states,
“Although the internet has made communication more efficient in many ways, it is also limiting in other ways. The internet cannot transmit many nonverbal signals (e.g. touch, scents, physical proximics, body languages, etc) that are often very important for relationship building… Since social technologies are not able to help us build relationships more efficiently, I must come to consensus with Prof. Dunbar that modern social technologies probably cannot increase our Dunbar limit any further.”
The article delves into a comparison of socializing and communicating, pointing out that these are very different concepts. It also provides a brief history of human socializing behaviors. Ultimately Wu concludes that socializing includes many non-verbal cues which technology cuts out. Hence the Dunbar number remaining static. The article is fascinating as a more scientific approach to social media.
Chelsea Kerwin, February 20, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
DataSift Announces Trainable VEDO Processing Engine
December 30, 2013
The folks over at DataSift dropped us a line announcing the release of their next-generation processing engine, VEDO. The company’s founder and CEO Nick Halstead writes about the product at the company’s blog in, “DataSift VEDO: Programmable Intelligence.” The central idea, they told us, is to apply context and capture value from social data with less manual processing than before. That is a welcome advance. We wonder: can Datasift match Topsy’s spectacular deal with Apple?
Halstead relates:
“So today we are announcing VEDO – an extension of our core platform that brings programmable intelligence to the masses. Building upon our incredibly rich text pre-processing and parsing capabilities, we have added a whole new engine that allows customers to take advantage of advances in machine learning, statistical models, rich taxonomies and much more all through a simple and unified approach. As with the rest of our platform, we want to reduce the cost of developing this kind of functionality for our customers and let them focus on innovation and not on infrastructure.
VEDO brings the power to understand the context and the meaning of the content itself. It can be trained to understand any subject and to contextualize it so that the data can be inherently joined to other structured data within the business.”
Halstead goes on to advise that this connection between social data and other business data is the key to realizing value from investments in social-media data. A DataSift representative explained that three new components, programmable user rules, machine learning, and a library of pre-built classifiers, have been added to the processing engine. These features let users tailor VEDO to automatically categorize, interpret, and deliver social data in the ways most useful to their companies.
DataSift is holding a webinar on VEDO on January 9th; see here for details. True to its roots as an offshoot of the now-defunct TweetMeme, the company envisions a day when all organizations employ social-media data to inform their business decisions. Founded in 2010, DataSift has offices in San Francisco, New York, and Reading, U.K.
Cynthia Murrell, December 30, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
LinkedIn Friend Request Option Stinks
December 24, 2013
We are about to make a heretical observation based on Kirill Zubovsky’s blog post entitled, “How LinkedIn Screwed Up Our Friendship.” According to the article, Zubovsky uses LinkedIn like any professional seeking to maintain and forge business relationships. Recently he noticed that he was being sent a bunch of blind friend requests from people have never met before. Any sort of message identifying the user did not accompany the requests and he chalked it up to the user being lazy. Then he realized why he wasn’t receiving messages to accompany friend requests:
“I fell into the trap when I tried to invite Ethan Anderson to connect. I was just browsing through a page, which suggests people I may know, and I realized that indeed, I met Ethan at a 500Startups event a couple of months ago. I’ve been a fan ever since he did RedBeacon, and I find him to be quite a smart dude, so connecting on LinkedIn to keep him on a closer radar seemed like a natural step.”
He hit a connect button and viola! A friend request was sent without allowing Zubovsky to personalize it. He puts it that LinkedIn messed up his friendship with this potential business contact. We agree with him that LinkedIn should improve this “connect” option. No one likes getting requests from strangers and business relationships rely on an introduction to take root.
Whitney Grace, December 24, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Grabbing onto a Partnership
December 20, 2013
Partnerships develop when companies each possess a strength and then combine forces to build a beneficial relationship. The CogBlog, Cognition’s Semantic NLP Blog, announced a new relationship in the post, “Cognition To Power Grabbit’s Online Recommendation Engine.” Cognition is a leading name in semantic analysis and language process and Grabbit is the developer of a cloud-hosted suite of Web services. Together they have formed a strategic partnership that will combine Cognition’s natural language processing technology with Grabbit’s patent-pending system for making online recommendations of products, content, and people. The idea behind pairing the two technologies is that the semantic software would analyze social media content and then Grabbit’s software would then make product recommendations based on the data.
The article states:
“Cognition provides a powerful set of semantic tools to power Grabbit’s new web services. The scope of Cognition’s Semantic Map is more than double the size of any other computational linguistic dictionary for English, and includes more than ten million semantic connections that are comprised of semantic contexts, meaning representations, taxonomy and word meaning distinctions. The Map encompasses over 540,000 word senses (word and phrase meanings); 75,000 concept classes (or synonym classes of word meanings); 8,000 nodes in the technology’s ontology or classification scheme; and 510,000 word stems (roots of words) for the English language. Cognition’s lexical resources encode a wealth of semantic, morphological and syntactic information about the words contained within documents and their relationships to each other. These resources were created, codified and reviewed by lexicographers and linguists over a span of more than 25 years.”
Why do I get the feeling that online shopping is going to get even more complicated? Personal qualms aside, Cognition and Grabbit are not the first companies that come to mind when it comes to social media analytics and e-commerce. This partnership is not the first endeavor to cash in on Internet sales.
Whitney Grace, December 20, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Short Honk: Topsy
December 3, 2013
Before I lose the thought, I want to capture one of the important lessons from the Topsy sale. You can get the basic story at “Apple Acquires A Social Media Analytics Company For ~$200 Million.” None of the write ups emphasized the important shift at Topsy that made the deal possible. The company abandoned its Web log and social media index and focused on Twitter. Once the change was made, Topsy had something to sell; namely, an easy to use system that made figuring out what was hot and what was not on Twitter. With the shift, an important search and retrieval resource was lost to people like me. For the investors in Topsy, the shift delivered $200 million big ones.
Was it technology? Nope.
Was it better search? Nope.
Was it spiffier analytics? Nope.
It was positioning. As I learned at a recent conference, the same old Topsy is still there covered up with the Twitter baked on enamel and clear coat. And Apple bit.
Moral: Figure out the positioning. That seems to be one key to big paydays. In short, words matter.
With one less resource to use, Google’s control of “information” grows stronger. I will review my initial thoughts in a few months to see if I was right or wrong. In the meantime, party on, Topsy.
Stephen E Arnold, December 3, 2013
LinkedIn Catches the News Bug
November 29, 2013
Ever since Google left a void by discontinuing Google Reader, other RSS feeds programs have attempted to fill it. Pulse is one of the top replacements and now “LinkedIn Integrates With Pulse For Professional News Aggregation. Social Sharing.” LinkedIn purchased Pulse earlier this year and now they are offering their users professional news for both desktop and mobile platforms. LinkedIn and Pulse are now synced and sharing articles and social media interactions are as simple as a few mouse clicks.
There have been some changes made to how LinkedIn works and improvements to Pulse:
“This means that LinkedIn Today, which gathered top news related to your profession—one of the cool, little-known features in LinkedIn—has now been made defunct. Instead, even if you visit the web app, you will be taken to LinkedIn Pulse. Under the hood, the search feature has been enhanced and Pulse will now offer better autocomplete suggestions.”
It is a great idea to have all of your professional content and social interactions in one place. It makes it easier to stay on top of current events and network, but as any new venture starts this question must be asked: will the news be relevant to the individual users, advertisers, and LinkedIn’s professional standards? LinkedIn probably does not want “News of the Weird” or the latest prescription drug advertised on their Web site. Pulse already has high standards, so doubt is low but who knows.
Whitney Grace, November 29, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Facebook Usage Shrinks
November 26, 2013
Last month, Facebook admitted that users, particularly teens, are using the site less these days. The Guardian reports, “Teenagers Say Goodbye to Facebook and Hello to Messenger Apps.” (Messenger apps function much like text messaging, but without the extra charges on the phone bill.) Writer Parmy Olson blames the shift on the wider audience Facebook has successfully attracted over the years.
She writes:
“Their gradual exodus to messaging apps such as WhatsApp, WeChat and KakaoTalk boils down to Facebook becoming a victim of its own success. The road to gaining nearly 1.2 billion monthly active users has seen the mums, dads, aunts and uncles of the generation who pioneered Facebook join it too, spamming their walls with inspirational quotes and images of cute animals, and (shock, horror) commenting on their kids’ photos. No surprise, then, that Facebook is no longer a place for uninhibited status updates about pub antics, but an obligatory communication tool that younger people maintain because everyone else does.”
I’m sure that is a factor, but the Reference Heap provides another perspective. It isn’t so much that Facebook’s user base has changed, but that changes to the site have made it less useful. At the same time that its algorithm presents us with pointless information, it often fails to deliver truly relevant missives from friends and family. In a note beginning “Dear Facebook, You Suck,” the angry pastebin writer charges:
“One of my best friend’s mother lost her battle with cancer the other day, my friend wrote a beautiful status update commemorating her mother, it got 297 likes and tons of comments before I noticed it… You know how I noticed it? My mother called me and told me about her mother dying and I went to her actual page to see for myself. But you know what I did notice? Becky hates Mondays. My 3rd cousin whom I haven’t seen since a family reunion 10 years ago started playing his umpteenth game on Facebook.”
I can relate. I know I have missed important news on Facebook in a similar fashion, and messages I really wanted folks to see got little traction. Is this a deliberate attempt to get us to pay Facebook the seven bucks (well, $6.99) to “promote” posts we actually want others to view? Perhaps I’m being too cynical.
Cynthia Murrell, November 26, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Google Plus Grafted Onto WordPress
November 24, 2013
The article on c/net titled WordPress Folds in Google Plus For Authentication, Comments offers insight into the new changes. Justin Shreve from WordPress described the benefits of the deal as increasing the verification of ones’ posts by creating an “official connection” between the Google Plus Profile and WordPress.com content that is being generated.
The article explains:
“WordPress, the widely used blogging system, has built in Google+ technology that will let publishers use the service for authentication, comments, and sharing.
The deal, announced Monday, spreads Google’s influence into a Web site that’s very widely used for blogs and other self-publishing needs. Even as it elevates the profile of Google’s social-networking technology, though, it also lowers barriers between Google+ and other parts of the Web. “
There’s nothing like forcing an agenda, but both companies seem to benefit from this deal, with WordPress users able to send their content to Google Plus with a feature called publicize, as well as receive a more prominent position in search results. Google will gain more information about its users from the pages created, improving search result accuracy. Furthermore, WordPress users will now be able to embed onto their WordPress sites what they have published on Google Plus.
Chelsea Kerwin, November 24, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Digimind Offers Up Free Social Media Guide
November 21, 2013
The high-paced world of the fashion industry is both glamorous and as vicious as a shark bite. Fashion retailers and designers need to be on top of all the trends and changes, because “one minute you are in, the next you are out.” With the advent of the Internet and social media, that expression has turned into an even quicker time lapse. Digimind is a company that prides itself on providing companies with insights into their social media data and the fashion industry is not any different, so they created a free eBook: “Social Media Survival Guide For The Retail/Fashion Industry.”
The article states:
“Retail & Fashion is a very visual sector. People buy your products based on visual elements like design and packaging and they want an enjoyable shopping experience. Shopping has been social for some time, and is only getting more so, especially with the plethora of e-commerce sites out there. A community manager in this sector should leverage social media platforms that are most focused on design. Thus, the best social media platforms for you would be a Blog, Facebook, YouTube, Pinterest and Instagram. But what is the secret to using these platforms successfully?”
The eBook offers information on recommended social media channels, Google+ insights, best practices for each network, and key statistics and specific case studies. Best of all, unlike fashion, the eBook is free. Follow the same link and you will be treated to more free eBooks from Digimind.
Whitney Grace, November 21, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
How New Media vs Traditional Media Fares on Twitter
November 5, 2013
We caught an intriguing finding in a Social Times article recently. The title of it sums up the point nicely: “The New York Times Gets More Mentions Online than Mashable.” The majority of the piece is shared through infographic form, a clear nod to new media. Digimind, a SaaS social media monitoring and competitive intelligence company produced the infographic.
One of the ways the data is presented is through the fact that old media is nearly 3 times more likely to be mentioned on Twitter than new media.
Digimind states in a quoted blog post:
“While our love for social platforms may be strong, we still rely heavily on media stalwarts, and the numbers back this up. The infographic reveals that “old media,” which includes The New York Times, USA Today and The Wall Street Journal, make up 72 percent of share of voice in total, while The Huffington Post, BuzzFeed and Mashable make up only 28 percent.”
Is it readership numbers that are important or is it engagement data that matters? Ironically, a traditional media outlet has received more engagement via mentions that a new media company. The New York Times remains a winner! And that seems to be the best direction we could be going in, based on the word cloud from the new media side related to the government shutdown where Ferris Bueller is presented as the concept with the most mentions.
Megan Feil, November 05 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
