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Rapleaf Research Into Social Networks Not Particularly Revealing

Email today from Rapleaf shows some tepid insights based on looking at 49.3 million people in their dataset:

[via email]

In a follow up to the Study of Social Network Users vs. Age, we just released full downloadable data on the 49.3 million people from the previous study.

Highlights:

• Women ages 14-24 dominate activity on social networks and have more friends than men of the same ages.
• Men ages 35+ are more active and have more friends than women of the same ages.
• The average social network user has 2-25 friends.
• There are a disproportionately high number of 69 year olds across various social networks.

Full data can be found here:

http://business.rapleaf.com/company_press_2008_07_29.html

Please let me know if there are any questions about the full dataset.

Best,

Vivek Sodera

Rapleaf

I would much rather have seen some distribution graphs, and pivot tables, like numbers of social contacts v countries or age groups. Instead we get the dataset to roll our own, and the observation that people put down 69 as an age when they have to have an age (and one older that 18) to participate. Yawn.

I went back and looked at the earlier Study of Social Network Users vs. Age which is exactly what it says: a few highlights based on the distribution of age on various social networks. I am still interested in cultural difference, like French-speaking people v German speaking people's affiliation patterns, and so on.

NowPublic's 'Life In A Fishbowl' List For Silicon Valley

I get a kick out of placing twelfth on NowPublic's 'Most Public' Index for Silicon Valley. I am in the dark on the internals of their calculations, but I suspect that it's all about living your web life very very openly with lots and lots of kibitzers. Their subtitle -- 'most influential' -- must be taken with a large grain of salt, however.

[from The Most Public Index, Silicon Valley | The News is NowPublic.com by Michael Tippett]

NowPublic today announced its second MostPublic Index, identifying the 50 most influential individuals in Silicon Valley/San Francisco. The MostPublic Index is a detailed (and transparent) barometer of who’s voices are most heard in the digital landscape as new channels—Twitter, Facebook, Flick, YouTube and the like—transform how media is created and spread. Last week, NowPublic identified and announced the 50 MostPublic influencers in New York.

[...]

NowPublic’s formula gauges influence and “publicness” across four categories, including:

1. Online Visibility
   
2. Presence on User-Generated Content and Social Networking Sites
   
3. Interactivity and Accessibility
   
4. The “R” Factor: Presence on Microblogging Platforms (Flickr, Twitter, Tumblr, etc.)

NowPublic examined statistics in each of these categories from Alexa, Compete, Facebook, Flickr, Google, Quantcast, Technorati, YouTube, and various other blogs and sites, to create a list of Silicon Valley’s leading influencers. It then narrowed the list to 50 by analyzing and documenting individuals’ presence and popularity in each of these channels, applying a weighted scoring system, determined by the strength of specific traits held in each online community.

Without further ado, NowPublic proudly presents the MostPublic individuals in Silicon Valley/San Francisco:

1. Robert Scoble
2. Michael Arrington
3. Jack Dorsey
4. Biz Stone
5. Matt Cutts
6. Pete Cashmore
7. Dave Winer
8. Guy Kawasaki
9. Loic Le Meur
10. Kevin Rose
11. Merlin Mann
12. Stowe Boyd
13. Jeff Atwood
14. Jeremiah Owyang
15. Veronica Belmont
16. Kara Swisher
17. Scott Beale
18. Marc Andreessen
19. Ryan Block
20. David Sifry
21. Emily Chang
22. Om Malik
23. Timothy Ferriss
24. Nick Douglas
25. John Battelle
26. David Cohn
27. Louis Gray
28. Tom Foremski
29. Tim O'Reilly
30. Ariel Waldman
31. Matt Mullenweg
32. Dean Takahashi
33. Philip Kaplan
34. JD Lasica
35. Sarah Lacy
36. Brian Solis
37. Charlene Li
38. Rafe Needleman
39. Dan Farber
40. Howard Rheingold
41. David McClure
42. Margaret Mason
43. Jason Goldman
44. Leah Culver
45. Chris Shipley
46. Jackson West
47. Liz Gannes
48. Owen Thomas
49. Adeo Ressi
50. Max Levchin

So, basically, I am a slave to the social tools that have made me, and now everyone knows my dirty little secret.

I guess the 'R' factor is the new 'Q' factor?

To make this stunt more convoluted, I really think they should have sent me a tiny loving cup with the word 'Twelfth' engraved on it.

A Tale Of Modern-Day Customer Support

In the old days, if you had a problem with a product and wanted to deal with it online, you could email the company's customer support or post a question in their online support forum, if they had one. Questions and problems, if the company even responded, were often dealt with in private rather than on an open forum. Today, there's Twitter and Get Satisfaction instead, because there's nothing like a bright public light shone on a company's product to make them take notice.

If you're not familiar with Get Satisfaction, it's a site used for providing customer support in an open forum: it's independent from the companies represented there, although employees of a company can choose to participate. You can open a new topic or participate in an existing topic, and you may have your issue resolved by a participating company employee or by someone else in the community. It's a great open model for customer support: the conversation is completely transparent, and controlled by the community rather than the company that is the target of the discussion.

Back to the story: I've been searching for a new place to live, and receive daily reports from my real estate agent of properties that fit my criteria. Some of these include a link to a virtual tour of the property, and the most popular virtual tour site (at least for listings in Toronto) is Obeo. One problem that I have with Obeo is that it resizes my browser window -- a clear breach of good web design when your site might be sharing that window with several other open tabs -- and I tweeted my frustration at it about two weeks ago, then forgot about it. On Twitter, however, someone is always listening, and yesterday Get Satisfaction tweeted back that a thread had been opened based on my tweet.

As it turns out, Get Satisfaction has an "overheard" section for each company on the site that shows all tweets that mention the company name, and anyone can start a new topic based on one of those tweets. When that happens, the original twitterer receives an @reply that someone has replied to their tweet on Get Satisfaction.

So this is the new model for customer service: totally transparent, community-driven, involving multiple online channels including micro-blogging and independent community forums. You'd better be ready for it, because your customers no longer need your permission to talk about you.

Cuil Tries To Outgoogle Google

With amazing fanfare, the new search competitor, Cuil has emerged from stealth. Cuil (pronounced 'cool') is trying to change our habits and grab some of the huge search market. Arrington seems to suggest great things for them, or at least states that their index is large:

[from Cuil Exits Stealth Mode With A Massive Search Engine]

Cuil also claims to have better search results than Google and others based on how they index websites. They do not simply catalog keywords on a site and then rank the site based on its importance. They also work to understand how words are related (France - cheese - wine, for example), to return more relevant results to users. This is a semantic approach to search, but very different from Powerset’s natural language approach. Powerset uses artificial intelligence to try to understand what sentences on a website actually mean. Cuil, by comparison, simply tries to properly categorize and file a web page, even if the category name doesn’t appear on the site.

That means users search the same way they always have, but Cuil will try to return better results via refinements in a “explore by category” module to the right of results. A search for dogs, for example, will return category results for “water dogs,” “crossbreed,” “cocker spaniel,” etc. Some of these related terms do not include the term “dog.”

Cuil is another take on semantic search -- knowing how words relate is all semantics -- but my results were so-so at the best and terrible at the worst which was the case with Hakia, another semantic search firm.

Searching with the phrase "C++ operator order of precedence" led to zero results:

c++ operator order of evaluation - Cuil, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

This example is always interesting, because Google comes up with an authoritative answer as number 1 (see http://www.cppreference.com/operator_precedence.html).

I tried searching for Anais Nin, the author of erotica, and got this:

anais nin - Cuil, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

Which is ok, but I guess I would have expected to see the Wikipedia entry somewhere, and perhaps the anaisnin.com website.

The semantic categories seem to hold up. She acted in a number of files, and was of Cuban and French ancestry, and worked as a model in her teens. I can find no proof of her having been a dancer. I think the semantic categorization should link to some evidence. She was born in the outskirts of Paris, so the 'People from Eure' -- Eure is a part of France in Normandy -- seems to be just wrong.

On the other hand, I have become accustomed to the Google style of search results, which may bias me. But if a new competitor comes along hoping to shake me out of the rut I have fallen into it has to offer something with a bit more than -- perhaps incorrect -- semantic categories.

And when I try a term that has semantically varied meanings -- 'casting' -- I don't find Cuil giving me the sort of semantic disambiguation I might.

casting - Cuil, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

It provides Sculpture Techniques and Jewelry Making as two good categories. But Christian Rock Groups? It appears there is a Christian rock group called Casting Crowns, but come on. An Reality TV Series seems from left field.

It may be that Cuil and other semantic search tools will require a great investment of feedback from users before the searches can become truly reliable. But I don't see where Cuil is getting that info, aside from the clickstream.

It's one thing to argue that popularity isn't everything in search results, but semantic jumps that are just wrong create more problems than they solve.

How We Are Made Great

Stowe has a phrase. It's one of my favourites:

"I am made greater by the sum of my connections, so are my connections."

Who is the 'greatest' one among any network? We'd like to think it's any and all of us - a moveable feast in an adhoc group-forming world.

From occasion to occasion a different one among us is raised upon the others' shoulders - and glasses raised to them.

And we'd like to think we would earn our moment in the spotlight thanks to some unique insight or better-than-the-rest contribution.

But the fact is it's rare that we know when we've nailed it - when we've done something worthy of discovery. Because we don't get to decide. Other people do.

Bloggers are constantly surprised by which of their posts prove most popular, for example.

Mark 'Herdmeister' Earl's work reveals some of why. To paraphrase Mark's core ideas; we are a social, copycat species (less homo sapien, more homo mimicus). This is way more important in governing, or seeking to explain, behaviour than our cherished notion of rationality. We do things, then try to rationalise why we did them afterwards.

We do what the monkey next to us does. Mark's book, Herd, has much more.

Small example. Today I went through the list of people following me on twitter and found plenty I hadn't followed back. My rational explanation for who I follow back is that I check their name, any link they have provided in their profile and what they've been tweeting about recently. If all that feels right I click the follow button.

But I went through and discovered a dozen or so people I had not followed back, despite them fitting all my rational criteria. Looking at their follower/followed counts I spied a bit of a pattern. Those I had not followed back either had very few people following them - or a significant imbalance (they followed way more than they were followed by). That wasn't on my list of rational motivators!

My actions had been entirely shaped by what the rest of us monkeys thought of the particular monkey in question.

For fun, check your own follow/followed lists (if you happen to be on twitter). See if you see the same?

Other monkeys had made my decision for me and I hadn't even noticed it happening. Our behaviour is less like that of the pioneering individual and more that of part of a flock.

So where does the great man or woman stand in this social context? How does greatness get defined?

What's the Shakespeare quote?

"Some are born great, some achieve greatness, some have greatness thrust upon them."

In all cases it's a retrospective evaluation. No one, no thing, no idea starts off inherently great.

How does the flock recognise greatness? You can't choose to be great. Other people decide whether or not a person or an idea gets elevated in this way.

Some spend all their time waiting for the person next to them to influence their next turn. Some spend all their time turning, trying to influence the person next to them.

It seems to me that in a networked world, in which we flit from adhoc group to adhoc group, each of us can and do perform either role.

At least, we try to.

But as anyone who has ever tried to turn a flock will tell you - you never get to do it on your own.

So, go careful when you claim responsibility. Remember all those times you tried to turn the flock and nothing happened - or it turned in the opposite direction. You were just as responsible then.

We make us great.