December 1

Facebook: The Oracle

Consider these facts about Facebook.com straight from their Statistics page:

People on Facebook

  • More than 500 million active users
  • 50% of our active users log on to Facebook in any given day
  • Average user has 130 friends
  • People spend over 700 billion minutes per month on Facebook

Activity on Facebook

  • There are over 900 million objects that people interact with (pages, groups, events and community pages)
  • Average user is connected to 80 community pages, groups and events
  • Average user creates 90 pieces of content each month
  • More than 30 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc.) shared each month.

Global Reach

  • More than 70 translations available on the site
  • About 70% of Facebook users are outside the United States
  • Over 300,000 users helped translate the site through the translations application

Platform

  • More than one million developers and entrepreneurs from more than 180 countries
  • Every month, more than 70% of Facebook users engage with Platform applications
  • More than 550,000 active applications currently on Facebook Platform
  • More than one million websites have integrated with Facebook Platform
  • More than 150 million people engage with Facebook on external websites every month
  • Two-thirds of comScore’s U.S. Top 100 websites and half of comScore’s Global Top 100 websites have integrated with Facebook

Mobile

  • There are more than 200 million active users currently accessing Facebook through their mobile devices.
  • People that use Facebook on their mobile devices are twice as active on Facebook than non-mobile users.
  • There are more than 200 mobile operators in 60 countries working to deploy and promote Facebook mobile products

With this many global users spending this much time on the site, we are writing our own autobiographies via Facebook’s Daily News Feed.  We mention books we are reading, our favorite songs, the newest viral video, life events such as relationship beginnings and endings, engagements, deaths, who we ran into at the store, a random reference from a movie we saw years ago, and and the list continues on endlessly.  We share things with strangers and friends alike.  It didn’t take long for many to realize this information could be mined to learn oodles of information, both useful and pointless.

Over at The Slate, Michael Agger wonders What would happen if Facebook made it’s data available for research:

I was curious who was looking at this data and what larger trends they discovered.

Our first stop is Openbook. The site lets you search public Facebook updates and was created to demonstrate how FB’s privacy settings are confusing: People don’t realize how widely they are sharing personal information. And, indeed, when you do a search like “cheated on my wife,” you discover updates that would’ve been better left in the privacy of one’s own mind. Same with “my boss sucks.”

As you move beyond obvious “gotcha” searches, the vastness, weirdness, and potential usefulness of Facebook becomes even more apparent. A search like “brushing my teeth” reveals the amazing variety of pop music that launches people into their day. It would satisfy a small curiosity to map the status updates about UFO sightings, and I could imagine tech-happy CNN showing where love for President Obama is currently cresting. I also like doing lunchtime marketing research about how people feel about organic food or comparing the patrons of Pizza Hut vs. Taco Bell.

But there is a more serious type of analysis to accomplish. It would be helpful for transportation planners to know the places where people complain the most about traffic. Educators could see the data and sentiment analysis around how a community feels about its local schools. The writer Marshall Kirkpatrick at readwriteweb.com has called for Facebook to open up its data for research. He points to the fact that the discriminatory practice of redlining was discovered “when both U.S. Census information and real estate mortgage loan information were made available for bulk analysis.” And he rightly speculates that “patterns of comparable importance” could be found in Facebook’s enormous social graph.

Nerve’s James Brady Ryan recently wrote about how Facebook’s fan number can accurate predict election results:

It’s news that should be kind of obvious but still somehow feels surprising: according to Facebook’s “political team,” candidates who had more fans on the social networking site than their opponents won their actual elections overall. (So not only did they lose, but they also are super unpopular and probably won’t even be asked to the spring formal.) Here are the numbers:

The Facebook political team’s initial snapshot of 98 House races shows that 74% of candidates with the most Facebook fans won their contests. In the Senate, our initial snapshot of 19 races shows that 81% of candidates with the most Facebook fans won their contests.

As I said, this really shouldn’t be shocking — candidates who have more people who like them get more people to vote for them?! — but I think we often consider becoming a fan of someone on Facebook to be something of an empty, half-hearted political gesture. Not to mention that it’s notoriously difficult to get younger people to vote and Facebook has a whole lot of them.

But now that Facebook has become so prominent, and so much more than the easiest way to stalk a cute guy from your Biology class, I guess it’s time to reconsider.

The real interesting piece here is that Facebook does not openly allow users to peek and mine the data it contains.  They provide certain data to advertisers to market towards us and make money from the annoying ads on the right side of the page.  Back to the Slate article mentioned above,

Facebook’s challenge is to leverage that social graph in a way that doesn’t alienate us all. The site analyzes us for the benefit of its advertisers but offers only limited peaks at what its engineers are capable of. The Facebook Data Team, for example, tries to measure how happy people are on Facebook each day with the Gross National Happiness Index. The index tracks the numbers of positive and negative words in status updates. In America, we just hit a happiness peak on Thanksgiving Day—Mother’s Day is a distant second. (Fun fact: We are happier on the day of the Super Bowl than we are on Easter.) The data team also analyzed how diverse its U.S.-based users were and voter turnout trends in the recent election.

The larger trend here is that Facebook keeps very close tabs on its information. The poster boy for FB’s data hoarding is entrepreneur Pete Warden. He built his own database of 210 million publicly available Facebook profiles and created a whimsical map of the United States that divided the country into regions like the “Nomadic West” and “Socalistan,” based on where people’s friends were likely to be located. His widely circulated Fan Page Analytics showed, say, what things people who liked NPR also liked, or the top states for Megan Fox lust. Warden’s plan was to make his data available to researchers, but he was threatened with a lawsuit by Facebook, and that was that. (Be sure to look at Warden’s new project, OpenHeatMap.)

A basic hurdle with self-tracking or a volunteer data collection project like Track Your Happiness is simply getting in the habit of collecting the numbers. Facebook is a natural platform for these efforts, and I know that many “quantified self” tools are integrated with the site.

By analyzing status updates,  Mathias Mikkelsen created this graphic to visualize when break-ups are most likely to happen.

Peak Break Up Times a la Facebook

Keep in mind that the information mentioned above has been from data made public only.  What would the information look like if Facebook opened up the data vault they have on over a half billion people? s this something we should be concerned about or should we embrace it?  Will we see the vanishing of exit polls in favor of Facebook?  Will Homeland Security change the threat level based on Facebook posts?  What will happen to human interaction? Facebook has the power to better society, but at what price will that come?

Category: Social Media | 1 Comment on Facebook: The Oracle
December 1

Assorted Links of Curiousity

Here are some assorted links that may perhaps peek your interests.

Category: Links | Comments Off on Assorted Links of Curiousity
December 1

The Beginning

No doubt everyone is familiar with the wonderful WikiLeaks Fiasco.  Politicians and governments everywhere are shouting down Julian Assange at every turn.  As is to be expected.  Nobody likes their dirty laundry being hung out for everyone to see.  But kudos to Assange for being a champion for transparency.  And kudos to Salon for having some sound coverage of the dump’s aftermath.

Glen Greenwald takes mainstream media, or “The Good Journalists,” to task for their reaction to the leaks…

Then, with some exceptions, we have the group which — so very revealingly — is the angriest and most offended about the WikiLeaks disclosures:  the American media, Our Watchdogs over the Powerful and Crusaders for Transparency.  On CNN last night, Wolf Blitzer was beside himself with rage over the fact that the U.S. Government had failed to keep all these things secret from him:

Are they doing anything at all to make sure if some 23-year-old guy, allegedly, starts downloading hundreds of thousands of cables, hundreds of thousands of copies of sensitive information, that no one pays attention to that, no one in the security system of the United States government bothers to see someone is downloading all these millions — literally millions of documents? . . . at this point, you know, it — it’s amazing to me that the U.S. government security system is so lax that someone could allegedly do this kind of damage just by simply pretending to be listening to a Lady Gaga C.D. and at the same time downloading all these kinds of documents.

Then — like the Good Journalist he is — Blitzer demanded assurances that the Government has taken the necessary steps to prevent him, the media generally and the citizenry from finding out any more secrets:  “Do we know yet if they’ve [done] that fix? In other words, somebody right now who has top secret or secret security clearance can no longer download information onto a C.D. or a thumb drive? Has that been fixed already?”  The central concern of Blitzer — one of our nation’s most  honored “journalists” — is making sure that nobody learns what the U.S. Government is up to.

But one of the best points of the article is the following regarding the behavior of NYT’s Executive Editor Bill Keller…

Then we have The New York Times, which was denied access to the documents by WikiLeaks this time but received them fromThe Guardian. That paper’s Executive Editor, Bill Keller, appeared in a rather amazing BBC segment yesterday with Carne Ross, former British Ambassador to the U.N., who mocked and derided Keller for being guided by the U.S. Government’s directions on what should and should not be published (video below):

KELLER:  The charge the administration has made is directed at WikiLeaks: they’ve very carefully refrained from criticizing the press for the way we’ve handled this material . . . . We’ve redacted them to remove the names of confidential informants . . . and remove other material at the recommendation of the U.S. Government we were convinced could harm National Security . . .

HOST (incredulously):  Just to be clear, Bill Keller, are you saying that you sort of go to the Government in advance and say:  “What about this, that and the other, is it all right to do this and all right to do that,” and you get clearance, then?

KELLER:  We are serially taking all of the cables we intend to post on our website to the administration, asking for their advice.  We haven’t agreed with everything they suggested to us, but some of their recommendations we have agreed to:  they convinced us that redacting certain information would be wise.

ROSS:  One thing that Bill Keller just said makes me think that one shouldn’t go to The New York Times for these telegrams — one should go straight to the WikiLeaks site.  It’s extraordinary that the New York Times is clearing what it says about this with the U.S. Government, but that says a lot about the politics here, where Left and Right have lined up to attack WikiLeaks – some have called it a “terrorist organization.”

Curious.  Even the beloved NYT is falling prey to acquiescence.  The real summary of what’s going on with “Good Journalists” comes in the next paragraph with help from The Guardian‘s Simon Jenkins.

It’s one thing for the Government to shield its conduct from public disclosure, but it’s another thing entirely for the U.S. media to be active participants in that concealment effort.  As The Guardian‘s Simon Jenkins put it in a superb column that I can’t recommend highly enough:  “The job of the media is not to protect power from embarrassment. . . . Clearly, it is for governments, not journalists, to protect public secrets.”  But that’s just it:  the media does exactly what Jenkins says is not their job, which — along with envy over WikiLeaks’ superior access to confidential information — is what accounts for so much media hostility toward that group.  As the headline of John Kampfner’s column in The Independent put it:  “Wikileaks shows up our media for their docility at the feet of authority.”

Greenwald then shifts to focus on the “Good Citizen” who is “furious that WikiLeaks has shown them what their Government is doing and, conversely, prevented the Government from keeping things from them.”  And it illustrates something so true about American society today.

Nonetheless, our government and political culture is so far toward the extreme pole of excessive, improper secrecy that that is clearly the far more significant threat.  And few organizations besides WikiLeaks are doing anything to subvert that regime of secrecy, and none is close to its efficacy.  It’s staggering to watch anyone walk around acting as though the real threat is from excessive disclosures when the impenetrable, always-growing Wall of Secrecy is what has enabled virtually every abuse and transgression of the U.S. government over the last two decades at least.

That is why this WikiLeaks Fiasco is so important.  The operation of a machine in the dark may be soothing to a people as citizens and consumers, but it is not beneficial.  Understanding the behaviors elected and appointed officials, CEOs and business owners partake in is crucial to the proper treatment of citizens and consumers everywhere.

Category: Politics | 1 Comment on The Beginning