A Serenade for Social Web by Spindle
June 9, 2012
The Social Web’s being serenaded again, but this song has a different beat. Spindle croons a tale of exploration and discovery with a realistic element according to, Announcing Spindle. Their company mission is simple; they want to make social content more discoverable.
Spindle freely acknowledges the web is vast and stated:
“We believe that we’ve barely scratched the surface of what’s possible via the social web and that discovery needs to be reimagined from the ground up. Location, device, time of day, the structure of the physical world, the social graph, and your interests can uncover better content than keywords. At Spindle, we’re building the discovery engine for the social web.”
When information is delivered only via a specific group or source, one might miss something pertinent. Regardless of how informative and insightful your group of friends, something more logical might be just outside your circle. Spindle realizes that and is developing a way to change how you discover information and relate to the people, organizations and places all around you.
The competition for the perfect web tool has been growing strong. Until now, most the players have sang the same old song with variations in the beat. Spindle’s new tune has a catchy jingle that sticks in the mind. The new search system spotlight just may be shining on them, as they continue to serenade the social web.
Jennifer Shockley, June 9, 2012
No Love in the Air or the Numbers for Google+
June 9, 2012
Summer is here and love is in the air, but Cupid isn’t aiming any arrows towards Google+. Things just aren’t going well for Google’s 6th attempt at social networking, according to the article The truth about Google+: The social network without passion.
Google has repeatedly tried to find love, but they continue to add obituaries to their social networking cemetery.
Orkut 2004, currently only used in Brazil.
Dodgeball 2005-2009
Jaiku 2007-2009
Wave 2009-2010
Buzz 2010-2011
Google+ was recently analyzed by RJ Metrics, who sampled posts by 40,000 randomly selected users. Their findings were as follows:
“The average post has less than one +1, less than one reply, and less than one re-shares.”
“30 percent of users who make a public post never make a second one. Even after making five public posts, there is a 15 percent chance that a user will not post publicly again.”
“Among users who make publicly viewable posts, there is an average of 12 days between each post.”
“After a member makes a public post, the average number of public posts he or she makes in each subsequent month declines steadily.”
One can almost hear the sound of Google+ being etched on a new tombstone. It seems their networking super model has the charisma of a socially impaired hermit and cupid has taken a leave of absence. There is just no love in the air or the numbers for Google+.
Jennifer Shockley, June 9, 2012
Inteltrax: Top Stories, May 28 to June 1
June 4, 2012
Inteltrax, the data fusion and business intelligence information service, captured three key stories germane to search this week, specifically, what is hot and trending in big data these days.
The first answer came from our story, “Dashboard Data Analytics Hot” which showcases the many ways in which increased usability is increasing big data’s popularity.
Also, “The Next Great Data Gold Mine” looks a little deeper into what we already know, social media is going to be huge for analytics.
Finally, “Analytic Healthcare Contests Boom” showed that many of the health field’s biggest problems are being solved by analytic contests.
The rapidly evolving world of big data is always in flux. What’s hot today might be cold next week. But know we’ll be taking the industry’s temperature every day to stay atop all the exciting changes.
Follow the Inteltrax news stream by visiting www.inteltrax.com
Patrick Roland, Editor, Inteltrax.
June 4, 2012
Trampoline Systems Pivoted to Social Analytics. Did It Get Dizzy?
June 1, 2012
According to Charles Armstrong, the CEO of Trampoline Systems, their company’s journey has not always been easy. They jumped into the business of network analysis technology about five years to early during a time of global economic struggles and faced some investment problems.
Facing the challenges head on, they created their own form of venture financing and ended up being the first company in the world to raise money via equity crowd funding. Now, the fruits of their labor have ripened and their moving right along with the times.
They describe their specialty on their website as;
“Trampoline Systems is an award-winning specialist in social analytic software. The company’s SONAR technology analyses business communications to map internal collaborations analyze external relationships and report on critical performance factors. Dedicated solutions are available for sales force optimization, internal reorganizations and expertise search.”
“The company grew out of Charles’ ethnographic research into social behavior underlying efficient collaboration, which saw him spend three years living in small island communities.”
“SONAR Framework provides a flexible range of modules for data aggregation, analysis, visualization and reporting.”
Charles Armstrong basically runs the show. However, Craig McMillan, CTO is the mastermind behind their technology. He is responsible for creating the overall system architecture and development of the core analytic algorithms. Their award winning Software Company gained recognition and made an impact, which has pivoted Trampoline Systems into the social analytic industry. The company has been quiet. Did the pivot disorient management and customers?
Jennifer Shockley, June 1, 2012
Ark, Search and Social Network for a Cause?
June 1, 2012
There’s a new kid on the social network block, and ARK is promoting social engineering for a cause. The interview Ark.com: A Powerful New Social Network for Social Change gives us a look at the site via the eyes of the man who initiated the concept.
Founder of Ark Don McChesney tries to provide insight into the future of this new social networking site and his feelings on what it is about:
“We see ourselves as the dominant social network for giving to causes on the Internet. Your Ark profile will be the best representation of what you care about in the world. But perhaps most importantly, we see a huge volume of funding being generated by Ark for causes that are currently desperate for the resources they need to accomplish their goals. Naturally, we look forward to seeing many more of those important missions fulfilled and the world becoming a better place as a result of our users’ efforts.”
What happens when a parent search system blocks a federating system’s queries? Anyone remember ez2find.com, the French meta-search system. It was a killer and then ran into friction. The ARK concept is nice but it’s not completely off the ground yet. Social networking is all about hype, social engineering and marketing. We’ll have to wait till the buzz dies down to see some actual results.
Jennifer Shockley, June 1, 2012
Sponsored by PolySpot
Is YouTube a Two Day Old Cheeseburger?
May 31, 2012
Today’s smartphones offers fresh video sharing apps that are making Youtube as appealing as a day old cheeseburger. The article How Social Video Could Kill YouTube leaves the impression that online video’s may get left in the microwave instead of on the dinner plate.
According to San Francisco-based Flurry;
“Startups like SocialCam and Viddy, two of the fastest growing social networks for sharing video on smartphones, may be on a collision course with Google-owned YouTube. While initial indicators are far from conclusive, rumblings of a possible market tsunami are afoot.”
“From January to March, people spent 10% less time watching YouTube videos online, while users of mobile video apps increased their viewing time by 52%.”
Times have changed and now Smartphones are the fresh apple pie of video. Why? They make the process simple. These ‘all in one’ devices are easily accessible and provide increasing process power, higher bandwidth and high-definition cameras. This makes them today’s favorite flavor when capturing memories and sharing them with friends and family.
Youtube has an app for video sharing, but it still requires multiple steps, whereas the apps offered by Smartphones are simple, often offering one step procedures to share. If this story is accurate, is there trouble ahead for Google’s video ambitions? Youtube may be doomed to become yesterday’s cheeseburger compared to the piping hot new apps available on smartphones.
Jennifer Shockley, May 31, 2012
Sponsored by PolySpot
Lexalytics Uses Text Analytics to Find the Most Popular Superhero
May 31, 2012
The LexaBlog recently posted some interesting information about popular superheroes in the article “The Avengers: Most Popular Superhero?”
According to the article, writer Seth Redmore analyzed 330,000 tweets regarding the new Avengers superhero movie by sending out query topics on the main characters as well as the actors playing them.
Redmore breaks the information down for us with several charts showing the most to least popular characters as well as the most to least popular themes as well as hash-tags.
When discussing his process, Redmore states:
“This actually does a good job of showing why I wanted to create query topics for the superheroes. Many of their names come out looking more like themes than like proper “names”. Many of these themes aren’t particularly useful, so, I excluded a bunch of them when I was doing other sorts of analysis. Next, I decided to see what themes were most commonly associated with each of said superheroes. As I said before, I pulled out things like “watching avengers” when I was doing this analysis, as it adds nothing in terms of what people were associating with this character/actor.”
How will this aid your business? Send us your ideas via the comments section of this blog.
Jasmine Ashton, May 31, 2012
Sponsored by PolySpot
Pingar Analyzes Tweets: Polyspot Integrates Them
May 29, 2012
Pingar set themselves up with a challenge, described in their blog post, “Making Sense of Conversations on Twitter: Lessons Learned.” The business intelligence company wanted to test themselves with some of the most nebulous unstructured data out there—data from social sites like Facebook and Twitter and, an added test, organizations that stash their data behind a firewall. They share challenges and lessons from the project in their post. The write up describes part of the process:
“First, we cleaned the tweets by removing all the duplicates, as thousands of re-tweets and spam tweets can negatively affect the results. From each tweet we removed URLs, hashtags, user names and stopwords such as RT, via, lol, lmao, while keeping the original copy for display later. Once all the tweets are cleaned and categorized into dates and sentiments, we applied the Pingar API Entity Extraction method to determine the keywords for the two sets of positive and negative tweets. The API returned two lists of keywords along with the keyword scores. Sometimes the same keyword appeared in both positive and negative list. In this case, we removed the keyword with the lower score from one of the lists.”
Naturally, though, context free content remains a challenge. A demo of the Twitter results is available here.
Pingar is headquartered in New Zealand with offices in the US, Hong Kong, India, the UK. Their roots are in research, and the company maintains ties with key universities, including the University of Waikato and the University of Swansea. Pingar API launched in 2011; the software is platform agnostic, and currently supports English and Chinese with more languages on the way.
Our question, “When you have tweets, then what?” The answer is to use Polyspot’s insight enabled infrastructure to make the data immediately accessible to users wordwide.
Cynthia Murrell, May 29, 2012
Sponsored by PolySpot
Facebook Monetization Speculation
May 24, 2012
“It’s free and always will be.” CNet News’ Chris Matyszczyk speculates that Facebook may have to break its famous vow in “Why Facebook May Soon Cost You Money.” Extrapolating from a New Zealand test run of a program that would boost visibility of your status updates for a fee, Matyszczyk sees more charges in the future for Facebook users. He also suspects this may ultimately (ironically) give users more power. He writes:
“This week’s New Zealand experiment comes from the same helpful impulse that spawned fees for your first checked bag at the airport. “In other words, now that we’ve got you, give us something. Of course, one of the difficulties if Facebook succeeds in charging customers for, say, actually having people seeing their updates, is the possibility that its relationship with its users will change. “Currently, Facebook can switch its privacy rules and drag you along because you are aren’t a paying customer. “But once you are, mightn’t people begin to take on a different attitude? A paying customer might expect a higher level of service, of feedback — and, yes, of privacy.”
That is a good point. Certainly Facebook isn’t eager to hand users any control over the site.
I’m sure they aren’t eager to break their promise to always be free, either. After all, that vow is posted prominently on Facebook’s sign in/sign up page, and has always been integral to the company’s philosophy. On the other hand, charging piecemeal for perks (a.k.a. improvements) won’t technically violate their word, and may just help keep those shareholders happy.
Cynthia Murrell, May 24, 2012
Sponsored by PolySpot
Report Finds Google+ Lacking User Engagement
May 23, 2012
Business Week recently reported on Google’s social media arm in the article “Is Google+ a Ghost Town, and Does It Matter?”
According to the article, RJ Metrics found that, after surveying 40,000 of the 170 million people with Google+ profiles, user activity is rapidly on the decline. Unlike other social media sites like Facebook or Twitter, Google+ has an extremely low rate of reposting (15% to be exact) and the average time lapse between posts is 12 days.
Google denies these allegations and states the findings to be inaccurate, but fails to provide its own data on user engagement. The search giant does say that people are two to three times more likely to share content in their private circles than to make posts public.
The article states:
“Robert Moore of RJMetrics acknowledges that the study is skewed by the lack of private data, but points out that his findings echo a ComScore (SCOR) study released in February, which showed that Google+ users spent only about 3 minutes per month on the social networking site in January, compared with 7.5 hours on Facebook.”
While we can certain of the accuracy of this data, based on my own personal experience with Google+ it paints a pretty accurate picture. This study certain reminds readers that Google sits alone at lunch.
Jasmine Ashton, May 23, 2012
Sponsored by PolySpot
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