Tidying Tweets. Twitter Next?
February 23, 2015
I read “Meet the Tweet-Deleters: People Who Are Making Their Twitter Histories Self-Destruct.”
Here’s the passage I noted:’
There are a handful of services—TweetDelete, Tweet Deleter, and TwitWipe among them—that can automate the tweet-deleting process for those who don’t feel like writing their own scripts. 1.3 million people have signed up for TweetDelete, according to the company, and 533,000 accounts are actively using the timed auto-delete feature.
Do these services remove items from systems which perform automated collection, analysis, and reporting?
Stephen E Arnold, February 23, 2015
Divining Unemployment Patterns from Social Media Data
January 14, 2015
It is now possible to map regional unemployment estimates based solely on social-media data. That’s the assertion of a little write-up posted by Cornell University Library titled, “Social Media Fingerprints of Unemployment.” Researchers Alejandro Llorente, Manuel Garcia-Harranze, Manuel Cebrian, and Esteban Moro reveal:
“Recent wide-spread adoption of electronic and pervasive technologies has enabled the study of human behavior at an unprecedented level, uncovering universal patterns underlying human activity, mobility, and inter-personal communication. In the present work, we investigate whether deviations from these universal patterns may reveal information about the socio-economical status of geographical regions. We quantify the extent to which deviations in diurnal rhythm, mobility patterns, and communication styles across regions relate to their unemployment incidence. For this we examine a country-scale publicly articulated social media dataset, where we quantify individual behavioral features from over 145 million geo-located messages distributed among more than 340 different Spanish economic regions, inferred by computing communities of cohesive mobility fluxes. We find that regions exhibiting more diverse mobility fluxes, earlier diurnal rhythms, and more correct grammatical styles display lower unemployment rates.”
The team used these patterns to create a model they say paints an accurate picture of regional unemployment incidence. They assure us that these results can be created at low-cost using publicly available data from social media sources. Click here (PDF) to view the team’s paper on the subject.
Cynthia Murrell, January 14, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
German Spies Eye Metadata
January 13, 2015
Germany’s foreign intelligence arm (BND) refuses to be outdone by our NSA. The World Socialist Web Site reports, “German Foreign Intelligence Service Plans Real-Time Surveillance of Social Networks.” The agency plans to invest €300 million by 2020 to catch up to the (Snowden-revealed) capabilities of U.S. and U.K. agencies. The stated goal is to thwart terrorism, of course, but reporter Sven Heymann is certain the initiative has more to do with tracking political dissidents who oppose the austerity policies of recent years.
Whatever the motivation, the BND has turned its attention to the wealth of information to be found in metadata. Smart spies. Heymann writes:
“While previously, there was mass surveillance of emails, telephone calls and faxes, now the intelligence agency intends to focus on the analysis of so-called metadata. This means the recording of details on the sender, receiver, subject line, and date and time of millions of messages, without reading their content.
“As the Süddeutsche Zeitung reported, BND representatives are apparently cynically attempting to present this to parliamentary deputies as the strengthening of citizens’ rights and freedoms in order to sell the proposal to the public.”
“In fact, the analysis of metadata makes it possible to identify details about a target person’s contacts. The BND is to be put in a position to know who is communicating with whom, when, and by what means. As is already known, the US sometimes conducts its lethal and illegal drone attacks purely on the basis of metadata.”
The article tells us the BND is also looking into the exploitation of newly revealed security weaknesses in common software, as well as tools to falsify biometric-security images (like fingerprints or iris scans). Though Germany’s intelligence agents are prohibited by law from spying on their own people, Heymann has little confidence that rule will be upheld. After all, so is the NSA.
Cynthia Murrell, January 13, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Whatever Happened to Social Search?
January 7, 2015
Social search was supposed to integrate social media and regular semantic search to create a seamless flow of information. This was one of the major search points for a while, yet it has not come to fruition. So what happened? TechCrunch reports that it is “Good Riddance To Social Search” and with good reason, because the combination only cluttered up search results.
TechCrunch explains that Google tried Social Search back in 2009, using its regular search engine and Google+. Now the search engine mogul is not putting forth much effort in promoting social search. Bing tried something by adding more social media features, but it is not present in most of its search results today.
Why did this endeavor fail?
“I think one of the reasons social search failed is because our social media “friendships” don’t actually represent our real-life tastes all that well. Just because we follow people on Twitter or are friends with old high school classmates on Facebook doesn’t mean we like the same restaurants they do or share the politics they do. At the end of the day, I’m more likely to trust an overall score on Yelp, for example, than a single person’s recommendation.”
It makes sense considering how many people consider their social media feeds are filled with too much noise. Having search results free of the noiwy makes them more accurate and helpful to users.
Whitney Grace, January 07, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Inside the Creative Commons Dataset from Yahoo and Flickr
January 5, 2015
These are not our grandparents’ photo albums. With today’s technology, photos and videos are created and shared at a truly astounding pace. Much of that circulation occurs on Flickr, who teamed up with Yahoo to create a cache of nearly 100 million photos and almost 800,000 videos with creative commons licenses for us all to share. Code.flickr.com gives us the details in “The Ins and Outs of the Yahoo Flickr Creative Commons 100 Million Dataset.” Researchers Bart Thomée and David A. Shamma report:
“To understand more about the visual content of the photos in the dataset, the Flickr Vision team used a deep-learning approach to find the presence of visual concepts, such as people, animals, objects, events, architecture, and scenery across a large sample of the corpus. There’s a diverse collection of visual concepts present in the photos and videos, ranging from indoor to outdoor images, faces to food, nature to automobiles.”
The article goes on to explore the frequency of certain tags, both user-annotated and machine-generated. The machine tags include factors like time, location, and camera used, suggesting rich material for data analysts to play with. The researchers conclude with praise for their team’s project:
“The collection is one of the largest released for academic use, and it’s incredibly varied—not just in terms of the content shown in the photos and videos, but also the locations where they were taken, the photographers who took them, the tags that were applied, the cameras that were used, etc. The best thing about the dataset is that it is completely free to download by anyone, given that all photos and videos have a Creative Commons license. Whether you are a researcher, a developer, a hobbyist or just plain curious about online photography, the dataset is the best way to study and explore a wide sample of Flickr photos and videos.”
See the article for more details on those tags found within the massive dataset. To download the whole assemblage from Yahoo Labs, click here.
Cynthia Murrell, January 05, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Pentaho Makes Big Plans for Big Data in 2015
January 1, 2015
The Pentaho blog takes the year in review and makes some pretty big speculations about 2015 and they’re big, because they concern big data: “Big Data In 2015-Power To The People.” Pentaho predicted that big data business demands would be shaped by businesses’ demands for data blending and it turns out that was correct. Companies do not have standard data sets that fly across the board, rather each company in different fields are turning to big data to handle their increasing amount of data sets.
“Moving into 2015, and fired up by their initial big data bounties, businesses will seek even more power to explore data freely, structure their own data blends, and gain profitable insights faster. They know “there’s gold in them hills” and they want to mine for even more!”
The post’s 2015 big data predictions are even bigger than the imagination.
In 2015, companies will want to blend traditional data with more unstructured content. An example of how this will be used is to get a 360-degree customer profile. Combining social media with sentiment analysis about a company’s good and services tells them more about their clients. Industry is predicted to see big changes in operational, strategic, and competitive advantages by feeding companies info on to improve in these areas. Think smart house capabilities transferred to the new smart factories.
Big data will also have more flexibility in the cloud and people are demanding embedded analytics to see all the nitty gritty details about their business. The list ends that more big data power will be given to the people, mostly in ease of use. You can’t really call that a prediction, more like common sense. Whatever happens in 2015, big data will see big growth.
Whitney Grace, January 01, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
How Brands Should Approach Their Analysis of Social Media Mentions
December 23, 2014
The article titled Analyzing Social Media? You’re Doing it Wrong on CMS Wire investigates the tendency of some brands to approach social media without fully understanding context. This means not just scratching the surface, recording the number of mention on a given social media site like Twitter and whether they were positive or negative, but finding out what the conversation about your brand is really like. The article explains,
“Understanding important attributes within conversations, such as perceptions of cost or pricing, levels of customer satisfaction… and opinions of quality, actually help brands understand how they are positioned in the minds of consumers. Many of the more advanced social intelligence platforms operate on a flexible query language, some allow users to create custom filters…Customizable filters and theme detection are of course the easiest, however, with some ingenuity, queries can also be adapted to uncovering deeper context”
This sort of information can then allow for the brand to react in a way that is actually more fully formed and based off of a more accurate perception. While some people are doing this incorrectly, others in the Next Generation Information Access game are not. This might be the more important point for people active on social media to consider about who is listening.
Chelsea Kerwin, December 23, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Hedgehogs Digging For Content
November 21, 2014
Have you ever heard of Hedgehogs.net? According to a short introduction video it is:
“Hedgehots.net is social application framework that supports and empowers collaboration within the alternate investments community. Who is it for? It targets four main user groups: investment professionals, service providers, subject matter experts, fund investors. What does it do? Hedgehogs.net uses the power of social media and Web 2.0 technology to facilitate collaborative communication in the virtual world. It is designed to be a disruptive technology and economic force that has the commercial interests of the investment community at its core.”
Neat idea, a community that harnesses the power of social media and Web content to discuss alternate ways to invest money and ways to grow businesses! Browsing through the Web site, you will be bombarded by a pop-up that asks you to take survey and it gets annoying fast. Also reading the content raises an eyebrow too. Most of the blog posts seem centered on a random topic tagged with many keywords. Perusing through them show that there is a collective stream of consciousness that requires more than a second glance to understand. Hedgehogs.net also acts as a news aggregator similar to Fark.com and Reddit.com.
Hedgehogs.net’s purpose is buried somewhere on its page. Whatever and however it is used certainly drives a lot of traffic.
Whitney Grace, November 21, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Search Every Tweet: Sounds Like a Perfect Circle
November 19, 2014
If you want to find a single Twitter message, you may have to license a comprehensive archive. According to “Now You Can Search Every Tweet That Was Ever Sent”, you allegedly can use the Twitter search engine and click “all”, which is one of the 20 somethings’ favorite words. I won’t poke at this assertion.
The passage I highlighted in this IDC wonderful write up was:
Now, every public tweet since Twitter’s launch in 2006 is fair game. The change is being rolled out over the next few days to the Twitter website as well as to its iOS and Android apps. It doesn’t change how search works on Twitter. You still search from the regular search bar or the advanced search page. Clicking on the “all” tab reveals results from the full index of tweets, and over time more tweets will also appear in the “top” results tab, Twitter said in announcing the enhancement Tuesday.
Now what’s more important: [a] a single tweet or [b] an analysis of Twitter messages by some useful index point?
I won’t ask the annoying questions that I contribute to LinkedIn posts that are essentially from another dimension. I won’t ask, “What happens to Twitter messages generated by a hacked account?” Nope, not me.
The single shot search just sounds great. Give it a whirl.
Stephen E Arnold, November 19, 2014
Synthesio Leads in Listening Platforms in Forrester Wave Report
November 19, 2014
The article titled Synthesio Named a Leader in The Forrester Wave Enterprise Listening Platforms Report on Synthesio.com provided some new jargon in the discussion of enterprise listening platforms. (Listening platforms, not surveillance platforms.) The work these “listening platforms” do is largely tuning into the discussion of a given company on social media and use the information to better satisfy customers. The report named Synthesio as a leader among the eleven providers that “matter most.” The article quotes the report,
“European-based listening solution Synthesio was a leader in this study due to its superior global data coverage, automated analysis built from human coding, and functional dashboard. Synthesio has a strong road map that focuses on cooperative and connected sources of consumer feedback data. Well-satisfied customer references score the vendor highly for its flexibility and the frequency with which it recommends new approaches… Today, buyers need tools that provide more stakeholders with access to listening data.”
It is customer support that seems to have won this high ranking for Synthesio. Additionally, the report credits the user-friendly nature of their platform, even stating that the tools for this listening platform require “little training.” The field of enterprise eavesdropping platforms seems likely to grow as more and more conversations happen on social media, and Synthesio is leading the way, ears-first.
Chelsea Kerwin, November 19, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
