Spin Valley Post

With the continued success of Twitter and other social networking tools, any criticism (or praise) of products and companies is becoming increasingly public. Finding a way to manage these external communications in the internal decision-making process is an ongoing challenge for many businesses. Today, in an effort to help marketers and community managers better deal with such outside correspondence, blueKiwi, an Europas shortlist finalist, has announced the introduction of a free version of its Social Business Platform aimed at integrating outside conversations into daily internal communications to improve the decision making process.

Instead of community managers simply engaging with outside audiences via social networking tools, blueKiwi pulls outside conversations into internal discussions in order to leverage the thoughts and ideas of its user base, much like Salesforce aims to do with Chatter or Bantam Live. It is social CRM. Bluekiwi combines a slew of web 2.0 capabilities: such as collaboration, document sharing, blogging, event posting, and polling, into a single, unified solution. The use of social analytics tools ensures that the most pertinent conversations reach the eyes of the community managers.

The blueKiwi dashboard allows the community manager to integrate outside feeds—be they RSS feeds, Twitter, or Facebook—in order to stay on top of external chatter. The “Notebook” shows anything and everything in the blueKiwi community which involves the user. Any chatter which involves the user is threaded in a Facebook status-esque interface, making it simple for users to stay up-to-date on conversations in which they are directly involved.

To ensure the product is being utilized most efficiently, the product has an automated personal assistant, Alice, programmed to make recommendations to community managers in order to keep them on top of important tasks. If part of an online community seems to be slacking in a certain department, Alice will make recommendations to try and increase efficiency. The homepage of blueKiwi also gives suggestions based on analytics to further this goal.

The free version of blueKiwi supports one external community, which can range from customer forums, to channel programs, to developer groups—basically anything where the majority of the users are outside the internal network—but allows unlimited internal groups and external members. Within the community, admins can vary the access privileges of individual members. Internal and External members can see everything which goes on in these groups, or admins can restrict access to only internal members. As conversations continue to grow, admins can change access privileges as well.

blueKiwi was founded in 2006 by Carlos Diaz and Christophe Routhieau. They have raised a total of $12.3 million in funding from Sofinnova Partners and Dassault Systemes.

Youth social networking researcher dana boyd has observed that many people presume the way they use social networks is the way everyone uses them. “I interviewed gay men who thought Friendster was a gay dating site because all they saw were other gay men,” she says. “I interviewed teens who believed that everyone on MySpace was Christian because all of the profiles they saw contained biblical quotes. We all live in our own worlds with people who share our values and, with networked media, it’s often hard to see beyond that.”

Now picture our perspective leaving our own experiences, zooming out and up, until we can see how all the different groups are interacting on a world-wide social network. That bird’s-eye-view could be both beautiful and horrible if the resolution was clear enough. That’s what a Ramen-eating, ex-Apple engineer named Pete Warden is about to release to the public this week.

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This Wednesday, Pete Warden will make available friend, fan page and name data about hundreds of millions of Facebook users available to the academic research community. It’s a move that Facebook has to see coming, a move that many in the data-centric community have been calling on the company itself to do for years and an event that’s complicated by Facebook’s recent privacy policy changes that have muddied the waters of right and wrong but rendered even more data left open for outside analysis.

If what people call Web 2.0 was all about creating new technologies that made it easy for every day people to publish their thoughts, social connections and activities – then the next stage of innovation online may be services like recommendations, self-and-group awareness and other features made possible by software developers building on top of the huge mass of data that Web 2.0 made public. It’s a very exciting future, and Pete Warden is about to fire one of the earliest big shots in that direction.

Nerds in Space: Social Graph Analysis For Solving Large-Group Problems

Pete Warden studied Computer Vision in college in the UK, then got into game development. After moving to LA, he spent 6 years building graphics drivers for the original Playstation and the XBox. Then he started his own independent business, where thankfully he open-sourced much of his work (something he’s still doing today).

When he found out that starting his own business wasn’t going to work with his immigration status, he was very fortunate to have also caught Apple’s eye with the software he had been releasing to the public. Apple bought his company in order to bring him on board. The proceeds of that small sale are now sustaining his next project after leaving the company.

After spending 5 years at Apple struggling to navigate the maze of people and connections and types of expertise in order to get the information he needed, Warden decided to go independent and build a company that solved exactly that kind of problem. “I can’t think of a better big company to work for, but it was still a big company,” he says. “It was hard to find the right people to talk to, whether for particular expertise or for contacts at external companies.” And so Pete Warden left Apple to build a company that would use social graph analysis to solve problems like that. He called the company Mailana.

We’ve written here a number of times about Mailana’s tool to analyze the social graph of any Twitter user. Enter the username of someone on Twitter and Mailana will show you which 20 other people they have exchanged the largest number of reciprocal public @ replies with. Find someone interesting or important? Mailana’s Twitter analyzer will tell you who they most regularly interact with. See, for example, The Inner Circles of 10 Geek Rockstars on Twitter.

Pulling Down the Facebook Social Graph

Now Warden is about to unveil a much larger project along the same vein. For the past 6 months he’s been crawling public profile pages on Facebook. He now has more than 215 million of them indexed and updated about once a month. When he began he was using webcrawling service 80legs but in time he had to build his own crawling infrastructure.

When I talked to him this afternoon, he had already begun uploading 100 GB of user data onto his server to make available for academic research starting on Wednesday. Warden says he’s removed identifying profile URLs but kept names, locations, Fan page lists and partial friends lists. All those fields of data are just waiting to be analyzed and cross referenced. That’s one very rich resource.

Yesterday Warden posted some of his own initial observations from the data on his personal blog. Those included:

• God is in almost every state in the Southern US the #1 most popular Fan page among Facebook users. Among people in the LA, San Francisco and Nevada regions? “God hardly makes an appearance on the fan pages, but sports aren’t that popular either,” Warden writes. “Michael Jackson is a particular favorite, and San Francisco puts Barack Obama in the top spot.” In the Oregon and Idaho region? Starbucks is #1.
• In the Mormon-influenced areas of Utah and Eastern Idaho, the most popular Fan pages are The Book of Mormon, Glen Beck and the vampire book Twilight, which was authored by a Mormon.
• The bulk of Warden’s posted analysis yesterday was about location networks. People in the Western US tend to have Facebook friends all over the country, people in the Southern US tend to mostly be friends with people who have remained in the same area.

Taking a Deeper Look

These observations are interesting, but they are only the beginning of what’s possible. Name, location, friends and interests are great data points to analyze. Warden has written a program that will estimate gender as well, based on names. All these data points can be cross-referenced with outside data, too. Members of Facebook’s own staff did this kind of analysis when they compared last names on the site to US census data about the likelihood of people with particular last names reporting particular racial backgrounds in order to estimate the changes in Facebook’s racial composition over time.

“I’m mostly thinking ‘What do I try first?’,” Warden says. “There’s so many interesting ways to slice the data – especially as I’m starting to get changes over time. I’m also trying to map out political networks in aggregate; how polarized the fans of particular politicians are – so how likely a Sarah Palin fan is to have any friends who are fans of Obama, and how that varies with location too. One of my favorite results is that Texans are more likely to be fans of the Dallas Cowboys than God.”

Warden says he hasn’t talked to anyone from Facebook since he started crawling the site, but he did get an email from someone on the security team asking him to take down instructions he’d posted exposing a security hole that made harvesting peoples’ email addresses easy. So the company is paying attention. “I’d love to see them put me out of business by putting decent data out there,” Warden says. He says his Amazon Web Services bill was over $5k last month.

Why is he indexing all this content and why is he going to hand it over to the academic world later this week? “I am fascinated by how we can build tools to understand our world and connect people based on all the data we’re just littering the internet with,” Warden says.

“Nobody thinks about how much valuable information they’re generating just by friending people and fanning pages. It’s like we’re constantly voting in a hundred different ways every day. And I’m starry-eyed believer that we’ll be able to change the world for the better using that neglected information. It’s like an x-ray for the whole country – we can see all sorts of hidden details of who we’re friends with, where we live, what we like.”

For a great example of the kind of social impact that data analysis can make, Warden points to some of the fascinating ways that GIS data is illuminating the intersection of race and public services. Data has shed light on social injustices for decades and measurable information about the interactions of hundreds of millions of people every day on Facebook offers opportunities to discover both good and bad news about the contemporary human condition.

Warden says he’s not yet been able to interest any investors in his ideas for businesses based on this data, so his girlfriend Liz Baumann, a former insurance actuary, stepped in to help and is now running much of the crawling. He says he’s now focused on “working on ways of presenting all this information in a form that answers questions for people willing to pay.” His first experiment along those lines is the very interesting FanPageAnalytics.com.

What does Pete Warden hope for from this week’s public release of all this Facebook data? “Hopefully I’ll get to see a bunch of interesting [academic research] papers come out of it, worst case. And I’d like to be the guy people turn to when they need stuff like this.”

Already well-respected among a fringe group of bleeding-edge geeks, we hope that Warden’s work on social graph analysis will end up impacting a far larger number of people than may ever know his name.

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YouTube might be streaming more than 13 billion videos a month, or nearly 40 percent of total individual streams, but when you measure by time spent YouTube only accounted for 26 percent of all viewing minutes on the Web last year.  It is not surprising that it commands a smaller share of time spent watching videos than number of streams watched, since most YouTube videos are so short.  But what is surprising is how fragmented the Web video landscape remains once you go out past the top 25 sites.

According to comScore’s 2009 U.S. Digital Year in Review, more than half of all time spent watching videos on the Web (52 percent) last year was on Long Tail video sites beyond the top 25.  What you see is a real barbell distribution, with Youtube on one end and the Long Tail sites on the other.  Total video views more than doubled between December, 2008 and December, 2009, from 14 billion to 33 billion streams. So there is hope yet for niche video producers.

The Nos. 2 through 25 sites account for the remaining 22 percent of video minutes.  This group includes No. 2 video site Hulu, which just hit 1 billion monthly video streams in December, and fast-rising Netflix (no. 19).  Hulu’s 1 billion streams accounted for 5.8 billion minutes of viewing time, up 140 percent from a year before.

For  more from comScore’s report, see my earlier post on Ten Biggest Advertising Publishers On The Web or download the entire report here.

If you’ve been a geek your whole life then you understand the term “Canadian girlfriend.” The Canadian (or sometimes British) love interest is the person you talk about when a member of the opposite sex inquires about your dating status. The story is that you met online, you’ve formed a solid bond and you’ll probably break up with your online girlfriend when a girl in your vicinity decides she likes you. The idea is to drive up the value of your perceived social stock. In the startup world, the same principle is used in “ham and egging.”

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As pointed out in a recent blog post by university professor Scott Shane, “ham and egging” was first coined by Columbia’s professor Amar Bhide and Harvard Business School’s Howard Stevenson. The term refers to the technique of convincing multiple stakeholders that others are working with you despite the fact that you’re only in talks. The only problem is that most early partners only want to work with you if other reputable partners have already signed on.

Explains Bhide and Stevenson,”the ultimate ham and egging solution is for the entrepreneur to simultaneously convince each participant that everyone else is on board, or almost on board.”

However, when ReadWriteWeb spoke to MobiTV CEO Paul Scanlan about forging deals between telecom and television companies, he suggested a different tact. Although Scanlan found himself caught between partners who were skittish to sign on without the initial validation of others, he decided that rather than ham and egging, he’d build contingency clauses into contracts. Scanlan’s contracts stated that all partnerships were contingent on a set number of large-scale partners to launch. While this may not be the ideal method of closing deals, it seems like an ethical alternative to engaging in deals that begin with dishonesty.

Have you ever engaged in ham and egging and if so, was your deal a success?

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Last year, Yahoo still dominated display advertising on the Web in terms of sheer number of ad impressions on its properties, but social networking sites MySpace and Facebook came on strong. Some new data from comScore in its just-released 2009 U.S. Digital Year in Review ranks the top Web properties by the number of display ad impressions.

Yahoo served up an estimated 521 billion impressions last year, according to the report, followed by Fox Interactive Media (i.e. MySpace) with 368 billion, and Facebook with 330 billion. Microsoft sites (No.4) only served up 218 billion display ads, whereas Google (No. 6) served up only 70 billion. (These numbers do not include paid search text ads)

Here’s the full ranking:

Top Ten Publishers Of Display Ads
in billions of impressions (comScore)
1. Yahoo! Sites: 521 billion
2. Fox Interactive Media (MySPace): 368 billion
3. Facebook: 330 billion
4. Microsoft Sites: 218 billion
5. AOL: 192 billion
6. Google Sites: 7o billion
7. eBay: 36 billion
8. Glam Media: 25 billion
9. Amazon Sites: 22 billion
10. United Online: 20 billion

Obviously, the biggest sites with the most visitors serve up the most display ads. This year, Facebook doubled in size to the point where it is well past MySpace and catching up to Yahoo in audience size. It is already bigger than Yahoo in terms of pageviews.

Facebook has more advertising inventory than it knows what to do with, although not all of it is desirable. But Facebook is now selling all of its display ad inventory itself after it renegotiated its ad deal with Microsoft.

Biggest doesn’t mean most profitable. Facebook might be serving up more ads than almost anyone else, but they are still selling at very low ad rates because they perform poorly for the most part. If Facebook can figure out a way to make the ads on its site become more relevant and useful, it has a lot of room to boost its ad rates.

You can download the entire comScore report at this 2009 U.S. Digital Year in Reviewlink.