Bernardo Huberman, Hewlett-Packard's director of the HP Social Computing lab, and fellow researcher Gabor Szabo have published a highly detailed report (PDF) on "predicting the popularity of online content." Focusing on content submitted and popularized on popular social sites Digg.com and Google's YouTube, the two concocted not one but three ways to predict how much traffic and overall user interaction a story or submitted video will receive well after it hits its initial popularity.
To do this the pair kept an eye on 7,146 videos from YouTube's recently added section, and every digg from registered digg users between July 1, 2007, to December 18, 2007. From this data, they found that stories on Digg got more votes and views during peak traffic hours than those at nights and on weekends (duh), and that YouTube videos tended to get more and more views a month into being submitted--and in many cases well beyond the initial 30-day evaluation.
HP's research shows the usual daily spikes in Digg traffic compared with story submissions and promotions.
(Credit: HP Labs)To dig a little deeper into this data, they were able to figure out which time of day story submissions on Digg had the most chance of getting attention, right down to the hour. The data also showed how many diggs a story would get after being promoted to the front page depending on both what time that story hit and when it was originally submitted. The lesson: submit, and hit the front page early.
The prediction models, which you'll have no problem understanding if you paid attention in your grad school numerical analysis class, outline three different ways to guess any one submission's popularity. All three depend on any number of variables, as dictated by Huberman's research, including what time of day you're submitting compared with how many others are submitting at the same time.
One thing that slightly outdated the research done on the Digg-side is the somewhat-recent introduction of the recommendation engine. Digg has been quite vocal with the success of its engine, both in terms of additional traffic and higher user interaction levels.
Also, at the time of the survey Digg was just two weeks out from a redesign that put more emphasis on friends activity--a precursor to the mid-September overhaul of user profiles, which made the site resemble a social network. Neither of these things changed Digg's overall method of having popular stories roll off the front page in a matter of hours--something that hasn't changed during the lifetime of the site, but it's worth noting nonetheless.
I've embedded the paper after the jump. You can also track some of HP Labs' other projects on this page.
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On Friday, Google's Picasa Web Albums rolled out a new page that highlights community photography, with featured shots from its users, a stream of live updating uploads, and a game that makes use of media that's been geotagged.
Of all the new features, the "Where in the World?" game is the most fun. It lets you guess where a photo was taken by clicking on a giant world map. You're awarded points for how close you were, with closer guesses racking up massive points. It does this using shots that have been geotagged, although that doesn't necessarily make it easier. Success in the game comes from shots that contain landmarks or language markers with local signage. If the shot doesn't have any of that, which seems to happen more often than not, you're playing with pure luck.
Picasa's new Explore section outlines some of the newest and most interesting photographs from Picasa users. (Click the image for a larger version.)
(Credit: CNET Networks)The featured photo section is also a great start but hardly the exploratory experience competitor Flickr has established for itself. There's no way to sort by date, and Google has not made it clear how the photos have ended up on the front page by hiding how many people have viewed and bookmarked each shot.
One thing missing from the equation is more ways to explore the actual users. You can still get to someone's profile with all their public shots, but there's not yet a community spotlight for interesting photographers.
The Where in the World game lets you guess where photos were taken. You're lucky if there's some sort of language or landmark...otherwise it's anyone's guess. (Click the image for a larger version.)
(Credit: CBS Interactive)
Performance-monitoring firm Pingdom thinks we should look at social networks differently.
The popularity of a social site such as MySpace or Twitter is frequently measured in unique users, page views, or user registrations. But a recent ministudy by Pingdom chose instead to look at how much of a proportional lock a given social network has on the countries' Web users. The tool of choice was Google Insights for Search, which was formally launched earlier this week.
Facebook, for example, started in the United States and still has more members there than in any other country. But there's more proportional "interest" in Facebook in Turkey, based on Google searches for the term. In second place is Canada, followed by the United Kingdom, South Africa, and Colombia.
For MySpace, the U.S. ranks at the top of the list when it comes to regional interest, followed by Puerto Rico, Australia, the U.K., and Malaysia. Beyond that, many American-founded social networks are much more popular overseas than at home: Friendster, which recently affirmed its focus on Asian countries, gathers the most "interest" in the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, and Myanmar, respectively. The top five Google Insights locations for Hi5, founded in San Francisco, are Peru, Portugal, El Salvador, the Dominican Republic, and Costa Rica.
The rest of Pingdom's results can be found on the company's blog.
On Monday at Supernova, Google's Joe Kraus gave a hypothetical example of how online shopping could become more social. On Wednesday, I saw the real thing: a new widget from PopularMedia that makes shopping sites a bit more personal.
Unlike other sharing widgets, SocialNotes sets up a back channel.
(Credit: PopularMedia)
When recipients open the page they get from a SocialNotes e-mail, they'll see an embedded note and feedback form in it.
(Credit: PopularMedia)The SocialNotes product is a widget reminiscent of ShareThis and AddThis; it's code that publishers can drop in to their sites that makes it easy for visitors to send pages off to friends or to embed them in social-network profile pages or blogs. The SocialNotes widget is somewhat more interesting because when the e-mail recipients of a notification go to the site in question, they get a little message box on the page with a personal note from the sender, as well as a way to enter a reply, which is then e-mailed back.
Implementing SocialNotes will require publishers to do a bit of coding, since they have to define where the message boxes will appear when e-mail recipients click through to the pages. The base service will be free; PopularMedia will try to up-sell users to its "advanced social-media marketing solutions, priced on a subscription basis," CEO Jim Calhoun told me.
The full, two-way version of SocialNotes will launch next month. If you want an early look, e-mail beta@popularmedia.com and ask nicely.
See also: ActiveWeave Stickis.
After the Always On conference program closed on Wednesday, I headed over to the Lunch 2.0 event (it started at 5 p.m., but who's counting?) at Facebook HQ. When I got there, the room was packed with Facebook employees and builders. (See the video for a peek at the crowd; yes, that's Scoble.) I thought it would be a good opportunity to get the skinny on good Facebook applications. Beyond the statistically popular applications, and the applications you see that your friends are using, I wanted to know what applications Facebook insiders use and like.
Here's the weird thing: I had to talk to more than 20 people to come up with a good list. Several people said they didn't use Facebook applications. Granted, some of those were Lunch 2.0 hangers-on who just showed up for the free beer. But some were developers, and even some Facebook employees.
Still, several applications were clearly popular among the Facebookerati. Here they are. (You'll need a Facebook login to try these out.)
You may touch the monkey.
- (fluff)Friends. This application lets you put a fuzzy pet on your profile that your friends can feed and pet. You need "munny" to buy food for your pet, and you earn it by petting your friends' pets. Horrible. But three people mentioned this application to me.
- Scrabulous is Scrabble in Facebook. Scrabble is a great social game. Facebook is a great social directory. This is a great idea.
- E-mail Me Instead, aka Xobni, is a little application for old folks like me who still like e-mail. It gives your profile visitors a quick way to drop you an e-mail, so you don't have to communicate through Facebook.
- Appsaholic is a Facebook ranking service. No surprise that it was popular at the Facebook HQ. It shows which applications are getting traction, and displays nice charts and graphs of usage.
- Picnik is the Facebook version of a very cool Web-based image editing application. The advantage of the Facebook port is simple: You can use it to edit your Facebook pictures. Without leaving Facebook to do so.
- Graffiti. If installed, this lets friends deface a small area of your profile page. Most people who mentioned this application didn't like using it, since they found it hard to create good-looking tags on other peoples' pages, but they kind of still liked it on their own pages.
- Finally, Flixster is a group movie rating site. After you rate a bunch of movies, it tells you which of your friends you are most compatible with--at least as movie buddies.
How to make me look sharp.
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