Tag Archives: facebook

Social Networking 4 Your Business talk

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Few days ago, I gave a 4-hours talk in Bari for the initiative sponsored by Italian government and 4 universities “Imprenditori si diventa” (Entrepreneurs are made, not born). The presentation is embedded below.

Social net-work 4 your business

View more presentations from Paolo Massa

It was a very interactive talk and I enjoyed it very much. I used for the first time VisibleTweets: students could write twitter messages with tag #isdsn and these tweets were automatically shown on another screen by VisibleTweets. Unfortunately not all students had a connection so it was less interactive than what I hoped but still very interesting [note for myself: VisibleTweets probably works better if the talk is given by at least two people because it is hard to read twits and talk, and the audience (as expected) challenges you and tries to “steal” the attention from you (to their witty twits)]. I also showed many videos (see the slides): from CommonCraft, from the movies Ratatouille and The pursuit of Happyness, some from Socialnomics.com and one by Corrado Guzzanti, an Italian comedian. It is incredible the power of movies in waking up your audience! ;)
The talk was full of real examples such as successes and failures in using Twitter, Facebook and other social media, both in the Italian context and worldwide (I didn’t avoid talking a bit about Wikipedia when exploring concepts such as wikinomics and crowdsourcing of course!)
There were some interesting projects by will-be entrepreneurs and I wish them all the best, for their future and the future of Italy.
Well, if you are interested in the slides, you can get them on Slideshare.

Percentage of men and women on different social networking sites (Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, …)

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Lots of debate arose around the fact almost 87% of Wikipedia editors are male. This is not necessarily true since the survey on which this “fact” is based has some biases (for example, people self-elected to answer).
However, a query run on the Wikipedia database showed that more than 83% self-identified as male.
While these numbers are not 100% representative of reality, it is probably true that most of editors are male. This is acknowledged also on a Wikipedia page about the systemic bias of Wikipedia (yes, I know this very page has been written by people whose bias we are trying to interpret but, going to the extremes, it’s turtles all the way down ;)

So the question could be: what is the ratio male/female on other social networking sites?

Just, for comparative reasons (and a bit for fun too), I compiled the following table based on the Social Network Analysis Report by Ignite Social Media. The table is sorted so that first lines are sites in which there are relatively more females than males. I’m not familiar with all the sites but it seems that sites more populated by women are the very social and playful (such as Haboo, Bebo, Myspace, Xanga, Facebook). On the other side of the spectrum there are sites populated most by males: sites showing what’s interesting right now thanks to social bookmarking such as Reddit, Digg, Identi.ca, and “professional” network sites such as Linkedin and Plaxo.
This table is not “scientific” in any way as well (for instance, percentages in the report are gathered from Google Ad Planner and Google Insights for Search).
Consider the following table just as more food for thought. Does it confirm your intuitions? Or should I say prejudices? ;)

  Social network site Percentage of females
Habbo 66%
Bebo 62%
Myspace 62%
Xanga 62%
Facebook 55%
Ning 55%
Hi5 52%
Meetup 52%
Tribe 52%
Twitter 52%
Yelp 52%
Flixster 50%
Foursquare 50%
Friendster 50%
Flickr 48%
Last.fm 48%
Livejournal 48%
Metafilter 48%
Multiply 48%
Plaxo 45%
Stumbleupon 45%
Badoo 43%
Mixx 43%
Linkedin 40%
Netlog 40%
Newsvine 40%
Plurk 40%
Identi.ca 34%
Digg 32%
Indianpad 24%
Reddit 24%

Credits: Icons by socialshift, elegantthemes and WpZoom.

Facebook reaches 500 million users and now tells stories

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500 million people share their lives on Facebook, incredible eh? (see this blog post by Mark Zuckerberg).

For the occasion, Facebook launched Facebook Stories (http://stories.facebook.com/).
“Facebook is all about the individual and collective experiences of you and your friends. It’s filled with hundreds of millions of stories.

On 12th Febraury 2010, I made the following picture: at that time Facebook reached 400 million users and, if it was a country, it would have been the third country in the world. Today, 17th September 2010, it is at 500 millions. Anyway it will take some time before becoming the second largest country in the world, considering India has more than 1 billion citizens.

Using the Web to do Social Science: ICML 2010 Keynote by Duncan Watts

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Duncan Watts is principal research scientist at Yahoo! Research, where he directs the Human Social Dynamics group.

Although internet-based research still faces serious methodological and procedural obstacles, Duncan proposes that the ability to study truly ‘social’ dynamics at individual-level resolution will have dramatic consequences for social science. To illustrate this, he will describe four examples of research that would have been extremely difficult, or even impossible, to perform just a decade ago:
* Using email exchange to track social networks evolving in time
* Using a web-based experiment to study the collective consequences of social influence on decision making
* Using a social networking site to study the difference between perceived and actual homogeneity of attitudes among friends
* Using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to study the incentives underlying ‘crowd sourcing’

Read the interesting report of the talk by Fitzgerald Steele. (via Avesao)

Facebook social network analysis using Gephi

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Facebook network analysis using Gephi

This great presentation tells you:
* how to use Netvizz, a Facebook application for exporting your Facebook social network or the network of a Facebook group in the form of a .gdf file
* and then how to import the .gdf file into gephi for analyzing and visualizing your network: you can select and parameter layout algorithms, change colors and sizes, etc.
Amazing!

If Facebook were a country, it would be the third largest country in the World!

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Facebook is the third most populous country
According to stats published by Facebook, Facebook has currently 400,000,000 active users. This would make it the third most populous country in the world, after China and India.
Do you bet it will overtake India’s population (1,166,900,000)? In how many months?
(picture adapted from this image)

Networks of loneliness

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From NYTimes A Facebook Christmas Love Story, it seems loneliness is contagiousness and spreads to your social ties on social networks (just as another study has found about spreading of happiness and spread of obesity and smoking behaviour).

An article in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology presented the argument that feelings of sadness and isolation can spread from the folks who are feeling them not only to their friends but also to their friends’ friends.

Today “Facebooking Won’t Affect Your Grades”, Study Finds. Tomorrow “Facebooking Affects Your Grades”, study will find.

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Every research finding is so ephemeral nowadays. Maybe what we are doing is not science after all? Or maybe it was like this even years ago but simply it was slower, i.e. it took 20 years to get a new study confirming or not the previous one. Or better, every new study is just a small contribution in an ocean of possibilities and many of them will crystallize over time into “our comprehension of the Reality”…

From Facebooking Won’t Affect Your Grades, Study Finds. At Least Until Next Month’s Study Tells You It Will

It seems like every week there’s a new study about whether or not the sky is falling because of Facebook and other Web sites of its ilk. Now the University of New Hampshire offers new research that falls squarely in the sky-is-not-falling category, at least not when it comes to the impact of social media on students’ grades.
A survey of 1,127 University of New Hampshire students pursuing various majors found no link between how much time they spend Facebooking, tweeting, and YouTubing and how well they do in college.
The breakdown: 63 percent of heavy social-media users got high grades, compared with 65 percent of light users. The findings held up for academic slouches, too. Thirty-seven percent of heavy users got lower grades, compared with 35 percent of light users.
The university’s message: “Parents worried that their college students are spending too much time on Facebook and other social-networking sites and not enough time hitting the books can breathe a sigh of relief.”
Or not.
In April, a researcher at Ohio State University found that students who use Facebook reported earning lower grade-point averages than nonusers of the social-networking service. Then again, the researcher said in an interview with The Chronicle that she didn’t have enough data to determine whether Facebook use causes students to do poorly.
What research can prove is that when those students get married there’s a good chance Facebook might help cause their divorce. At least that’s the story until next month, when someone else is bound to tell us how Facebook is saving relationships.
Oh wait, someone already did.