Facebook feelings are contagious: Study examines how emotions spread online You can’t catch a cold from a friend online. But can you catch a mood? It would seem so, according to new research from the University of California, San Diego. Published in PLOS ONE, the study analyzes over a billion anonymized status updates among more than 100 million users of Facebook in the United States. Positive posts beget positive posts, the study finds, and negative posts beget negative ones, with the positive posts being more influential, or more contagious. “Our study suggests that people are not just choosing other people like themselves to associate with but actually causing their friends’ emotional expressions to change,” said lead author James Fowler, professor of political science in the Division of Social Sciences and of medical genetics in the School of Medicine at UC San Diego. There is abundant scientific literature on how emotion can spread among people – through direct contact, in person – not only among friends but also among strangers or near-strangers.
Twitter’s Video App, Vine, Adds Private Messages Twitter’s Vine video-sharing service released a new feature that allows you to send video and text messages to other people on Vine. Previously, the only option was for sharing Vine’s six-second videos with the public. The new option underscores the push by social companies to emphasize more personal, one-to-one or one-to-few forms of communication, in response to the rising popularity of apps like Snapchat and WhatsApp. Facebook’s Instagram Direct launched in December. Vine’s push into direct messaging might see greater pickup, as the app enables you to send videos to anyone in your address book, even if they aren’t on Vine. With the addition of Vine messaging, now Facebook and Twitter both have multiple direct-messaging channels.
Measuring Large-Scale Social Networks with High Resolution This paper describes the deployment of a large-scale study designed to measure human interactions across a variety of communication channels, with high temporal resolution and spanning multiple years—the Copenhagen Networks Study. Specifically, we collect data on face-to-face interactions, telecommunication, social networks, location, and background information (personality, demographics, health, politics) for a densely connected population of 1 000 individuals, using state-of-the-art smartphones as social sensors. Here we provide an overview of the related work and describe the motivation and research agenda driving the study. Additionally, the paper details the data-types measured, and the technical infrastructure in terms of both backend and phone software, as well as an outline of the deployment procedures. Figures Citation: Stopczynski A, Sekara V, Sapiezynski P, Cuttone A, Madsen MM, et al. (2014) Measuring Large-Scale Social Networks with High Resolution. Introduction Related Work
TWITTER ANALYTICS 101 – GETTING STARTED While browsing in my Feedly account, my eye fell upon an article about Twitter analytics on Friday. The article, ‘Revealing the World of Twitter Analytics’,by Social Media Today instantly caught my eye! Love me some analytics, yet this, Twitter analytics, was news to me! The article started out by explaining where (i.e. under your Twitter Ads campaign) in your Twitter account you could find your analytics (they showed a screen shot) and then went on to show & tell (with more screenshots) their account’s Twitter analytics. All this was based upon the assumptionthat you would have ‘Twitter Ads’ and therefore ‘Analytics’ as an option on your account. This is what I reread – first lines in the article about Twitter Analytics - “Before I start writing on Twitter Analytics, I would like to bust a myth – “Twitter analytics is only available for accounts that have advertised on Twitter.That statement is not true. Was I going to have to wait for it to roll out? Challenge? I saw this:
The Emerging Science of Superspreaders (And How to Tell If You're One Of Them) Who are the most influential spreaders of information on a network? That’s a question that marketers, bloggers, news services and even governments would like answered. Not least because the answer could provide ways to promote products quickly, to boost the popularity of political parties above their rivals and to seed the rapid spread of news and opinions. So it’s not surprising that network theorists have spent some time thinking about how best to identify these people and to check how the information they receive might spread around a network. But there’s a problem. But there is growing evidence that information does not spread through real networks in the same way as it does through these idealised ones. So the question of how to find the superspreaders remains open. In the past, network scientists have developed a number of mathematical tests to measure the influence that individuals have on the spread of information through a network.
Twitter Redesign: Hello, Facebook Twitter's newest profile revamp prompts comparisons to Facebook, but the changes make it more usable. Here's what to expect. Twitter users: Your profile just got a heavy dose of Facebook. Beginning Tuesday, Twitter will begin migrating users to a new profile design that it tested back in February. Along with the new design, Twitter will launch three new ways for you and others to interact with tweets. [Facebook has suffered some strikeouts during its 10 years. Two other additions include pinned tweets, which let you choose one of your posts to tack to the top of your page, and filtered tweets, which let you choose which timeline to view when looking at other profiles. While some users may lament a more Facebook-like design, the changes do improve the desktop version of Twitter. While Twitter green-lit many features from its February test, some didn't make the cut. Twitter will gradually roll out the new design to users beginning Tuesday. More Insights
Social Network Analysis Brief Description: "Social network analysis is the mapping and measuring of relationships and flows between people, groups, organisations, computers or other information/knowledge processing entities." (Valdis Krebs, 2002). Social Network Analysis (SNA) is a method for visualizing our people and connection power, leading us to identify how we can best interact to share knowledge. A related practice is Network Mapping. History: When to use: How to use: From the UK's NHS KM Library: "In the context of knowledge management, social network analysis (SNA) enables relationships between people to be mapped in order to identify knowledge flows: who do people seek information and knowledge from? Informal Face to Face Network Mapping To highlight the value of our social networks, at a face to face gathering create an informal map using Post-it notes on a large piece of paper. Tools and Software for SNA onas Highly recommend. Training on SNA Tips and Lessons Learnt Tags
Twitter Literacy (I refuse to make up a Twittery name for it) - City Brights: Howard Rheingold Post-Oprah and apres-Ashton, Twittermania is definitely sliding down the backlash slope of the hype cycle. It’s not just the predictable wave of naysaying after the predictable waves of sliced-breadism and bandwagon-chasing. We’re beginning to see some data. Nielsen, the same people who do TV ratings, recently noted that more than 60% of new Twitter users fail to return the following month. To me, this represents a perfect example of a media literacy issue: Twitter is one of a growing breed of part-technological, part-social communication media that require some skills to use productively. When I started requiring digital journalism students to learn how to use Twitter, I didn’t have the list of journalistic uses for Twitter that I have compiled by now. One of my students asked me online why I use Twitter. Openness – anyone can join, and anyone can follow anyone else (unless they restrict access to friends who request access). Immediacy – it is a rolling present.
Applying algorithm to social networks can reveal hidden connections criminals use to commit fraud Fraudsters beware: the more your social networks connect you and your accomplices to the crime, the easier it will be to shake you from the tree. The Steiner tree, that is. In an article recently published in the journal Computer Fraud and Security, University of Alberta researcher Ray Patterson and colleagues from the University of Connecticut and University of California – Merced outlined the connection linking fraud cases and the algorithm designed by Swiss mathematician Jakob Steiner. Fraud is a problem that costs Canadians billions of dollars annually and countless hours of police investigations. Patterson says that building the algorithm into fraud investigation software may provide important strategic advantages. The criminal path of least resistance To quote a television gumshoe, everything's connected. "You're really trying to find the minimum set of connectors that connect these people to the various [network] resources," he said. Fraud and the Steiner tree, by the numbers