Archive - 2007
September 28th
Our trip to New Hampshire
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 09/28/2007 - 09:48Wednesday, Kim, Fiona and I drove up to New Hampshire to help with the Edwards campaign on the day of the Democratic Presidential Debate as well as to give Fiona a chance to spend some time with her cousins. It provided a wonderful microcosm of the political landscape.
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September 27th
How I created the Twitter Social Map
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 09/27/2007 - 09:47meeyauw asked how I produced the Social Map of Twitter that I put up yesterday for Wordless Wednesday. I didn't want to put up the details yesterday, or else the picture wouldn't have been wordless.
However, it is now Thursday, and I would like to use the map as a starting point for a discussion about Twitter. I was at the OMMA show earlier this week and two things jumped out at me. The first was the eagerness of marketing types to diss Twitter and the second was the lack of interest in conversations online. I think these are related.
As I thought about Twitter, I thought it would be interesting to produce a social map of the connections in Twitter. I wrote a fairly quick program in the mono implementation of C#. This is an open source, free software implementation of the .NET framework. I've been doing a little more programming in mono recently, in part because of my interest in OpenSim which is a "BSD Licensed Open Source project to develop a functioning virtual worlds server platform" similar to Second Life, which is also written in mono.
One of the mono tutorials had an example of scraping a Google page. I modified that to scrape twitter pages. Essentially, I would take each twitter page, scrape out the list of friends, and then for each friend, repeat the process. However, this would produce a very large graph which would include people who are not particularly active twitterers.
So, I threw in a little test. I only selected people that had more than 100 friends and that had more followers than friends. I felt this would give a better relationship between the people that others especially follow.
My first pass didn't have any error checking, and it ran through about twenty different people before I got an error from Twitter. However, it gave me enough data to produce the graph. I have run a subsequent version that captures errors so it can keep on going, and also pauses a second between page requests, so I'm less likely to overload the twitter servers.
That run produced massive amounts of data; too much to reasonable be displayed in a graph, and I'm thinking of doing another pass where I only look at people with more than a thousand followers.
My program wrote out the results in a format that could be fed into Graphviz. Graphviz is a wonderful program to create visual images of graphs. Since Twitter friendships are asymmetrical, that is, I can add you as a friend without you adding me as a friend in return, I used the directed graph capability of Graphviz.
Each time, I started on my own Twitter page, and followed the links. In each run, I very rapidly found my way to Biz Stone, which isn't surprising since Biz is a co-founder of Twitter.
I look forward to creating another map, as well as posting some other reflections on Twitter shortly.
September 26th
Another canary sputters
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 09/26/2007 - 11:06If you've been reading the Connecticut section of this blog, you will have heard plenty about Avery Doninger, the student in Burlington, CT, who was banned from running for re-election to class office after writing a blog post critical of the school administration. In addition, students were barred from wearing T-shirts showing their support of her.
I am proud to now have a 'Team Avery' T-shirt.
Well, this isn't an isolated event. Today, I read over on the John Edwards blog as well as on DailyKos about a student who received a one day in school suspension for wearing a John Edwards T-Shirt.
As I've posted in both places, students around the country need to gather together to fight to maintain their basic freedoms.
September 25th
Wordless Wednesday
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 09/25/2007 - 19:06
White Labeled Social Networks
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 09/25/2007 - 16:08At the OMMA show, there were several vendors out their touting their white-labeled social networking tools. My initial reaction resembled that of the beloved NPTech humorist kitty cat. Yet I have to admit that my work in Deanspace (as talked about in Mousepads, Shoe Leather, and Hope, was essentially my part in creating white-labeled social networking tools several years go.
I spent a bit of time talking to four different vendors. I’ll list them here in the order in which I spoke with them.
The first vendor I saw was The Port. The are located down in Atlanta and have a .NET based system. Their clients include the Atlanta Falcons and the Atlanta Journal Constitution. They are also partnering with Convio as they reach out to non-profits and other associations. They focus on providing the infrastructure and having others handle community outreach strategies, design issues and so on. They are not doing anything with XFN, microformats or OpenID.
They do have a sample site up. I set up a page there, as well as a blog. They support RSS and have a widget in beta.
The second vendor was KickApps. They started early in 2006. They are based in New York and use Java as their underlying software. I was told that their main selling point was that people could get up and running very quickly with them, where other firms the engagement process could take several months. They did not have a demo community available.
The third vendor was CoreSpeed. They came out of enterprise project work, and tout their interconnectivity to back end enterprise systems. They are based on PHP and SOAP. They mentioned BMC software as a client, but wouldn’t give details about what any of their clients had done with data gathered from the portals citing client confidentiality.
They partner with What a concept! “the first social media agency in the Southeast.” Sherry Heyl, CEO was “a key organizer of SoCon07, the first Social Media un-conference in Metro Atlanta and is currently planning SoCon08”.
Like ThePort, CoreSpeed has a demo white labeled social network up and running at CoreSpeed Community. I’ve set up an account there as well. They provide the ability to import external blogs, Flickr photos and much more. They support RSS. They even have OpenID support was part of their “ID Hub”, which they describe as a work in progress. Unfortunately, I received errors when I attempted to use my OpenID.
The final white-label social network firm that I visited was Prospero. As Miranda’s father, I’ve always had liking for the name Prospero. In addition, they had cool swag; refrigerator word magnets with words like Live, Moderation, Share, Believe, Message, Today, Build, Smart, Think, Attract, Blog, Chat, Cool, Engage, Community, Social, Widget, Create, Crazy and others.
They are located in Boston and their software is .NET based. They grew out of the old Delphi communities and have iVillage as a lead client. They talked a bit about their abilities to deal with moderation issues. They were live blogging the event, but didn’t have a demo site available to use.
One other company that I visited was Reality Digital. They don’t speak of themselves as a white-label social network provider but as a “A hosted service platform for storing, sharing, managing and monetizing user-generated content including video, photos, games, text and more”
One of their clients is Lonely Planet. I’ve always loved Lonely Planet travel guides and the idea of Lonely Planet TV is very appealing.
So, while other people spent time talking about where to place their banner ads to maximize clickthrough, some companies are providing services to help make marketing a meaningful part of people’s conversations.
