Skip to main content

Home/ (HBSN) How to Build a Social Network/ Group items tagged scaling

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Kurt Laitner

Attacked from Within || kuro5hin.org - 0 views

  • German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies first investigated the difference between 'community' and 'society' (respectively, Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft). Small groups can exist in a sense of organic community, not requiring formal rules because a sense of common mores or norms unite them. Personal relationships can be cultivated and are quite strong, and there is little need for external enforcement. John Allen's quaint description of early Usenet illustrates Tönnies' idea of community. Larger groups find community hard to sustain. Individual interest rules behavior rather than common mores. Society, as opposed to community, is based on explicit rules that require enforcement. Society possesses greater flexibility and potentially more capability, but individuals are subject to greater anomie and anti-social behavior. Internal factional conflicts occur more frequently, despite the greater modularity of individuals' function in society.
  • Society scales easily because users are interchangeable, community scales with difficulty because relationships and identity are not interchangeable.
  • we run into two opposing conceptions of identity: persistent identity and anonymity.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • The political science terms for what Shirky is trying to say are 'asset specificity' and 'selective incentives.' Users need to earn non-portable assets on an individual basis as a reward for constructive contributions to the community.
  • Dupe accounts, much like the shady accounting practices that allowed Enron to shift all its losses onto the balance sheets of fictive subsidiary corporations, allow the user's principal account to retain any specific incentives for constructive behavior while shifting all of the negative moderation and other penalties off onto the dupes.
  •  
    Some absolutely brilliant bits in here - especially ambient communities, I riff off of this that everyone starts anon themselves and to everyone else, interaction quality causes the 'other identity' to begin to crystallize and be symbolically represented, and that this 'other' need not be mapped to a natural person, this gets really very very interesting at this point so I go away and think - wildcat, your thoughts?
François Dongier

YouTube - Davos 2010 - IdeasLab with MIT - Tim Berners-Lee - 1 views

    • François Dongier
       
      How to build web-scale intelligence (people + machines) Intelligence is about making connections Suppose a half-form idea in my head and a half-form idea in your head could both be put into the web and connected Link these using URIs
    • François Dongier
       
      Key concept: half-form ideas
fishead ...*∞º˙

The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Social Search Engine - John Battelle's Searchblog - 7 views

  •  
    "Third, we learn some cool things about how Aardvark works. Check this quote out: "...unlike quality scores like PageRank [13], Aardvark's quality score aims to measure intimacy rather than authority. And unlike the relevance scores in corpus-based search Screen shot 2010-02-02 at 5.57.33 PM.png engines, Aardvark's relevance score aims to measure a user's potential to answer a query, rather than a document's existing capability to answer a query." Also interesting: " this involves modeling a user as a content- generator, with probabilities indicating the likelihood she will likely respond to questions about given topics. Each topic in a user profile has an associated score, depending upon the confidence appropriate to the source of the topic. In addition, Aardvark learns over time which topics not to send a user questions about...""
  • ...2 more comments...
  •  
    Have you used Aardvark? I haven't yet. If yes, did you enjoy it?
  •  
    Nope--this is the first I'd ever heard about it. I just thought the thing about quality scores as an intimacy value was interesting--something along the lines of what Kurt calls "Reputation".
  •  
    Look at what we're doing with 'reputation!' Whatever it turns out to be, I think it's amazing! I've never met any people on our list! Amazing!
  •  
    haven't read yet, but Intimacy is a different dimVal than Reputation - related of course, and it has nothing to do with haptic body suits, though I suppose that would be a different type of Reward - looks interesting, off to scrounge around
François Dongier

Anatomy of a Large-Scale Social Search Engine - 2 views

shared by François Dongier on 04 Feb 10 - Cached
    • François Dongier
       
      Not sure I agree with this. In the Village paradigm, authority (reputation) remains important. Village paradigm extends (doesn't replace) the Library paradigm
  • We demonstrate that there is a large class of subjective questions — especially longer, contextualized requests for recommendations or advice — which are better served by social search than by web search. And our key finding is that whereas in the Library paradigm, users trust information depending upon the authority of its author, in the Village paradigm, trust comes from our sense of intimacy and connection with the person we are getting an answer from.
  •  
    I think they are referring more to the kind of question. A query like "who is the oldest living American president?" is best suited for a Library paradigm, whereas a question like "is the current president of the US doing a good job in repairing the economy?" is really more of a village paradigm. I most likely will 'trust' the library answer on the first one, but will probably become en-snarled in endless debate with my Village on the second. The point is I think, that more and more, people are asking questions that the traditional library of knowledge cannot effectively answer, even with functional semantics in place. Long live The Village. Now, who IS Number 6?
Jack Logan

Eliminating the Need for Search « Nova Spivack - Minding the Planet - 7 views

  •  
    Interesting. Looks like Nova's moved on from T2.
  • ...5 more comments...
  •  
    Are we never going to see T2? Thoughts?
  •  
    It looks like even Nova has realized now the futility of his "project". It makes me think that he is more on the side of experimentation and pushing boundaries that actually developing anything substantial. One of the things I've been taught in my work is that the difference between dreamers and doers is that dreamers never stop dreaming. Doers know when to take the dream, flesh it out and make it into something that works. Nova is a dreamer, and has left a wake of half-baked thoughts behind him as he continues to seek the next "thing", having lost interest in the last "thing" he experimented with. There are a lot of once-promising ghost towns that have been cooked up and discarded that trail behind him like the chains on Dickens' ghost of Christmas past. Earthweb, NVention, Lucid, Radar, Twine. All flittering bubbles of inspiration that never grew up, and/or were abandoned by the dreamer just short of success. I think we've already glimpsed the "future" as Nova sees it, and I for one have learned that what ever his future is, I don't want to participate.
  •  
    +1
  •  
    @fish yeah we have a saying for those "dreamers'. it's "Put down the bong and DO something!!" Dreaming is something i do when i sleep. hoping,planning and working i do when awake. Keep waking em up Man!! And double +1 to your commet about interactions with Nova the Snake Oil Salesman!!
  •  
    -1 :-)
  •  
    I think Nova has contributed greatly, and will continue to do so. His gifting is not in finishing, but in starting - starters and finishers are seldom the same person. What is unusual here is that a starter is given large amounts of capital but the vc's don't know enough to pair him with a finisher. One of my business partners said a business needs a dreamer, a doer and a sob. To which I asked, so that makes you.....? T2 is based on what I know of it (unless they've come up with some scaling algorithm, which isn't a product, and should be sold based on the patent to MS or google) fails on differentiation, and is entering a market against formidable incumbents. Hence Nova's thoughts that the next 'google' needs to differentiate itself further are actually quite valid. If I were Nova's vc on T2 I would pull the plug. Never talk about your next project.
  •  
    Not so long ago, in fact just a couple years ago, Twine (T1) was far ahead of the competition in the area of interest networking (building of communities around interests). I think Nova and T1 really did a good job in *pioneering* the idea that social networking should not just focus on people connecting to each other but rather on the topics that people share an interest for. For some reasons, Twine did not try to stay ahead in this field and didn't integrate improvements that seemed quite obvious. I would have liked to see T1 evolve towards real semantic tagging, connecting Twine tags and topics to linked data entities. I would have liked to see a T1 with stronger collaborative filtering: even the "like" button that was - i believe - introduced by FriendFeed, is now everywhere, except on Twine... I don't think that what Nova is discussing here has much to do with T2, just like I don't think that the semtweet project that he tweeted about a couple weeks ago has much to do with T2 either. I agree that so far Nova has been a dreamer, an inventor, more than a "doer", but I still like to check what he is dreaming about. Sometimes his dreams seem very deep and interesting: I don't find the current T2 dream (faceted search based on Apache-Solr technology) very exciting, unless something big comes out of it with respect to RDF. I am not that excited either about Semtweet, unless again it brings along something big with respect to RDF. And now Nova is sharing some new thoughts about some new user-machine interaction that wouldn't be based on search but on something else... I agree it's still pretty vague and not very convincing yet...
fishead ...*∞º˙

Evri Ties the Knot with Twine - Twine CEO Comments and Analysis « Nova Spivac... - 0 views

  • Evri Ties the Knot with Twine — Twine CEO Comments and Analysis March 11th, 2010  Share Today I am pleased to announce that my company, Radar Networks, and its flagship product, Twine, have been acquired by Evri. TechCrunch broke the story here. This acquisition consolidates the two leading providers of semantic discovery and search. It is also the culmination of my long and challenging venture to pioneer the adoption of the consumer Semantic Web.
  • At the time of beta launch and for almost six months after, Twine was still very much a work in progress. Fortunately our users and the press were fairly forgiving as we worked through evolving the GUI and feature set from what was initially just slightly better than an alpha site to the highly refined and graphical UI we have today. During these early days of Twine.com we were fortunate to have a devoted user-base and this became a thriving community of power-users who really helped us to refine the product and develop great content within it.
  • These losses meant we could no longer create compelling content or to manage the Twine community. So we put Twine.com on auto-pilot and let the traffic fall off. While painful to watch, this at least had the benefit of reducing the pressure to scale the system and support it under load, giving us time to focus all our energy on getting T2 finished and raising more funds.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • The Twine team is joining Evri to continue our work there. Twine.com’s data and users are safe and sound and will be transitioned into the Evri.com service over time. This process will be done in a manner that protects privacy and data, and is minimally disruptive. I have great faith in the team at Evri and believe they will handle this with great care and respect for the Twine community.
  • Twine was well-received by the press and early-adopter users.
1 - 7 of 7
Showing 20 items per page