Once I tweet my message gets to my followers, and  I know who my followers are (if I care to know). But then anyone of them can re-tweet it and I have no clue who will be receiving it.
Well Microsoft has described the results of one of their research projects, Viral Search, that has been looking at 1.6 billion tweets and constructed the trees (or forest) of connection.

As you can see in the drawing above (more representations through the link to Viral Search) every tweet creates a forest whose edges touch other forests. One single tweet may bounce and re-bounce becoming viral.

The analyses of the networking of information has just started and I am pretty sure it will lead to some interesting insight of our Social Worlds (in the plural).

I just took a peek at my LinkedIn connection:

It is interesting to see that by colouring my different kinds of relations I can get an idea of my social space. I would like to be able to do the same by looking at all emails, comments to this blog, calls I make and receive and so on.

Fifty years ago Samuel Hartington, a scientist and politician, wrote a book, The Clash of Civilization, proposing the idea that future conflicts would start at the borders of civilisations, marking the clash of cultures.

Now researchers at Stanford have investigated the clustering resulting from email exchange to see if there are indeed some sort of social clustering that correspond to separate culture aggregation.

They have looked at mails exchanged by more than 10 million people of different nationality, religions and culture and came up with graphics like the one shown on the left where each colour represents an aggregating property, such as a given religion.

Indeed they found clusterization around these properties.  At first glance this is in line with the proposition made by Samuel fifty years ago. However, more interestingly, they also found that certain condition tend to decrease the blunt division between one aggregation and another one. Ease of transportation (including ease to obtain a visa, or no need for a visa) are important factor in fading away the borders and decreasing potential clashes.

What I feel interesting is that by looking at the way the World communicate we can start to understand what potential problems we might face and take action to decrease their insurgence.

This is the magic of Big Data…

You might have seen movie stars or soccer champions being followed by photographers and camera operators to record their every step (a bit annoying, I would guess).

The MeCam prototype soon hovering above you!

Well, it looks like we might have our personal film crew at our disposal as soon as 2014, once Always Innovating releases their new product, MeCam, a tiny helicopter equipped with a video camera that can follow us and record our every step and talk!

Interestingly, in their news press announcement Always Innovating states (verbatim) “Today people capture and share their photos and videos using archaic methods and with mixed results.”

I like the word “archaic”! It gives the feeling that we are already living in the past!

What they propose is a sort of web cam that you launch from your hand and instantly hover to follow you, automatically, with no need of directing it. In case you wish to have the camera recording not you but something occurring around you you just tell it, using voice command. The film is streamed to an Android or IOS cell phone to be relayed to some social website.

Now, I have to confess this seems to me a gadget with a limited appeal, but I have been wrong so many times in interpreting what people may wish to do. I didn’t expect, as an example, to see so many people buying video camera equipped goggles to film as they are skying or riding a bike, and yet many did.

For sure, if this comes to pass we are going to have wireless networks filled up with data streams! I am not confider, however, that this can translate, one to one, in increased revenues. Probably only in an increased adoption of high speed wireless networks and an increased revenue by subscription to premium services, at least for a while.

Many Body Systems are everywhere (matter physics, superconductivity, nanoscience, in general any category of physical problems pertaining to the properties of microscopic systems made of a large number of interacting entities).

Imagine a ball moving in a force field spatially and temporally varying. If we know the force on the ball at every point in space and time then we can easily calculate the trajectory of the ball by using Newton’s laws. Problem is easy even if the field is varying, as long as the field variation does not depend upon the position or velocity of the ball. Now let’s attach a second ball to the first one by means of a spring. In general the spring will either be stretched or compressed the balls will exert a force with each other. The motion of the balls is still described by Newton’s classical laws of motion, but now the motion of the first ball A linked with the motion of the second one. That is, we cannot compute the trajectories of the balls separately. If there are many balls then the problem rapidly becomes complex. It should be stressed that the balls are still subject to Newton’s laws, but the difficulty of solving the motion equations increases rapidly because of the coupling. This is, in essence, a Many Body System : a sort of network of interacting entities in a field.

Now imagine “replacing” the ball with a neuron and the force field (spatially and temporally varying) with the chemical field of neurotransmitters. Now add a second neuron, attached to the first one with some synapsis and so on… that’s modelling brain’s neural network as a Many Body System. Neurons might be simple, but complexity (with its wonderful properties) rapidly emerges because of their coupling.

Neurons Network as a Many Body System

Also future networks and even more social networks could be seen, in principle, as Many Body Systems (think about people behaviors coupling in certain socio-cultural fields): amazingly concepts and mathematical models being used in many-body mechanics will be valuable instruments to describe and master complexity of networks problems.

Technology is providing easier and easier means to communicate,  it is possible to get in touch with another person without that person knowing who is communicating with. This invites inappropriate conversation and it can lead to harassment.

This statement rings familiar as every day there are examples of inappropriate use of communication in social networks and more generally on internet.

The reason I am bringing it up is because of an article on today’s Herald tribune under the heading of “Grasping the world of social media”. The article started by observing that these concerns where voiced 100 years ago when the telephone started to hit the mass market (that is where the statement came from, it was voiced 100 years ago).

I found it quite interesting that we are expressing the very same feelings of our grand-grand-grand parents hundred years ago.
It is not the technology, per se, that creates problems, rather it is our difficulty in adapting present habits to new ones made possible by technology.

This is an example of the cultural divide  created between those that are facing a new technology and those that are born with it.

The issue is just getting more visible, and impacts more people, because of the speed of innovation and the shorter time it takes to an innovation to conquer the market. Whereas television took 30 years to become mainstream the iPod took 5 and the iPad just 2 (see the graph from Inigral Insights).

And we are talking about hardware and it takes time to manufacture and deliver hardware. With software the manufacturing time as well as delivery time is close to zero (making copies of a program takes some milliseconds….). A new application may spread faster than wildfire “contaminating” those that are ready for it and digging a wider gap from those that are not.

In Italy we are seeing the relevance of the cultural digital divide for business. By far, most of the people that are not on the Internet do not feel the need “to be” connected by Internet. It is not an economic issue (most of the time), rather a cultural one. We are seeing this divide at school (with few notable exceptions) where the students “are” digitally connected as a way of life, whilst teachers oppose this kind of connectivity forcing on the students a way to access information that is not part of their world.

In the coming years we will need to pay much more attention to the deployment of technology than to its development. And this is going to be a challenge to most engineers.

It has been said that we are moving towards a world where each of us will know more and more about less and less. Let me beg to disagree. We have the tools that in principle would let each of us grasps what matters about more and more. The shift towards semantics is just that.

This is just what we need since more and more life will be about getting an holistic view and behaving according to that.

According to Twitter, there are over 2,200 tweets per second (based on August 2011 stats) and they are handling 1.6 billion queries per day. But how do these tweets connect people?

Get the zoomable version from the referenced article

This is what a number of companies are trying to find out. Companies like SocialFlow. SocialFlow analyses the connections generated by tweets, the response a tweet generates, the forwarding of a tweet to another community of followers and so on, trying to understand how much viral a tweet can become. An article on Technology Review shows the kind of relationships that can be created by a tweet. The figure is taken from that article and it shows an aggregation around two hubs, one created by a US general, the other by a journalist. The graph depicts what happened  when the general twitted about the killing of Osama Bin Laden, about an hour before the official announcement by President Obama. His tweet generated a lot of traffic and part of that was the consequence of a journalist re-twitting it to his community of followers.

By understanding the instantaneous Social Graphs being created it is possible to target messages to specific community by hitting the right “hub”. This is what SocialFlow offers its customers.

It is just another example of the value of data once you start digging into them to create information.

The first use of Internet by the mass market has been tied to some sort of community services and community communications. But it is clearly a mark of this last decade the strong emergence of Social Networks. From MySpace to Orkut to Facetime and along with hundreds of more specialized communities the web has become a set of big squares attracting the world. Communications has been transformed from a one to one to many to many. More than that. People, and not just young people, want to be “on the square” all the time. This has generated the need for using a multi channel communications. It may be the computer from home, the cell phone on the move, a connected television from the hotel room.

Communications has also morphed into several media, with voice fading away, supplemented by texting, posting of clips and images, sharing of links.
The SMS way of communication that begun in the nineties is now being supplemented by a one to many text communication via Twitter.

It is amazing to see how the communications infrastructures, designed few decades ago to  carry voice communications (64kbps in slots of 3 minuted a few times a day per user), have been able to stand the flood on the one hand of video and images (huge bandwidth for considerable periods of time) and on the other hand the tremendous number of tiny messages, few hundred bytes each, tens of time a day per user (on average, with peaks exceeding 100 times a day for certain users).

The communications mediated by Social Networks has also marked a progressive abandon of the telephone number as the way to identify a calling/called party. This identity is now associated to the name of the person, both at the network and at the perceptual level.

At the Future Centre we have a project focussing on exploring the changes that may affect the enterprise clockwork once Social Networks will find a way to become part of the enterprise processes.

As usual, we are also challenging our ideas with a set of meetings/conferences involving friends in Venice. One of this conferences will be (in June) about the future of Social Networks and biz. As I am preparing for that I run into Whereberry.

My first "I would like to ..."

At first sight, this might seem to have little to share with our goal. It is a new service, that piggy back on Facebook, aiming at creating communities to discuss what we want to do in the future.

Do you fancy a restaurant with Indian food. Say that on Whereberry and some of your friends or friends of friends may come up with information, suggestions or even the proposal to join forces and wish to fulfill them together.

That trigger me into thinking that, maybe, a sort of service like this, customized for an enterprise may prove valuable.

We receive every year “our goals” and by analyzing them and sharing part of them within the enterprise we might be able to generate a community focussing on their achievement.

I really feel that once the new generation will be hired in our companies we will see a different way to tackle objectives and a different way to achieve them. Crowd-sourcing and social networks are likely to play a significant role, particularly in the innovation area. Don’t you think so?

Social Networks are now involving probably close to 1 billion people, Facebook having the lion share. Of these youngster are probably the largest share. No wonder than several researchers are going on to see how these social networks can be leveraged for a better learning.

This is what Classroom Salon, an application developed by Carnegie Mellon University is doing.

What is interesting is its approach to tap onto the collective intelligence of the community of students participating to the Social Networks to provide a better learning experience.

Classroom Salon is modeled along with the Facebook interface that has shown its effectiveness on the youngster generation. According to Ananda Gunawardena, the professor of CMU that worked on Classroom Salon:

“With Classroom Salon, we’ve tried to capture the sense of connectedness that makes social media sites so appealing, but within a framework that that allows groups to explore texts deeply. So it’s not just social networking for the sake of socializing but enhancing the student experience as readers and writers.”

Classroom Salon has been tried out in 2010 on several thousands students and it is going to be adopted by the University of Baltimore this year to see if it can increase the ratio of students finishing their courses.

Yesterday I watched the movie The Social Network, the one about the founding of the social networking website Facebook and the resulting lawsuits. I know that this movie is not new, but speaking about movies usually I watch them late. Anyway, I really liked this movie, maybe because I was expecting a boring documentary and instead I watched an exciting drama, or maybe just because I am a nerd and like all movies related to technology.

Facebook today is definitely one of the social networking website that I am using more, but it wasn’t like that three months ago. I have Facebook since 2005, and I kept this system basically to communicate with some friends in US and Europe, about 40 people in total. My main social networking website was Orkut, because in Brazil the most popular one was (or is) it (by the way, it is owned by Google). I can not affirm that it stills the most popular one, but among my friends is definitely not. Nowadays I rarely received one message in Orkut, and basically all my friends now have one account on Facebook. The curious thing is that it happened very fast, between the interval of three mounts. Yeah… the Web is always unpredictable. In this specifically situation there are some facts that could explain this phenomenon. Many people, taking me as an example, kept two accounts in similar systems (which is a waste of time), and in my opinion Facebook offers more interesting features. So many of my friends started to realize that creating a cascade phenomenon of migration to Facebook. I kind of miss using some features of Orkut, let’s wait for Google’s reaction.

Speaking about interesting features of Facebook, I really enjoy the “Like” button. I always thought that it was a brilliant idea. After reading one article about Social indexing (click here to access it), I start to think that this simple button is also very powerful.

“Many sites have tried to personalize what they offer by remembering your past behavior and showing information they presume will be relevant to you. But the social index could be much more powerful because it also mines your friends’ interests and collects information from multiple sites. As a result, the index can give websites a sense of what is likely to interest you even if you’ve never been there before.”

The code of the Like button is available to anyone add it in its website`s pages. If a user is logged in Facebook when it clicks in the Like button, of any page in Web, the link is shared with that person’s Facebook friends. This is a way to people express their interests on the Web. Many important websites use this feature, for instance Wall Street Journal.

Rely also in social networks information may be useful in web search. Google mathematically indexes the Web by scanning the hyperlinks between pages. This means that pages with many links from other sites appear on the top of search results, which is a great mechanism but it is not perfect for every needs. Using your friends’ opinions into account may be very interesting when you are searching for a restaurant, book, a place to stay or visit in a new city, and so on.

Since about 10,000 additional websites connect themselves to Facebook every day, I think soon we will see another interesting feature in Facebook, which will make me stick even more with this service.