Slashdot Mirror
New Social-Network Mapping Tools Compared
Roland Piquepaille writes "There are many new visualization tools around us which try to map our social networks. In this column, I examined Inflow, a datamining tool digging through your email repository to discover and find trends to know more about your networks. Here is a quote: "Assuming you have a significant amount of e-mail traffic, the software will create a remarkably sophisticated assessment of your various social groups, showing you not only their relative size but also the interactions between different groups." I also peeked at TouchGraph GoogleBrowser, which uses Amazon or Google Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to visually describe how books and Web sites connect with one another. Finally, I took a look at a brand new way of visualizing Google search results, from anacubis. If you know about other similar new tools, please tell me and I'll gather your comments in a future story."
Due to the high number of links to such sites within, Slashdot is incredibly close to sites such as goatse.cx and tubgirl.
... if are discovered reading my emails, surely will be spammers and mailing list administrators.
OK, so if I run that on my email inbox, I guess it'll tell me I have some long-running business relationships with penis enlargement companies, herbal viagra distributors, and various shady people in Nigeria...
This
I dunno about you; but I'm sure just a quick look at the way I group my instant messenger buddy lists, and which IRC rooms I prefer to chat and hang out in would go a long way to indicate how my social relationships are grouped.
consists of $$exy $luts, people who get rich quick, and guys who have large pumped up organs.
Assuming you have a significant amount of e-mail traffic, the software will create a remarkably sophisticated assessment of your various social groups...
After analyzing my email, I have determined that my social group is comprised of a large number of penis enlargement professionals.
GF.
Lots of petrified grits
Well this is interesting, but only half the equation. How does one interpret these graphs? Without that these are just pretty pictures.
In a recent (i believe 2 months ago) Dr. Dobbs there was an article about just this type of application. There was an article written by one of the top social enginners of applications like this. He was one of the people responsible for doing the Amazon "like this you'd like that" feature.
Erm, no offense, but I don't think A necessarily follows B here. Putting abstract constructs in visual terms doesn't automatically overcome the fact that you're still dealing with abstract constructs.
Anyway, this seems to be a next step in the evolution of search engines, not giving URLs that matches queries, but relating them, showing the relationship between actual data and ubication in internet.
Well, thats nice. No download links for InFlow so we can test it ourselves.
Merf
But here are the two most important questions:
1) How will this prevent spam?
and
2) How will it stop terrorism?
As soon as it stops spam and terrorism, I'm ready to invest.
...Or InFlow will assume you're a white-collar criminal with a small johnson.
New Social-Network Mapping Tools Compared
Oh, come on. This is Slashdot!
Some great technology and concepts exist within social-network mapping tools, but really it's totally useless to us geeks. Our social maps are built up like this:
Computer <--(attachment)--> Geek
Some of the slightly more warped geeks here have it like this:
Wife <--(guardian/moderator)--> Computer
|
| (controlled via sex)
|
V
Chump (a.k.a. geek)
mogorific carpentry experiments
I wonder whether they'll finally be able to disprove the six (or however many) degrees of separation.
Then again, most people will probably have a connection to Nigeria due to the certain organ-lengthening drug that they are so famous for.
"Smoking helps you lose weight - one lung at a time" -- A. E. Neumann
Do all the warez and porn sites look like a giant slime ball.. them all being intricately interconnected.
I was just wondering if anyone's come up with a free/open equivalent of InFlow, which is apparently commercial software (and probably Windows-only)? It'd be interesting to run it on my vast volumes of mail, but I run Linux...
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
This software looks great, but how do you visualize a beowulf cluster of Linux geeks in Soviet Russia discussing the death of *BSD and proclaiming that all of your OH- ions belong to them?
On second thought, maybe I don't want to visualize that...
Repeal the DMCA!
The mere fact of thinking about using such a tool is enough to know you are a geek. Sorry.
theefer
I liked one of the examples they give! (Warning: only maths nerds will find this funny.)
Note to M1-ers: a curt but otherwise insightful message is not "Flamebait" or "Troll".
...another half an hour spent exploring stuff I knew nothing about.
Interesting stuff, I wonder if there is any benefit in assigning values to (a) the length of replies, and (b) whether communication is one way or two way. The president of my company writes to me (well, and everyone else) once a week, but I don't reply! In a large organisation it would be useful, but not nice, to link email based analysis in with phone calls, meeting attendances, and so on.
How is the sexual life of geeks, crackerz and other members of the Internet underground documented? Check this out. A Wired story about this too!
That reminds me. What would the graph of all the people out of work look like?
Seriously -- this seems to be the aim of so many developments, to "help make the world a better place via this-and-that," but as an engineer -- and also a human being -- living in these times, it's sometimes hard to really believe that we are improving things on a human level.
So if technology is developed that can actually help people identify with themselves and others, if software can assist in helping people find their place in the human social fabric; wow, color me hopeful!
Regards,
John
Falling You - beautiful
... is this different from data mining cookies such as doubleclick and the like? Sounds like privacy invasion to me...
Those people should map their penises or something.
I don't know about the software, but this story has brought out the worst batch of lame posts I have ever seen on Slashdot. How do I filter this shit out!
This was a truly scary demonstration of this kind of technology being used by private industry, namely casinos, to track relationships between people.
Real stream available at: rtsp://media-1.datamerica.com/blackhat/bh-usa-02/v ideo/BH-USA-02-JEFF-JONAS.rm
Revolutions are never about freedom or justice. They're about who's going to be top dog. -- Kilgore Trout
Yeah thats really simple even you will get that
Our brains only ever work on the abstract
Saying something (we communicate with) is abstract is like saying all wheels are round
Imagine you was reading this in braile
Thank you Roland for the write-up on InFlow on your weblog!
Unfortunately there are some errors...
1) I am not a former IBM'er... they were my first major client.
2) It did not take me 15 years to write the software... the first working version [w/o visuals] was written in 2 weekends in 1987... on a 512K Macintosh... using Prolog. Yes, now it is commercial, used mostly by management consultants, on Windows. I also use it with VPC6 on my Powerbook.
3) InFlow can process data from email traffic to find patterns and paths, but the paragraph you quote is about the OTHER product in the article -- MIT Media Lab's "Social Network Fragments" -- a very cool tool.
Looking at just your own email[in/out] will not tell you much [except that it is 40% spam]. You need to look at the email flows between project team members, co-workers, communities of interest, etc. At least 20 participants before interesting patterns emerge...
Most of our data is collected via on-line surveys -- people participate knowingly. Most survey participants are very eager to see the resulting maps -- they want to see where they, and their friends ended up.
Valdis
Where do I download this? I have several abandoned account with 5000+ messages in the inbox to test.
http://www.orgnet.com/
http://www.anacubis.com/index.html
http://www.touchgraph.com/TGGoogleBrowser.html
http://www.smartmobs.com/index.html
http://smg.media.mit.edu/projects/SocialNetworkFra gments/
http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue7_4/krebs/
http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/wo_camero n030703.asp
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
This kind of a thing could potentially be used as a more sophisticated "exclusive filter" to counter spam propogation - emails that do not appear connected to a social network could simply be blocked entirely. This would require the "social network" to require two-way links - thus sending an email would not create a connection between two people, but sending and receiving an email would.
In any case, it's another way to look at spam protection.
Some scam-happy groups/individuals, individuals who are getting rich quick, people with a better sex life (and penis size!) due to some drug, and those who've lost 20 pounds overnight likewise. Ya think maybe I should run my anti-spam tools *before* the social map analyzer?
I made a PHP/MySQL library that prevents SQL injection & makes coding easier!
Not sure exactly what they use but it was fun to see how this new engine Vivisimo grouped both very broad topics and specific ones. Put your name in and see what it brings up and how it classifies it. Might be interesting.
Google+Blogger is an ideal combination for serving this market.
Here's how I think Go_Ogle will happen:
Soon, Google will improve the searchability of "blogspace" by making it easy for bloggers to annotate their blogs with information about themselves and their blogger friends. This information will be encoded in an RDF dialect called FOAF (Friend of a Friend).
It will then dawn on people that the FOAF file is effectively a static online profile, while the associated blog is akin to a living profile (in the 'living document' sense).
With this, Googling people will come to encompass both researching people you have met -- already a common practice -- and researching people you would like to meet.
The upside potential of this, as introduced above, will prove too substantial for IPO-bound Google to ignore. (In addition, I believe leadership of the market for online matchmaking software is the gateway to early leadership of the market for lifelong learning and career services, which will be worth hundreds of trillions of dollars in the coming decades. Toward understanding the relationship between the two markets, consider: according to a recent American Demographics survey, couples in the U.S. meet primarily at work (36%) or school (27%). More on 'online dating software -> LLCS' here).
Google will then acquire the best makers of RDF query tools and launch Go_Ogle, the mother of all online dating sites.
OK, so if I run that on my email inbox, I guess it'll tell me I have some long-running business relationships with penis enlargement companies, herbal viagra distributors, and various shady people in Nigeria...
If a tool like this is intended to be anywhere remotely useful, it would look at incoming and outgoing emails. Two people that have no two-way communication would, I imagine, be rather unconnected.
Finally, running this on the email inbox of a single person would be quite useless. You'd get a hub with spokes coming out. Whee. The real purpose of something like this is when you can run it on a massive collection of everyone's email throughout an organization. At this point, it starts to become a bit of a privacy issue. I mean, people on Slashdot scream horribly when the FBI thinks about doing something like this, but the moment the local network admin (someone who I in general would far *less* rather have digging through my email, and who I personally feel has much less right to do so) starts running social analysis software, it's okay because it's "neat". Sigh.
May we never see th
With an open source tool instead.
Etherape
Can't believe the author left that one out.
I would expect such blatant racism on Fark, but on Slashdot? Mods please ban this asshole.
The only thing I have played with to map social networks is Pajek.
I was inspired to mess with this a little at school after being inspired by the book _Linked_. It worked OK, and there was some literature about it on the web.
That being said, what he meant is perhaps that people's visual cognitive skills are much more evolved than their capacity for "abstract thinking" and intellectual pursuits.
Except slashdotters, of course.
(Mod me down for offtopic, or up for informative? Pant, pant.)
/Oh, if only I had done nothing simply out of laziness!
Once I get my map together, I can track down those people I associate with who know other people I associate with without my permission. I mean damn people, who the hell said you could know each other without me, "THE CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE!" introducing you!!!!!!
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Texas has a budget crisis? Suuuure... I'm getting 18 thousand dollars a year and a tuition waver to attend math grad school at UT next year. I don't even have to teach.
And, frell, I walk into the marble corridors of the business building and feel poor no matter what.
mlylecarlin
Try visualthesaurus: visualthesaurus.com, a web-based visualization tool for exploring how words are related to each other in extra dimensions. Looks very cool!
This is exactly the kind of facts people never hear about, that was the most interesting comment I've seen today on /. Sorry I have no point for you !
...that I have ties with every major spammer on the planet.
Do you have everyones email you know? - some dont even have email adresses - for me this is useless
Slashdot - The one stop shop for procrastination
...it says my best friend is a widow from Nigeria...
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?