Slashdot Mirror
AIM Meets Social Network Theory
dan moore writes "A student at Caltech has created a website (BuddyZoo.com) that tracks cliques within groups of peoples' buddylists. It also measures buddy popularity and allows you to do a six-degrees type search for other screen names. An interesting approach to social network theory."
Too bad it's only for AIM; it would be interesting to apply similar principles to blogs.
How does he have everyone's buddy list in the first place?
So if you use this, you'll know the sub-groups in your friends' list? You mean...otherwise you wouldnt have?
The Dirty Work Group
I don't see how this can be as effective as, say, a service that shows you graphicly the connection one website has with another (there is something like thi out there, forget the URL of it).
In order for you to show up on this thing, you or someone that has you on their buddy list needs to upload it. Not nearly as effective as being able to just search the web...
Is this a plot by AOL to get people to use their service rather than another? I do have an AIM screenname from 6 years ago but I cannot be bothered to load AIM up to find out if it is still working just to try this out and see what it does...
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
now you can find out with all certainty if you are the lamest and most unpopular person on the Internet.
-Look lively. LOOK LIVELY!!! --Mr. Shmallow
Sheez, some people collect IM buddies as a sport. You'd think someone has no real friends in life with 373 buddies in his contact list.
"Your popularity score: 0."
Yet somehow the IM spammers find me...
I'm just speculating, but it seems to me that he is building up his database when you log in and IM him. He doesn't have a complete list (since it said 6xxx names) although it's probably growing more and more. Looks almost like an opt in strategy, but for what? I didn't log in myself so I don't know.
...and they've all been just linked by slashdot.
:) Come and look at my webcam.. I like to have fun.. Just for you.. http://blog.example.com/ba342434/tubgirlcam/
Does anyone else get the feeling these 8000 people who gave their screenames to the site are about to get a lot of very exciting offers for penis enlargement and Hot17F Hi! My name is cindy
hol cr@p. you can see the ./ effect just by hitting the refresh button and watch the number of screen names grow. So how many of those users will now start to receive spam IMs? :-)
This seems like a really good way to find active screennames to spam.
Like this approach breaks ground.
We used to set up a card table in the hallway, outside the registrar's office. We'd hang out a little sign that said 'Coed Registration', and sit back and rake in names and phone numbers.
Today this would be called stalking, I'm sure. Those were the days...
An interesting approach to the task at hand: to waste as much time as humanly possible coding a spider that relies on AOL software and... yeah
What's that I hear? "I'll bet you wish you thought of it first"??? *sobs* well... yeah.
- what it's really doing,
- or how it really works,
- or what it can tell you other than letting you browse through the pretty pictures, like get a summary of clique statistics, or looking up specific names
- or whether the user interface will scale if a few hundred thousand people check in to it.
Also, if it's depending on people to enter their own data, rather than having some efficient way to siphon up all the data directly (which would be a major security/privacy risk of its own if it were possible), then it's really not scientific, and the statistics won't be meaningful, just anecdotal. And if it does get a countable fraction of AOL users, it'll get AOLdotted pretty quickly.Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
...some people have the weirdest screen-names. Still, I guess I could have learned that from reading slashdot, joining YaHoo!Groups or logged onto the IRC-network.
While I realise that having a few thousand "Bob"'s on the same network - at least as long as the nick is the only unike identifier - why do people insist on picking names that are plain weird? Some may not see this as a problem, but as a user on AIM, I'm reluctant to accept IM's from people with such handles.
Bah.. I'm ranting.
Everything in the world is controlled by a small, evil group to which, unfortunately, no one you know belongs.
...like 'autopr0n' makes Geoffrey Chaucer sit up and wish he'd thought of it first?
This coming from from the guy with autopr0n.com in his sig :)
agreed... "buddy" implies someone you go out and have a few beers with... somebody you'd ask to stand up at your wedding, or bail you out of jail. A true buddy might even help you bury a body... but you'd have to buy the beers afterwards.
Have most people even met all the people on their "buddy" lists?
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
Ah the power of chee... er, slashdot. It's up to 12k since I checked it, and quite frankly this seems like the biggest waste of time and (I know I'm being redundant) a prime target for spammers. Quick! Go sign up! There's absolutely no need for this whatsoever.... wait, it fits in just well with AOL itself. It's perfect!
When I am king, you will be first against the wall
With your opinion which is of no consequence at all
A couple of things
m l
I don't have the data already. Users contribute their lists to the site by uploading them.
I'm not going to spam people. I promise.
This load makes me glad I put the time into setting up mod_perl
proof that I made the site:
http://www.buddyzoo.com/images/slashdot.ht
It's up to 15000+ and growing.
You dirty lying /.ers - YOU ALL ARE RUNNING AOL!
I have to wash my hands. I might get AOL, or Windows disease from you...
This might be interesting once more people sign up. But there's millions of AIM users and only about 10,000 have registered with the site.
-jag
http://starboard.flowtheory.net/
(The sick thing is that I'm only half-kidding.)
Feeling up to it, cmdrtaco?
Maybe someone who's not an editor can do it too, if they can spider all the user pages. But I suspect it would take forever to do it without getting your IP banned.
I once came across a list of all /. users up to 5 levels in the friends chain from Cmdrtaco (i.e, friends of cmdrtaco, friends of friends, ...). I tried googling it now but can't seem to find it :(
Much like my email address, the less people know about it, the better.
The less people I know on AIM will effectively minimize my chances of existing on that site.
Unpopularity pays off here.
This can help out AIM in an undirect way. AIM spammers spam the living hell out of all members on that site. Users cannot set higher privacy settings (in chance of losing chances meeting new people and such), they can't have effective spam filters like spam killer for email. The spam is even more direct, it's not sitting in your mailbox, it's DIRECTLY on your desktop. Users find new IM screen names. AOL claims their AIM program is more popular due to the new 10 million users, who basically might be the same 10 million highschool/college kiddies.
The link in the parent post is a goatse.cx wannabe.
Be careful...8')
I don't actually get it. I think instant messaging is great, but only for business purposes (communicating with other branches, overseas contacts, etc).
To me, a buddies are people that you go to pubs with, go to cricket matches with, etc. I'll never be online after work hours or on the weekends, those time should be reserved for outdoor pursuits or social pursuits. There's nothing like doing 4x4 trails on the weekend, especially in Southern Africa. Or going horse-riding, playing golf, etc. Come on, guys.
I don't know. Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but I don't think sitting on PCs for hours a day chatting with MSN/AIM/Yahoo buddies is healthy. The USA is an amazing country with plenty of things to do. Go and check them out. That goes for people in other countries as well - there's more for you to do than just sit on your PC. There's a wealth of recreational activities in any given country that's waiting to be explored. Heck, one of the programmers at work used to be like that, sitting on his PC for hours a day playing games or chatting. We've converted him to an outdoor man by going camping, sky-diving and horse-riding. Now he seems a lot more relaxed and has a wider social circle of people - In real life!
We hang the petty thieves, but appoint the great ones to public office. - Aesop
If you look at this visualization of the results, this all starts to look a bit bizarre. Almost every single screen-name in that graph is nonsensical gobble-di-gook. I know for a fact that AIM screennames aren't all like that.
...and I'm not... I can't stand trying to get any amount of work done on my computer with people constantly "blinging" me... you're online... great, peace see you tonight after work.. whatever. Most of my friends don't have an admin job so they don't know why it's a pain... and I don't feel like explaining it to them either, so I simply don't sign on... AIM is my primary, however, with msn being the secondary... which I can't stand... In fact messenger sucked so bad on XP I'm back to 2000 (just one reason, however) Give me a choice to sign damnit, Bill, before I get blinged to death by my porno watching jobless buddy who have no real work to do on a computer! "hey check out this url!" Ok maybe I'm a little over the top... We use sametime at work... which will link to AIM which is nice... but I still think e-mail is the best way to get in touch with someone... it's more formal... AIM I use only if I've got to get in touch with somebody quickly for something important... that's it...
||| I still can't believe Parkay's not butter.
BTW, I wonder how online relationships will compare with real world relationships? One tends to have more acquaintances in meatspace, but our online friends are more diverse.
friend/foe system of /.? I've seen a lot of friends, fans, friend's friend, friend's foe down there...may be I'd actually like more details such as '(Degree of speration: 4)', so that I could flame with confidence to those whom has wide speration with me...
:)
May be not, nevermind.
This is a pretty natural thing to do with any kind of graph (PGP key servers, blogs, p2p network topologies, you name it). And the larger graph one can get, the more interesting it gets. I drool when I think about the kind of analyses the people at AOL must do with their buddy list database...
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
this really isn't interesting or novel at all.
.. not possible
this has been done a number of times before.
is this a dupe?
no
At first I thought it was talking about the hassle you have to go through to actually find an AOL screenname that's not taken.
I found a work around for that though -- just IM me at Steve89345199234761233290324692183646489
That's someone that goes downtown, gets two blowjobs, and then gives you one when he comes back home.
All databases of user information gathered by logging user mouse clicks whilst on-line are evil ... except for the purpose of tracking 'six degrees of seperation'.
Now that the phone companies are excercising their freedom of speech, and selling everyone's call data, the buyers of the data can do this in the real world, with people's real friends, and it's likely to be easier than doing it with buddy lists.
Technical:
It is a bit interesting, actually. I just wonder when his program will collapse, what the upper limit of number of users are.
I mean, this is a classical data-mining problem.
Philosophical / Paranoia:
When techniques like these functional enough to really work on large amounts of users, it's going to be candy for Big Brother.
They can just look at the graph over the people doing unwanted stuff and remove the spiders of those webs (the leaders of those underground networks). I think this is a great example of how important it is for us to develop freenet techniques.
Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even if you take into account Hofstadter's Law
I see you had concern with network admins knocking on your door. What about AOL?
Although I am not 100% on this, but AIM I believe is their trademark, and such they are going to defend it (as long as you are getting more hits than they ever will).
imaddict.com was an example. Their IM addiction survey and other stuff were REAL popular. I know they got legal letter from AOL regarding the trademark usage, and his attitude at first wasn't exactly yielding. Now I just tried going there again and it's not even on the DNS servers.
I am no lawyer, and I guess this is slightly off topic. But I am interested in something like this. It is an idea AOL might not have thought off and seems like they might be interested in something like this (given their current status, they probably have to increase AOL CDs so there's a higher chance someone will install their crap by accident).
Just a thought
But does it take into account all the Cindy's and Mindy's and Mandy's out there that "want to be your friend" or have just put up "some pictures of myself I would like you to see"?
ICQ (from experience, but I guess AOL too) gets spam just like email. I wonder if the spammers would constitute the major links between groups if you did an analysis of email as well?
Isn't even a person...
c hild
smarterchild
http://www.buddyzoo.com/popularity?target=smarter
Wasn't there an article here (or was it on www.idg.se (swedish idg site)) about some researchers on ibm or hp that made a similar thing with emails send within a company? The interesting (and yet not surprising) conclusion was that groups that you could extrude from the email data also was the informal groups that existed in the company irl.
The most usefull outcome of this, would hence be for the company to understand how it actually was organized, and also a tool to determine key persons in those groups.
Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even if you take into account Hofstadter's Law
How long before IM spammers start mining this site for screen names?
I don't the idea of my buddy list being closely examined. What if I have John Doe on my list, who has Omar Gill on his list, who has Osama on his list, the man would say that I've been associating with terrorists.
You know what bugs me?
People using idioms incorrectly.
Beyond the _pale_
LJ Connect is the page that lets you find how many steps away you are from someone else on LJ.
For what it's worth, though, they don't read the userinfo pages; they read the friends information from a special simplified web interface designed just for such tools. (The details of the interface aren't public, but you can ask the LJ admins for more information.) The end result is the same, though.
Marnanel
author another tool to analyse friends lists
GROGGS: alive and well and living in
I can't believe that no one who's registered has the asian prince on their buddy list. I thought millions of people would have him on their buddy list after he put his screenname on his website (http://asianprince213.tripod.com/). Although he hasn't been on line in a while. Presumably he was a little too popular.
Even with the privacy issues being resolved, and preventing the list from falling in the hands of spammers, there is a deeper problem of whether people on the ground will embrace it.
I remember similar experiments with networking "BOOKMARKS" or "Favorites" and they never could get big enough for the "critical mass." I am not sure why, but purely using that as an apporpriate analogy, I think this concept needs to be refined further before it can become big. Maybe people hesitate giving data from which things that they never imagined they were disclosing can be inferred or data-mined.
I believe that such experiments are good, but in today's world, where everything that you publish or email can be used against you, it is better for these experiments to remain pilot plants, and limited to small experimental groups. That is till Mr. Ashcroft Patriot Acts I and II and soon III are accepted as valid curbs on liberty.
But, either way, it is a good concept.
To see a world in a grain of sand, and then to step back and see the beach where the sand lies
Just by sumitting my buddy list, I've automatically made all my buddies immensely more popular than myself, as they all appear on one buddy list (mine), whereas none of them have uploaded their lists, so I appear on no buddy lists. Funny how that works out.
I use Trillian and I'm curious if the export and save up to his site process will cause unhappiness on the part of his system.
I have my most recent buddylist at work so I will try it there - I have never bothered to look at how it exports, but obviously it has a way to differentiate the sub components of the list (yahoo or AIM, etc), but does this site take advantage of that?
If not, then I guess I can't use it.
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
although smarterchild beats buddyzoo, budyzoo still pulls in at the 100th percentile with a popularity rating of 76. http://www.buddyzoo.com/popularity?target=buddyzoo
Stupid AOLers.
why not implement a version for ICQ
Registering for this requires you to click on an "aim://blah blah" link. I know I can just use the info in the link to send the right IM to their bot, but this brings a question to mind. How does one set up KDE or GNOME to handle those "aim://" links?
A quick way for spambots to harvest names...
Keep my SN out of it thanks
It seems now the east coast is awake and now hitting this thing hard.
as of about 7am there were around 64K users registered on there and the site was snappy. there were posts on here from last night indicating 8K users.
Now at 9:15am it seems that there are over 80K users registered and the site is crawling.
I am not sure if it is the mySQL database that is dying on it, or if it is just the load on the 1Ghz processor.
either way, I would say it will die within the next 15 mins now.
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
Actually... according to Microsoft's new, in development p2p IM thing... there are only 3 Degrees of separation , not 6.
But of course, are they really degrees of separation? Wouldn't six degrees of connection or something make more sense?
I keep getting server errors. It probably doesn't help that I keep hitting stop, refresh huh. Oh well. Back to that.
What the heck! I swear. My roomate came up with that idea last year and was going to try to implement it. Oh well. Caltech got it too and finished it first. I cant wait to play!
-- -=innocent ramblings from the mind of an insomniatic programmer=-
Anybody else to remember SixDegrees? You stated your links (and they could be specified as "friend," "co-worker," "acquaintance"...) and you were connected with them when they acknowledged you. Extremely interesting sociologically. But it went down for (apparently) economical reasons.
And for those who are genuinely interested in Internet applications of network analysis, you might want to try the Oracle of Bacon. It's an online version of the "Kevin Bacon Game" (who starred with whom) using data from IMDB.
Alexandre http://enkerli.wordpress.com/
Isaac Oates's Grade-AIM project at NCSA/UIUC did a similar thing more than a year ago. Unfortunately, I can't find much remaining record of it other than this DI article. You can take a halfway peek at the graphs from his monitor in the picture.
I considered doing this about a half-year back but abandoned it, not because it would be hard to do but because I couldn't think of an easy way for a person to share their buddy list. It would require setting up an account and possibly finding a text file and dropping it into a textarea field (or perhaps uploading a file), something I didn't think I could accomplish without skewing the data toward the geekier crowd.
It also occurred to me that there are probably a lot of people who don't want their whole buddy list to necessarily be known, so I'd have to create some barrier to prevent directly seeing other people's buddy list.
Further, buddy lists are always in flux. The data would become dated fairly rapidly and just straight-out incorrect not too long after.
Finally, I realized that this idea was something that would be trivial for AOL to do. They have the data and they have it in real time. All someone would have to do is check off a "yes, you can use my buddy list for data collection" or something (though I'd imagine their EULA would probably already give them that right if the simply wanted to do it sans specific permission). It could be spun in a number of different ways to entice people to do so.
Just some thoughts.
My
Limekiller
Don't you know you're supposed to humiliate and denigrate your opponent? Sheesh. You never would have made it in the cut-throat world of high school CX debate. :)
how are you doing? remember me? i just wanted to let you know that i've had you on my buddy list for 5 years now, since we met that one summer at school. i check your away message every day; i know a lot about you! steve sounds like a great guy, i hope you two are happy. also, sorry you had to write that long paper last week, i hope that you got it finished. i saw you were up late, i was checking your idle time! love the web page, jill, those are some nice pictures of your spring break trip. you are so hot in the red bikini. see you around, and IM me sometime! my name is MadWriter33.
cu,
janice
"Trash typing" has nothing to do with IM, IRC, or any other technocommunications. It's just something *kids* do, in EVERY era.
Hell, look at stuff carved into picnic tables or scribbled on billboards from the 1950s or even before. You'll see phrases like "U R my tru luv". In the antique era of handwritten letters, kids did the same thing -- shorthand and shortcut the written word as much as was feasible, even if it's just using an ampersand instead of "and". Kids see this as a sort of "economy" as to how much writing is needed to get the intended word on paper (or on the screen). Hell, I remember doing this in the '60s and '70s, in ordinary correspondence.
One sign of becoming an adult is that you outgrow this sort of communication behaviour. In fact, you can pretty well peg a person's overall maturity level (at whatever age) by how much "trash typing" they do, whether it's to be seen as 1337 or just as lazy-typist shorthand.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
12:11 EST, and it's dead.
:/
OK
The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.
Please contact the server administrator, dangelo@ugcs.caltech.edu and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.
More information about this error may be available in the server error log.
Apache/1.3.27 Server at buddyzoo.com Port 80
I bet the server admins were really happy about your hosting a Slashdotted site...it was kind of fun to reload the page and watch the tally jump from 9,000 to 16,000 to 36,000--kind of. I miss my rank
We recently had heard in the office over one of the Yellow Machine that's made by Anthology Solutions.
Shared Buddies
None of your buddies have submitted their lists yet.
If you're interested in Network Theory, there's a book called "Linked: the New Science of Networks" that covers six degrees of separation and a ton of other stuff too. It's very readable...
/. review...
Here's the
[o]_O
to how OS-X's Rendezvous for Ichat works....
Ave Molech Setting
Jesus, this is just like High School all over again!
Popularity
Your popularity score: 0. This is the number of members who have you on their lists.
Popularity ranking: 143044 (percentile: 16.29).
143043 people are more popular, 27837 are less popular.
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
I don't know what you guys are nattering about. What's there to be afraid of at that link? Come on. Everybody knows real men use lynx for just this reason... :)
"buddy" implies a superficial relationship, like the kind of guy who you'd feel comfortable talking with if you bumped into him at the local watering hole. I'd certainly be a bit more selective in deciding who to ask to help me dispose of "the evidence" :)
a buddy list is a glorified address book, nothing more.
--
well, it's nothing one behind the ear wouldn't cure
what's the contradiction? smarterchild already knows thousands of people, he must have some effective method of sifting through all his im's what's anothe million?
/*
If you add SmarterChild to your buddy list and type hello, it gives news, weather, etc. So I figured I would see just how popular SmarterChild was on BuddyZoo.com -- surprisingly it was number 1.
*/
Popularity of smarterchild
smarterchild's popularity score: 695. This is the number of members who have smarterchild on their lists.
Popularity ranking: 1 (percentile: 100.00).
smarterchild is the most popular person.
As of 12:35am EDT on 15 April 2003 the site appears to be down--what happened? Was it the bandwidth police, a hard-coded membership limit (500,000?), or something else entirely? In any case, I'm impressed that a single-processor machine in a dorm room was able to withstand as much traffic as it did.
"It take 9 months to bear a child, no matter how many women you assign to the job."
If you have any ideas or suggestions please drop me a note at slashdot@shovelbums.org
Kudos to the guy who built buddyzoo. Fascinating implementation of the theory and it reminds me of the old sixdegrees site(?) that mapped the "internet cloud" in the early 90's
Thanks for your time.
Best,
R. Joe Brandon Founder - Shovelbums.org