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."
He doesn't. From the looks of things you have give it to the buddyzoo bot - which makes sense :)
chris at darkrock dot co dot uk
http colon slash slash www dot darkrock dot co dot uk
Try reloading. Three minutes later and about three thousand additional screennames have been added to the site...
- 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
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
The link in the parent post is a goatse.cx wannabe.
Be careful...8')
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.
I scrambled them for privacy reasons.
Oi! I'm running Gaim!
(Instructions are provided for converting gaim buddy lists to the format needed by the system, but it took me a couple of minutes to figure out the syntax, so here it is):
www.kartoo.com
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
n.b.: Privacy statement
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.
"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?
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