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."
How does he have everyone's buddy list in the first place?
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.
No kidding. I've been using my same AIM name for years and I still have under 20 people on it. Maybe I'm just not as big a nerd as I thought I was.
Six years you say? Uhm, don't laugh...but it will most probably still work. I have AIM screenname from about 5 years ago and just recently I restarted to use it. (Short, just to kick someone's butt back on ICQ) So yes, it will work.
I don't use AIM much (read: only in specific cases) and prefer ICQ (I know, I know... ICQ is owned by AOL). I only use the AIM Express client anyway so I don't have to install their software.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
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? :-)
There are several websites out there that track LiveJournal friends lists and allow you to see how many steps away you are from people, who is in your immediate circle, and other features. They're also a lot more complete, since I believe they gain the friends data by scraping the user info pages of people, instead of each person having to sign up and upload a list of all their friends.
Also, LiveJournal has a few features built directly into the site that do somewhat similar things. You can get a list of friends who are popular with your own friends, and a listing of all the most recent posts of your friends' friends.
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.
> now you can find out with all certainty if you are the lamest and most unpopular person on the Internet.
Sure, but my short list of buddies are people that I actually know. So all the girls on my list are real girls.
I can't wait for the meta-analysis of the BuddyZoo that shows that half these people are bots and the other half are hairy middle-aged men who like to be called something like Jen^^Cutie16.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
There's a paper on weblog popularity here. (It got slashdotted IIRC)
Also, when I'm in a room full of people running ICQ, I find that dumbass "Uh-Oh!" wav bloody irritating... :-)
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.
Yahoo's limit is 100 people, which I reached a while ago. Now I have to delete someone to add a new person. I complained to Yahoo, and this is what they told me:
Hello,
Thank you for writing to Yahoo! Messenger.
You are limited to 100 friends at one time on your friend list. We have
limited it to this number because your Friend List is stored on our
servers rather than on your computer. The drawback of this is that you
are limited to 100 friends. However, the benefit of this is that you
can go to any computer with Internet access and have immediate access to
your friend list, without having to re-enter any information.
This doesn't explain to me why they chose a limit of 100. That is only 1k of data. A normal Yahoo account has 30 megs. Even on my 14.4 smartphone wireless connection the buddy list downloads pretty fast. Besides that, I like Yahoo messenger. I'm even writing my own client for PalmOS.
SproutWorks Software Design
Ross Mayfield did an experiment on Social Network Analysis with blogs once which I found quite interesting.
It was ICQ that I switched to and found it to be so superior that I never looked back. Now I have sunk back down to YahooIM but more because of the simple fact that the people I chat with are on Yahoo. I have tried the multi-company clients but I find that the Yahoo one works best for what I do now... I found that AIM became such a bad experience from many angles (harrassment from kiddies etc.) that I never wanted to go back to it and the only one I ever reload occassionally is ICQ, when I need to chat with someone that only has an ICQ address.
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
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=-
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