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
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? :-)
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...
- 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
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...
(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.
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'.
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
www.kartoo.com
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.
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
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.
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/
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. :)
"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