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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."
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.
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.
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.
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...
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
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.
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
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.
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.