Collaborative Thinking

More Twitter Visualizations

Social analytics - one of the hot topics for social networking enthusiasts...

Four Ways of Looking at Twitter - Research - Harvard Business Review

Data visualization is cool. It's also becoming ever more useful, as the vibrant online community of data visualizers (programmers, designers, artists, and statisticians ― sometimes all in one person) grows and the tools to execute their visions improve.

Jeff Clark is part of this community. He, like many data visualization enthusiasts, fell into it after being inspired by pioneer Martin Wattenberg's landmark treemap that visualized the stock market.

Clark's latest work shows much promise. He's built four engines that visualize that giant pile of data known as Twitter. All four basically search words used in tweets, then look for relationships to other words or to other Tweeters. They function in almost real time.

Four Ways of Looking at Twitter - Research - Harvard Business Review

Networks: More Than People

Liked the way they correlated people, places, groups,etc to produce a graph.

Original Source: barrywellman: Everything's a network, properly interpreted. http://slatest.slate.com/features/news_dots/default.htm

Introducing News Dots - By Chris Wilson - Slate Magazine

Like Kevin Bacon's co-stars, topics in the news are all connected by degrees of separation. To examine how every story fits together, News Dots visualizes the most recent topics in the news as a giant social network. Subjects―represented by the circles below―are connected to one another if they appear together in at least two stories, and the size of the dot is proportional to the total number of times the subject is mentioned.

To use this interactive tool, just click on a circle to see which stories mention that topic and which other topics it connects to in the network. Double click a dot to zoom in on it. From there, you can click on any connected dot to see which stories mention both subjects. To zoom out, just double click in white space or use the zoom out button in the upper left corner. The buttons in the upper right can toggle the emphasis between the importance of a subject and how recently it has appeared on the radar. A more detailed explanation of how News Dots works is available below the graphic.

Introducing News Dots - By Chris Wilson - Slate Magazine

Social Media & Innovation

Now that the SharePoint 2010 report on social computing is in the production queue, time to move on to my next report: 

Working Title: "Leveraging Social Media Within Innovation Strategies"

Target Audience: Innovation program managers, innovation project teams, decision-makers involved in collaboration and social media strategies, IT managers, architects, and others involved in knowledge management efforts.

Problem Statements:

• Have economic realities impacted innovation efforts?
• Innovation is a broad term, what’s an effective way to categorize an initiatives scale and scope?
• How is social media helping innovation become more participatory?
• What use case scenarios illustrate how social tools augment innovation efforts?

Background: Innovation has been a re-occurring theme within organizations over the past decade. In the past, innovation efforts were often the purview of assigned groups and driven by formal processes (often with mixed results). Internally, the topic is sometimes considered an off-shoot of knowledge management (e.g., "ideation”). Externally, the term is associated with crowdsoucring. Fusing internal and external thinking and approaches towards innovation has become more the norm, leading to an “innovation renaissance” influenced by social media trends. Organizations are exploring use of social application to make innovation a more open and transparent activity co-owned by its participants. However, contributions from non-traditional participants (customers, employees) presents its own set of challenges in terms of community management, decision-rights, and business alignment.

Thesis: Management and R&D teams are no longer the only participants in an organization's innovation efforts. Social tools have made innovation a more open and transparent effort where customers and employees become active contributors. However, leveraging the free-flow of ideas needs some level of structure to transform ideas into actual business outcomes.

Of Course You Want Opt-In As The Default, Of Course You Want Everything Public, Said The Nice Social Networking Site Operator... Trust Us.

Google seems to have quite deceptively hidden some information that Buzz is an automatic opt-in regarding "following". Sure, you can turn it off, but it's not intuitive and you are not pro-actively notified. Disclosure - to say the least - is done in an avoidance fashion. 

As I've said before - social networking providers, especially in the consumer space (Facebook, LinkedIn, and now Google), are in a dilemma. They need people to be open in order to create the type of network effects that support their agendas and business models. Only grudgingly will they be transparent when it comes to options available to manage privacy settings. They simply are not the trustworthy advocate for member privacy that they present themselves as when it comes to up-front disclosure, proactive notification and granular levels of consent (refer to Privacy & Social Network Sites: A Case Of Conflicting Agendas). 

No one should be surprised... disappointed, yes.

WARNING: Google Buzz Has A Huge Privacy Flaw

There is a huge privacy flaw in Google's new Twitter/Facebook competitor, Google Buzz.

When you first go into Google Buzz, it automatically sets you up with followers and people to follow.

A Google spokesperson tells us these people are chosen based on whom the users emails and chats with most using Gmail.

That's fine.

The problem is that -- by default -- the people you follow and the people that follow you are made public to anyone who looks at your profile.

In other words, before you change any settings in Google Buzz, someone could go into your profile and see who are the people you email and chat with most.

.....

A Google spokesperson tells us the followers lists are public by default so that people can quickly find new people to follow. Obviously, that's a good thing for Google, which is hoping to get as many people using Google Buzz as soon as possible. It's also meant to be helpful for users. And for those who are unconcerned with telling the world who they email most, it is. But for everyone else, it's terrible.

It gets to a deeper problem with Google Buzz: It's built on email, which is a very different Internet application than a social network.

The good news for Google is that this is a very easy problem to fix. Google must either shut off auto-following, or it must make follower lists private by default as soon as possible.

WARNING: Google Buzz Has A Huge Privacy Flaw

Facebook Developers | Integrating Facebook Chat Everywhere

Finally... certainly took a while. Interesting given discussion of Facebook offering traditional email services as well.

Every day people send more than two billion chat messages to each other on Facebook. Today we're making it easier for people to extend those conversations with their Facebook friends to instant messaging clients beyond Facebook.com. Facebook Chat now supports Jabber/XMPP, the open standard for instant messaging. Now developers can integrate Facebook Chat with their Web-based, desktop, or mobile instant messaging products.

Facebook Developers | Integrating Facebook Chat Everywhere