May 19, 2009

ICWSM'09 note - day two


Panel Discussion

- Cameron Marlow@Facebook: Look at data to do informed design

- Q: How do users find information on site? Are social links actively used? What about search?

- Slideshare A: We do see clicks from social networking sites, but most requests come from Google. So we put a lot of efforts and make sure our slides are easily searchable in Google. Front page is also important -- but that's more of a setting a tone about the site. (identity). We do lots of editorials in the front page.

- Facebook A: news feed is definitely the most important. This is a huge optimization problem. Facebook provides two feeds: live feed, highlights.



Modeling Social Dynamics

- Interesting paper "Stochastic models of user-contributory web sites" does modeling in social sites, similar to the famous Huberman et al. Science paper from 1998.

- One thought. Modeling is based on visible data. How would a model of user behavior change if we were to consider both visible and invisible activity? (e.g., browsing takes up most of our online time!)

- Prediction of content popularity based on early data possible--we've seen the same trend in YouTube. Is this a general trend in any massive content system?


- Flickr and YouTube are not about social relationship, but ultimately about information sharing. See evidence: paper "Personal Information Management vs. Resource Sharing"

- Social dimension (Shneiderman 2002): People search for other people's content on Flickr and YouTube. vs. People search for their own content on Delicious and Connotea. So is the purpose of tagging.


- Social computing & sustainability of sites: it's important to understand what, where, and why people share.

- Interesting paper by Nov et al.

- Motivation for sharing, two axes: self or others, intrinsic or extrinsic. All four combinations have positive loop to user behavior.

- This reminds me of comment from a director at Big Brothers. He said people post videos in YouTube, because they want to be the Steven Spielberg on the web.


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