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Very interesting post by my master’s student Cate Huston on Exploring a Conference Hashtag.

Cate used a number of different visualizations to understand the interaction of conference participants at the Eclipse Summit Europe on Twitter. Some of the things I found really interesting are:

• The distribution of Twitter clients and usage of mobile clients. Somebody created an iPhone app for ESE. This may have impacted the use of iPhones. More iPhones than Blackberries or Android phones.
• I really liked the idea of getting a description of the conference themes from the users’ profiles. In this way we can get a good understanding of what topics are discussed at the conference. The tweets themselves prove less revealing (top tags like ESE and RT don’t tell me a lot about the conference). Wordle also proves really useful to give us the gist of the profiles.
• The Twitter API provides a lot of additional information that is not included on the Twitter website itself, such as the location of participants (what other information?).

A lot of other interesting information can be gleaned from the tweets:

• Most active tweeters (with the expected power law distribution)
• Location of the conference participants
• Number of clients used by the users (one user used 5 different devices)
• Language used to communicate (mostly English)
• Date conference participants joined Twitter
• Plot of number of followers over number following

Looking forward to a visualization of the conversations between conference participants.

There is an intriguing chart created by The Guardian of who is suing who in the mobile space over patent infringement. Anyone up to doing a social network analysis of this network?

The levels of engagement in Twitter are analogous to those observed in other communities. At the periphery of this onion model, we find passive users (in this case, users are ignoring tweets), and as we get closer to the core, users become more active and their interaction is more intimate. Thus you find conversing, retweeting and direct messaging at the core of the figure.

Pirate Bay founder to introduce a micropayment service for web content called Flattr.

Take a break and enjoy this great podcast on saving the newspaper.

Two important changes to the social media landscape over the past couple of days:

• Google’s move into social media (from Google’s blog) and Google taking on Facebook and Twitter (Buzz)
• Flickr co-founder returns to roots by launching an online game (Glitch)

Google’s moves are a good example of countermoves (Google’s response to Facebook’s newly announced webmail product, code-named Titan) as described in Ferrier’s framework on competitive agressiveness.

One interesting play will be the integration with other services such as GMail, Google Maps, and their mobile versions in the case of Buzz. Which side will be in a better position to leverage their existing user base?

Hard to believe, but true. The submission deadline for EuroPLoP is nary two weeks away (Feb 15). The submission is now open and ready to receive your submissions. Just click on the submission tab on the conference website. If you have any questions, please email me at weiss@sce.carleton.ca or Paris at paris@cs.rug.nl. We are also looking for focus group proposals at this time.

Is this how valuable MySQL is to Oracle?

Great art work by Oliver Weiss visualizing twittering. It illustrates an article on nonprofits using Twitter.

Last week’s Digital, Life, Design (DLD) conference in Munich features an interview with Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, and many other interesting speakers.