infopresse cgt-english-final
TRANSCRIPT
CGT talk at Infopresse@cgtheoret
La Révolution des données sociales
@cgtheoret
Every minute:
• 48 hours of video are downloaded on Youtube• 320 new accounts and 98,000 tweets appear
on Twitter• 168,000,000 million emails are sent • 20,000 new posts on Tumblr• 6,600 photos appear on Flickr• Over 20% of all websites are
CMS/wordpress/etc…
@cgtheoret
@cgtheoret
@cgtheoret
@cgtheoret
@cgtheoret
@cgtheoret
@cgtheoret
@cgtheoret
@cgtheoret
But…• Facebook has lost 1.5 million users in Canada
and 6 million in the United States • Yahoo study: 50% of the content that is read
and shared by humans is produced by only 20, 000 accounts
@cgtheoret
@cgtheoret
This flood of data isn’t only about the scale that is nearly impossible to grasp in human terms. Other internal dynamics come into play and challenge interpretation . . .
@cgtheoret
@cgtheoret
@cgtheoret
This is so complicated, Stanford now offers a course on this subject:
@cgtheoret
Who is the professor who gives these courses in statistics and marketing ?
A physicist, of course…
Andreas Wiegend. Before accepting a position at Stanford, he was the Chief Data Scientist at Amazon. He coined the term “Social Data Revolution.”
@cgtheoret
Facebook (and Zynga) are sitting on the biggest, most detailed sociological database ever created by humankind.
Facebook owns all this data and is not sharing it. This database is used exclusively to sell advertising and . . . ?
@cgtheoret
Here is the story of a Social Data « Robin Hood » …
Pete Warden
@cgtheoret
Pete Warden was an engineer at Apple when he decided to leave and create a start up . . .
The start up didn’t work out. So in his spare time, he developed a legal Facebook crawler using their own programming API.
In 2010, his crawler had been operating for 6 months and had gathered information on 215 million users that he organized according to city, state, etc., while maintaining users’ anonymity.
@cgtheoret
@cgtheoret
@cgtheoret
@cgtheoret
In 2010, LinkedIn hired a team of17 people to do the same thing:
But can one “normal” person or company make sense of this mass of data without having access to teams of experts and an enormous budget?
Hundreds of social media monitoring tools are available:
195 tools here:
http://www.salesrescueteam.com/social-media-measurement-tools/
@cgtheoret
@cgtheoret
There is even a wiki with 224 tools: http://wiki.kenburbary.com/
@cgtheoret
But even with the huge success of some monitoring companies:
Radian6: $326 million / revenue ~ $20 Million Sysomos: $34 million / revenue ~ $2 Million Scoutlabs: $20 million / revenue ~ $1 Million Postrank: bought by Google, BackType: bought
by Twitter, etc . . .
@cgtheoret
@cgtheoret
@cgtheoret
Monitoring / Analysis• Monitoring tools present social network data
in Excel tables:
– As a list of “nodes” i.e., blog posts, tweets, etc.– In sequential order by date, one after the other – The emphasis is on real time – This works for a few dozen or hundred . . . but
what about thousands of posts?
– Making sense of all those posts is very expensive and labour intensive
@cgtheoret
Monitoring / Analysis• The added value of social media is not
in raw data, but in connections between people
And between ideas • On a fundamental level, it is a network • …and a network = relations
• To understand a network, you have to understand its relations
• To understand a single element in the network, you have to understand its context
@cgtheoret
With the “Social Graph” we can calculate “who is talking to whom,” “who is connected with whom,” and possibly where.
But we can go even further than that . . . .
@cgtheoret
With more information and calculations, we can see what interests people and how their interests are linked.
This is Facebook’s second challenge: ”The interest graph.”
How are ideas and conversations connected in the social web?
@cgtheoret
@cgtheoret
Zeitgeist
@cgtheoret
Zeitgeist
@cgtheoret
“The spirit of our times”
“Spirit” and “our times”: two concepts that are hard to measure . . . all the more so when you
combine them . . .
@cgtheoret
@cgtheoret
@cgtheoret
@cgtheoret
@cgtheoret
So what exactly is an “interest graph”?
Here’s a concrete example.
Take Réjean . . .
6’2’’, 35 years old, married, lives in Val D’Or. . .
According to traditional market research . . .
@cgtheoret
@cgtheoret
@cgtheoret
@cgtheoret
@cgtheoret
Why do you need a “special person” to understand the social data revolution?
@cgtheoret
@cgtheoret
Why do you need a physicist to understand the social data revolution?
Because he is not just a physicist!! He understands human behaviour . . .
@cgtheoret
@cgtheoret
@cgtheoret
