Let the FriendFeed Data Mining Begin In Earnest

With the FriendFeed co-founders' pedigrees including Google as their last stop, it has largely been presumed the team knew the value of search. In March of 2008, the online social aggregator first turned on their search engine, but as the site grew in popularity and features, many users were calling for more granularity in search - asking to see search results within a specific time period, or, more loudly, to see results from entries that had been gauged as interesting from the community, based on total likes or comments. Today, FriendFeed delivered the popularity end of the search database, and people are already diving into the data to see what they can find.

For example:

If you search for entries that have both 100 comments and 100 likes:

There are 11 total entries. The first ever was when we announced the birth of our twins. Of the other 10, see here, 4 are from Robert Scoble, and a second entry is by me, about Robert, and his potential monetization of FriendFeed. Other single entries are from Mona Nomura, Thomas Hawk, Monique, Conformist, and Akiva Moskovitz, also on the announcement of a new baby.

So yes, FriendFeed loves Scoble, tolerates me, and loves babies.
Of those 11 items, one was a tweet (mine), 7 were native FriendFeed entries, 2 were blog posts, and one was Robert's Facebook status update.

The most comments any post with the word bacon in the title has had is 80. (via Lindsay)

The most comments any post with the word sex in the title has had is 64. (via Mona)

15 Different Entries Have Been "Liked" More than 200 Times (see query)

In fact, the first entry ever to get more than 200 likes was an entry announcing a Jabber/GTalk IM bot for FriendFeed. Oddly, it got 445 likes and only 3 comments. Hmmm...

Of the 15 items, 5 were from Bret Taylor, FriendFeed co-founder, announcing new features. 3 more were fun items from Mona. Scoble only makes it once, though his note on January 10 did get 312 likes and 464 comments, which was epic.

Of the 15 items, 5 had both comments from me and likes from Robert. 4 were Bret Taylor entries. The fifth was Akiva's baby announcement. Matthew, a tad older, is already practicing his pickup lines.

Only one blog entry has ever received 150 comments on FriendFeed.

Avoiding accidental script anomalies, only one post has ever gotten 150 or more comments on FriendFeed. The conversation is completely in Italian about a cat, I assume.

Most blog posts don't get tremendous numbers of comments. (see query)

Aside from the previously mentioned Scoble monetization post, only one post I have ever made has hit 60 or more comments - a post in July on Web racism. And earlier that week, we managed 50 comments for the discussion of friending people online well outside your age range on the low side. Matt Dickman's guest post from last week also exceeded the 50 comment barrier. In contrast, Robert Scoble has six posts that reached the 50 comment mark on the site.

Also noted: 10 internal shares of mine reached 50 comments, while 46 internal shares have reached 50 likes. Of those, 26 were baby pictures of Matthew and/or Sarah. Such exploitation!

Only 4 Tweets have ever received 100 likes on FriendFeed. (see query)

Two were from me - one announcing the arrival of the twins, and the other, when my wife said she joined Facebook, but didn't add me as a friend. The other two? Akiva announcing the arrival of his baby, and Kevin Rose fooling e-mail correspondents by pretending his computer was an iPhone.

Eight FriendFeed entries with the word iPhone in the title have 50 comments. (see query)

Of those eight entries, three are from Robert, one is from Mona, and others are from Tina, Lindsay, Bret Taylor, and Chris Pirillo.

Seven entries with the word "Cat" in the title have 50+ likes. Dogs win with nine such entries.

I already predicted that search and the real-time Web, on both Twitter and FriendFeed, would be a big deal in 2009, and this step takes us even closer to being able to dig deep into the immediate (and historical) reactions of one of the Web's most unique and vibrant social communities.

You can see some more data mining fun in Scoble's feed.

Welcome To The Twittersphere

By Eric Berlin of Online Media Cultist (FriendFeed/Twitter)

As Twitter grows ever larger and more vibrant, so too grows the desire to extract meaningful data out of all of the conversations and information-sharing that's taking place.

Enter Twittersphere, a blessedly barebones service that comes from "Thomas Marban, the creator of the excellent popurls," according to Duncan Riley at The Inquisitr.

When you arrive at Twittersphere, there's a list of article names, and not that many at that. One or two at the top have very minimal, subdued red vertical lines to indicate "hotness", presumably, with subsequent stories trending from orange to yellow to green. The site tagline reads that "the current mélange of the most hyped stories from social messaging utility twitter.com, a screen into the greenhouse of worldshaking linkage and clutter."

And indeed, the feel of the site is clean and minimal enough to make you believe that this is a clutter-free zone. There are only three navigation links. The default view is "short," giving us the up-to-the-moment hottest stories being shared on Twitter, and then there is simply "medium" and "long term" links to see what is popular over relatively longer stretches of time.

The amount of time that those stretches represent, how the site collects its data, how "hotness" is determined, and how often the articles are refreshed are not indicated. Which, I suppose, is the point. There's nothing really interactive about the site and nothing to get in the way of simply seeing what links are popular according to the Twitter community.

I like the idea of Twittersphere, but fear there's not quite enough going on to keep people coming back in numbers. Personally, I'd go to a site more often that deals primarily with "RTs," or "retweets," those links that have gotten picked up from one Twitter profile and are passed around by others using the convention of RT. It would be fun to see not only which are the top links by RT, but which Twitter profiles share popular information, and which profiles are popular because they themselves are big sharers of information, or big RTers I suppose. This bit would go a long way in helping to measure influence on Twitter beyond mere numbers of followers. The metrics for how the site might be put together can be based on followers, number of RTs, link clicks, and some kind of algorithm that someone more technical than me could put together!

If this service doesn't exist already, I wouldn't be surprised if we'll see something like it quite soon as the array of Twitter-related services is growing nearly as fast as Twitter itself.

Read more by Eric Berlin at Online Media Cultist

Three And Out Takes Third Fantasy Football Trophy. Shrug.

As the Super Bowl wrapped up the year's NFL season, so to ended the year's fantasy football season - which on some days seems dramatically more important. And, now that the dust has cleared, my team has finished 1st overall, just like it did the last time I played, in the 2005-06 season, and the 2001-02 season, my rookie year. And while I should be elated, given my push to be competitive, and love of sports and all things statistical, ending up the winner is met more with a shrug than jubilation - partly because of the knowledge the competition is complete, with no more weekly battles, and also, as the margin of victory was already guaranteed, making today's game moot.

As I mentioned back on January 4th (See: Geek Leading Fantasy Football League During Playoff Push), I managed to take a lead after the 1st week of the playoffs, and knew I was well-positioned going into week two, but surprisingly, a lot of little things went right for my squad, and badly for everyone else - so while there were many upsets each weekend, the only real surprise in our league was that I managed to not only keep the lead - but score highest every single Sunday, increasing my lead.


By the time the Pittsburgh Steelers were crowned NFL champions this evening, I had finished the four-week playoff round with a total of 391 points, almost twice that of the second-place finisher, who had 217 points, followed by the stragglers at 190 points and 101. To give you an idea of how wild it is that I scored so many points, just three years ago I won it all with 281 points, beating out the second place team, who scored 239, and the prior year, I had finished second, losing 290 to 265 - much closer contests than the 2008-09 playoffs. (See: Kiss of Death League: History)

So how did this happen? As with any good fantasy squad, significant luck was involved. I had expected the Carolina Panthers to do very well, and possibly contend for the Super Bowl title. But as we were drafting one Saturday morning, I wanted to make sure I didn't post a zero in the initial Wild Card contests, and loaded up on the high-offense Arizona Cardinals, getting the quarterback and wide receiver pair of Kurt Warner and Larry Fitzgerald, as well as the San Diego Chargers' Darren Sproles, who I expected to rack up points returning kickoffs against what was supposed to be a superior Colts squad. But then Sproles became the primary running back as Ladanian Tomlinson was injured, and the Chargers beat the Colts. And virtually everyone knows what happened to Arizona. They went all the way to the Super Bowl, and both Warner and Fitzgerald set records along the way. It almost didn't seem fair as my team excelled while others were virtually eliminated by week one.


I'm torn because I love the fact I blew out the field. But I also would have liked some better competition, and to have been watching Sunday's Super Bowl with the knowledge my fantasy season could also be on the line. I love that I won by such big margins because I'm going to enjoy going through the stats, but it isn't exactly fun to talk trash (a major part of fantasy football) when you're ahead by 100 points, so for the last month, that piece has practically been eliminated.

How much did loading up on Arizona help me? According to the league statistics, Larry Fitzgerald and Kurt Warner were the 1st and 2nd highest scorers, garnering me 180 points between them. Add in the 44 points from Arizona special teams, and I'd be at 224, already ahead of the second-place finisher, and that doesn't even take into consideration the 74 points picked up by Sproles, who had an amazing first two weeks.

So now it's all done. At some point, I'll probably get a PayPal notification rewarding me about $200 or so, which is nice, but not life-changing. The first thing I'll likely do? Go out and see if I have to buy my own trophy to match the other two on my bookshelf. What's the fun in winning three times if you can't show everyone?

Are We Missing Something By Reading An RSS Feed?

By Rob Diana of Regular Geek (Twitter/FriendFeed)

People that read this blog regularly know that I am a big proponent of the conversation. I blog about what conversation may or may not be. I have written a tool to let you track where in social media people are talking about your blog post or some keyword you want to watch. I do this as a software engineer with no formal training in psychology, sociology or marketing. I do this as someone who regularly engages in conversations each day, as a normal person. In order to keep myself up to date on what other people are talking about, I use an RSS reader, specifically Google Reader.

This weekend I read a post on GrowMap.com regarding a blog review contest. Obviously, this has nothing to do with "conversation". However, there was something said earlier in the post that got me thinking:

Regular visitors to GrowMap are bound to have come across some great ideas in the comments left by Dennis Edell. Hopefully you’ve already visited his main blog DirectSalesWebMarketing.

What is so interesting about that quote? Well, I read GrowMap while within the familiar confines of my RSS reader. I rarely go to the source of a blog post unless I plan on commenting directly on the site. By doing this, I am obviously missing something. I am missing the conversation part of a blog post, the comments. Generally, I do not even know if there are comments on a post if I am within my RSS reader. Yes, I know that many feeds include feedflares that may include a comment count, but how many people look at those unless they want to email, Digg, tweet or generally take some action on the RSS item.

By missing the comments, we are missing part of the conversation. It is a large part of the conversation because it is the one part of the blog post where readers can interact. Are we shortchanging ourselves by not reading the post on the blog along with the comments? How much more intersting would your RSS reader become if it included the comments in the feed? Can somebody work on that?

See Also:
louisgray.com: The Trouble With RSS: I'm Not Involved
GeekWhat.com: RSS Readers Kill Readers’ Involvement?

Image by Photopia
Read more by Rob Diana at RegularGeek.com.