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Would Twitter have the success it has now if it wasn’t at Twitter.com? What about Digg, or Facebook, or MySpace, or Yelp? Before social networks appeared at those domains, there were other pages at those locations. I took a time trip to the Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive to see what those domains were like, before they were social. Digg.comHome to Digg Records
Many blogs display a list of “recent” blog posts or “most popular” blog posts in their sidebars, using a plugin widget. But those lists of blogs stay the same regardless of who is visiting the blog. Imagine a sidebar widget for a blog that can consider the online activities of visitors at sites like Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, Youtube, Digg, and Netflix, and recommend older blog posts from the blog being visited. This widget might not only look at tweets and status updates and digs, or tags posted for pictures and favorited videos, but it may also pay attention to what those visitors blog about on their own sites, or what they enter into a user profile, or which articles they may read on a site. A Yahoo patent application describes how they might put together such a widget, and how it might gather information to use to make recommendations:   Tags: lifestreaming, mybloglog, patent, Search Personalization, social networking, yahoo, yahoo patent | Category: Social Networking and Social Search |
11 commentsAdded 2-26-2010 – Two more pending patent applications assigned to Facebook were published yesterday, and one of Facebook’s pending patent applications was granted earlier this week. I’ve added the patent applications, and moved the granted patent on “Dynamically providing newsfeeds” from the list of pending patent filings to the list of granted patents at the bottom of the post. In addition, Facebook was assigned 9 granted patents from Hewlett-Packard Company, recorded at the USPTO on February 15, 2010, and was assigned a previously published patent application on February 11, 2010. Thanks to @TwiterHero for pointing out these additional patent assignments to me. The last time I wrote about Facebook’s intellectual property was in a post from August of 2007 titled Facebook Timeline and Patent Application. At that time, Facebook only had one patent filing published at the US Patent and Trademark Office, Systems and methods for social mapping, which focused upon how members of the social network requested and confirmed relationships with others. I thought it was interesting that the patent filing’s focus was on protecting the private information of others given the history of the development of Facebook, and that of its predecessor, the short-lived Facemash. Tags: Facebook, facebook patents, patents | Category: Social Networking and Social Search |
20 commentsIn addition to collecting a lot of information about the Web by using crawling programs to index content across the internet, search engines can learn a lot about pages and images and videos and other objects on the web by watching what we choose when we search, by seeing how we browse web pages through their toolbars, and by noting what words we might choose when we annotate and tag images and pages. As publishers of text and links and pictures, as users of web pages, and as interactive participants on pages when leaving comments and tags and annotations, we provide search engines with information about our interests and what we might be interested in seeing on the Web. As those search engines learn about us and our interests from the pages that we like to visit and the images and text that we might publish, they can compare what we see and what we do online with other travelers and publishers on the Web, and they might view us as communities who may share some common interests, and whom they can learn from. Continue reading Community Tagging and Ranking in Images of Landmarks Run a social network, or participate in one? You might find a couple of Yahoo patent applications interesting – they discuss some of the challenges in understanding how communities interact with social media sites over time, and how the interests of users of those sites evolve over time. If you run a social media application you probably want to explore how the community focus of a site evolves over time. This means being able to browse through users, photos, tags, or the more complex structures of your site, such as groups, themes and clusters. We’re told that past techniques used to visualize this kind of information have been functional but inadequate. One example given is Ben Shneiderman’s Treemaps, described in Treemaps for space-constrained visualization of hierarchies. That paper includes a number of examples, and was last updated in April, 2006. A newer article on Treemaps from Ben Shneiderman is worth a look, too – Discovering Business Intelligence Using Treemap Visualizations. Continue reading Yahoo on Visualizing Community Use of Social Media Sites Over the past few months, Google has been publishing a number of patent applications about adding customized applications (modules) from third party developers (sources other than Google) to a wide variety of personalized web pages. These seemed to cover much more than the creation of add-on content for Google’s personalized homepage, though they use that page as an example. Just who were the third party developers mentioned? Who would be the non-Google suppliers of data described? The filings made more sense after Google announced their Opensocial program — OpenSocial makes the web better. These patent documents don’t use the term “opensocial” but they describe something very similar to Google’s offering.
The Web provides opportunities for people who share common interests to find each other, and engage in conversations. While I was in Washington on Friday, I got a kick out of watching a duck enjoying the cool mist rising up from the water flowing from the reflecting pool into the World War II Memorial, almost oblivious to the crowds of school kids and tourists running around the attractions.
Technology is allowing people to engage in conversations about our environment, and there are a number of social networking sites were these discussions are taking place. Here are some of the green social networking sites that I found searching around the Web. Recently Robert Scoble presented a few videos on the topic of Why Mahalo, TechMeme, and Facebook are going to kick Google’s butt in four years. It was a controversial topic, and generated some signficant and emotional responses, such as the following two posts from Rand Fiskin and Danny Sullivan.
Last week, Loren Baker asked me about patent applications which showed how Google and Yahoo might be using information from user annotations and social bookmarking and network sites to influence the rankings of search results. I sent back a list of ten patent applications from Google and Yahoo which Loren included in his excellent post on the topic – Social Media’s Direct Influence on Search Engine Ranking. |
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