JumpSocial Blog

Wednesday 5:30 pm - 6:30 pm, Nov 14 (20071114)
at Pub 101

Event Brief Description: *SNTTT (Social Network Theory Think Tank) — Format: 10m social, 10m talk, Questions and discussion. This regular activity is hosted by Darcy Whyte (Darcy@Siteware.com) of JumpSocial. Contact Darcy Whyte for details about future session locations and times. Ideas and feedback are welcome! Please RSVP to Darcy@Siteware.com if you do not indicate in JumpSocial that you are attending. Also feel free to add Darcy@Siteware.com as a jumpsocial contact. It’s in the 2nd floor of the pub.

Event Description: ChoiceBot is an Ottawa startup that currently sells a successful, disruptive product search and selection technology to shopping sites. The core technology lends itself very well to p2p communication about products in a social context, and we’re designing an app that enables users to do just that on SN’s, blogs, product review sites, etc. At this SNTTT get-together, we’ll show some design concepts and be looking for suggestions, critiques, ideas, etc., before we start coding.

Nick Desbarats is ChoiceBot’s founder and CEO and has been part of the Ottawa software scene for over 15 yrs, having co-founded three companies including BitFlash Inc., which raised over $23M in venture financing and sold to OpenText in 2004.

Event Interests: No Cover, Talk, Seminar, Cocktail Party, Business, Marketing, Planning, VC and Angel, Mentoring, Technology

Pub 101: 101 York Street, Ottawa, Canada, 613-789-3515

Brief Description of Venue: A 3 Level Pub/Sports Bar/Night Club in the Heart of the Byward market. A Little something for everyone!

Open for lunch and dinner 7 days a week Pub.101 boasts a great menu full of amazing daily specials including 2 wing nights.

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Tim Inkpen of the SNTTT sent me these resources:

http://www.ottawabusinessjournal.com/320767738221139.php
http://www.ottawabusinessjournal.com/320767744774653.php

Book: �??The Social Construction of Reality�?� — Berger

Formula: Michael Hughes formula for measuring the depth of a relationship:

Familiarity (1-10)

Trust (1-10)

Potential (1-10)

Fun (-10 to +10)

Add up the total to get a score. Those people with the highest score are the contacts that you should focus on. This a network application of the 20-80 rule.

SNTTT — TravelPod Redesign / Social Network Theory
Wednesday 5:30 pm - 6:30 pm, Oct 24 (20071024)
at Pub 101

Event Description: TravelPod Usability Review with Luc levesque (General Manager / Founder, TravelPod.com): Participate in an open exercise in design and usability by giving your feedback on TravelPod’s new yet-to-be-launched homepage design. Try their Traveler IQ Challenge on Facebook http://apps.facebook.com/travelpod-challenge/

Presenter #2: Mr. Sanjay Belkhode — Abstract: In our very first session, Sanjay presented Part 1 of the Basics of Social Networking Theory. Since then, many attendees have indicated their desire to see this presentation again. This will be mostly the same presentation as before with perhaps a few changes/additions. You’ll learn more about the different types of social networks and how they relate to real life.

*SNTTT (Social Network Theory Think Tank) — Format: 10m social, 10m talk, Questions and discussion. This regular activity is hosted by Darcy Whyte (Darcy@Siteware.com) of JumpSocial. Contact Darcy Whyte for details about future session locations and times. Ideas and feedback are welcome! Please RSVP to Darcy@Siteware.com if you do not indicate in JumpSocial that you are attending. Also feel free to add Darcy@Siteware.com as a jumpsocial contact. It’s in the 2nd floor of the pub.

Event Interests: No Cover, Talk, Seminar, Cocktail Party, Business, Marketing, Planning, VC and Angel, Mentoring, Technology

Pub 101: 101 York Street, Ottawa, Canada, 613-789-3515

Brief Description of Venue: A 3 Level Pub/Sports Bar/Night Club in the Heart of the Byward market. A Little something for everyone!

Open for lunch and dinner 7 days a week Pub.101 boasts a great menu full of amazing daily specials including 2 wing nights.

Here’s a really cool article on the how content can be filtered. The author likens machine learning to evolution.

http://karmatics.com/docs/evolution-and-wisdom-of-crowds.html

It’s worth a peak.

I went into Facebook on Thursday at the end of the business day to play around with MyChannl (Facebook Application by Bill Love et. al.). I watched a few videos and then went to the shwarma shop around the corner in the Ottawa Byward Market near my office.

I connected to the Hotel wireless internet across the street and went into Facebook to make a chess move in a game with Guy from my high school chess club.

I eyeballed my inbox a bit and then went home.

When I got home, I went back onto my portable computer and was greeted with the message:

Your account has been disabled by an administrator. If you have any questions or concerns, you can visit our FAQ page here.

How annoying. I had no idea what caused it and received no warning. I just lost access to everything.

Nuts, I felt I was winning at the chess game.

Also, many of my business contacts were there and I was blocked from getting in. I needed to contact one of my business friends to arrange something for the SNTTT event next week that I’m organizing. But I couldn’t.

I contacted Facebook and someone got back to me today in the morning to say that I was now allowed back in. The message had an apology but they didn’t indicate what triggered it. Further, I still can’t get in. I sent them more messages. I got to the point where I felt the need to let them know that it was causing harm. I said that I felt that it was careless as well.

People might think something is up because I’ve disappeared from their contact list. They might think I’ve removed or blocked them.

Already my parents called me from Saskatchewan because I’ve disappeared off of all my families contact lists.

I guess I can get through life without Facebook but this is something to be aware of. Any of the information that you have in Facebook can disappear at any time.

Also, beyond your control and awareness, you can appear to be blocking or to have removed our friends and family from your contact/friend list.

This can create a mess (long distance phone calls) and lots of extra work to clarify the mess that it creates.

Have you backed up the information you have in Facebook?

Darcy

Last Wednesday we had another great SNTTT session at Pub 101.

Personally I love the MyChannl Application.

It’s really cool to be able to have relevant video content without having to do an explicit search. The MyChannl system takes information from your profile, searches various sources then presents you with the content.

You can also view videos based on your friends. I’m understanding that it uses votes from your friends for this. I think it should use your friends’ interests to come up with content and use the voting for ranking rather than content selection. Also that if I have viewed a video, it should be listed lower in my list. (The ones that I like will be in my favourites).

What’s your opinion?

Darcy

What can be done to make this site better?

http://www.artschallenge.ca

Thank to Lani and everyone who came last night.

We had about 12 people. I asked Lani to come on short notice and she was happy to come along to answer any math questions that would come up. Given the number of people that couldn’t make it, I was surprised. If people hadn’t have been so busy we would have had a fairly large group.
I went through a paper on Centrality and Aids and also we all shared a few anecdotes. http://www.analytictech.com/networks/centaids.htm

This paper is quite convincing to me that Eigenvector Centrality is a measure of something useful. Of course there is all the argument about how you model a network. (What is a tie etc.)

There is another article I mentioned on Scale Free Networks from Scientific American. It’s mentioned earlier in this Blog.

Darcy

There was a great article in Scientific American on Scale-Free Networks a while back in May 2003 written by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi and Eric Bonabeau.
If you read up on Network Theory, you’ll find that most texts assume that large networks are random graphs. This is a wrong assumption.

Many of the most interesting characteristics in graph theory is a result of the underlying architecture of scale-free networks.

I highly recommend this article so it’s worth a stop at the public library. I have that magazine so you could ask me too.

My friend Tim Inkpen sent me this article:

Web networking boom blasts into the workplace
The article is about FaceBook and MySpace and it also talks about the fact that many employers block people from certain aspects of the Internet such as email and FaceBook.

Personally I believe that this is generally bad for professionals who use their social networks to assist with problem solving and to discover information. I’ve been on contract sites where they block Internet access and it interfered with my ability to research.

On the other hand, it’s hard to stomach the idea that the civil service is spending their day cruising FaceBook or dating sites and their salaries come from public money. So I can see why they block many people.

Darcy

Tim Inkpen shared this link with me.

File-sharers forced to play fair

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6971904.stm

The article describes Tribler. It’s an interesting concept that there is a infrastructure that enforces reciprocity.

Thanks to Mike and all who came!

Mike’s talk turned out to be incredibly interesting. It was over the 10m but nobody seemed to mind given how organized he was an how well he delivered it in the noisy environment at Pub 101!

Tim Inkpen sent this link to me on social stuff: http://www.resourceshelf.com/index.php?s=social+network

Also Mike gave me the source code from his demonstrations on AJAX. Anybody who wants it is welcome to contact me at Darcy@Siteware.com. Demo Code from Mike’s Talk
It wasn’t 100 percent obvious to every person but the significance of AJAX is that it allows web systems to have rich interfaces like Win32 apps. As the Internet and Social Software becomes more and more widespread, it needs to become more usable and more accessible.

Also, he emphasized that AJAX allows you to use the horsepower of the client workstations which is a significant advantage. He even described the impact it would have on your application infrastructure.
Darcy

For those of you who are wondering, it stands for: Social Network Theory Think Tank.

It’s a support group organized by Darcy Whyte that meets roughly once per week. The group meets on different evenings in different venues but we seem to be converging on Wednesdays at 5:30pm at Pub 101 in the Ottawa, Byward Market. The speakers can influence the schedule and venue.

The format is generally a 10m social, 10m presentation and then questions and discussion. The idea is that one could just drop in and be in and out in an hour which is good use of time for a quality business networking activity.

Topics are anything that’s to do with social networks, networks, graph theory or anything of interest to people who want to understand, deploy or use social software systems.

Web 2.0 Lab:

The original intention was to branch the group adding a second area of interest which is the Internet and other programming that is involved with social systems. That could be anything from AJAX to PHP to BlackBerry programming. What seems to be emerging is that we have some speakers with this interest area and others under the network theory side.

Ottawa Facebook Garage:

Also hosted is an official Facebook developer support group. This will probably live in it’s own schedule (likely chained onto the Think Tank schedule).
Darcy