brown2020

Social Media is a Conversation: Visualization of Interactions on Facebook

In The Lord of the Rings, a palantír stone was like a crystal ball. When you looked into the stone, you could see what was happening near other palantíri around the world. If you could learn to manipulate the stones, you could gain great power by using the stones not only to see the physical world, but also to peer into the history, the thoughts, and the intentions of other people around the world.

Palantír is an apt name for a new project from Facebook that might allow us for the first time to glimpse the world from Facebook’s point of view. Palantír is a visualization of the data flowing through and collected by Facebook: Conversations, comments, photos, friend requests, pokes, status updates, and more.

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Every song ever written started with a first experimental musical note of the composer. In the same way, every essay, every letter, every book, every blog post, started with that first mental note of the author. Most of the time, our ideas and experiences float away and we forget them. Sometimes, we jot a thought down, remember it, and it leads to new experiences. Sometimes an idea, an experience, a name and phone number, or a note-to-self remembered rather than forgotten, makes the difference in the direction of our lives.

Taking notes can translate a fleeting conception in our brain into action, and that action usually involves sharing our experience or idea with someone else. As we carry more and more powerful technology around with us every moment of the day, might it be possible that we can start to translate more of our otherwise forgotten notes-to-self and fleeting experiences into shared experiences? Into the start of conversations that make our lives richer?

In 1995, Bill Gates concluded his book The Road Ahead with a prescient but disquieting idea: Carrying around mobile technology connected to networks would lead to the fully “documented life”:

“Your wallet PC will be able to keep audio, time, location, and eventually even video records of everything that happens to you. It will be able to record every word you say and every word said to you, as well as your body temperature, your blood pressure, the barometric pressure, and a variety of other data about you and your surroundings.… It will be able to track your interactions with the network—all of the commands you issue, the messages you send, the people you call or who call you.”

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Google Sets is an interesting new tool from Google Labs that finds associations between words or phrases and related terms that we might not have thought about. Who could be better able to offer such a tool than Google: More than any other organization on the planet, Google knows what we are thinking. When something is on our minds, chances are that a significant sample of us are typing it into Google. The resulting data puts Google in a unique position not only to identify associations between words, but also to derive insights into human intentions and behavior.

Google Sets Home Health Monitoring Example

For obvious examples, type “Porsche” and “Mercedes” into Google Sets, and the site returns Ferrari, BMW, Audi and Lamborghini, among others. Type in “brain fitness” and Google Sets returns brain health, mind fitness, mental health, stress, cognitive neuroscience, brain training, and more.

For something less obvious, I challenged Google with the name of my old company, Health Hero Network. Google Sets accurately found AMGA, the acronym for the American Medical Group Association, the company’s partner on an important but not very well known Medicare chronic care improvement demonstration project. Google Sets also identified two of the company’s competitors, Viterion Telehealthcare and AMD Telemedicine, but missed the larger rivals Philips Telehealth and Honeywell HomMed as well as Intel Digital Health, the latest entrant into the home health monitoring market. Google Sets also didn’t pick up the fact that Health Hero Network is now part of Robert Bosch GmbH.

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It’s the day before the biggest election in recent memory, and the Economy is the top issue as Americans have come to realize that the entire financial system at risk.

I typed the word “economy” into the search engine Google today, and saw that BarackObama.com is the third search result on the list out of 254,000,000 sites in the Google index. This is an amazing feat of Search Engine Optimization.

There are three fundamental ways to get attention on the Internet: pay for it, word of mouth, or through organic search results.

Paying for traffic by purchasing keywords from Google is expensive. It is so expensive to buy traffic that Google brought in a record $5.5 billion revenues for the three months ending September 30, 2008.

Word of mouth is the power of social networks like Facebook and Myspace. Information that we post travels through our newsfeed with lightning speed to our friends, even faster than we can email a YouTube video.

Organic search is perhaps the most important way of obtaining traffic. When we are seeking something, most of us start with a Google search. Traffic that comes in from a search result tends to be the most relevant. Rarely do we make it past the first page or two of Google results, however, before clicking on a search result or trying a new search term.

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In the book Click: What Millions of People Are Doing Online and Why it Matters, Bill Tancer provides an inside view into just how much data about our online behavior is routinely collected and what those clicks reveal about the thoughts and intentions of a population. As head of Global Research for Hitwise, a web analytics company now part of credit ratings giant Experian, Bill Tancer has at his fingertips a continuous datastream from 25 million Internet users, collected anonymously through Internet Service Providers (ISPs). It must be even more fascinating to see Google’s data, as the most common act we do when we are interested in something is to type it into a search engine.

After reading Bill Tancer’s book, I put some of the ideas to the test with my own research based on web analytics made publicly available for free from Google and from Compete.com. If Internet behavior is an indicator of the intentions of a population, then what can we learn about the current political campaigns of Barack Obama and John McCain? For a sense of perspective, I also included Hillary Clinton in my comparison. The Compete.com graph shows unique monthly visitors to BarackObama.com, JohnMcCain.com and HillaryClinton.com. Despite steady growth in visits to JohnMcCain.com in recent months, BarackObama.com led JohnMcCain.com in website visits for September by over 2.4 million monthly uniques visitors, with 5.5 million unique visitors to BarackObama.com compared to 3.1 million unique visitors to JohnMcCain.com.

BarackObama.com v. JohnMcCain.com v. HillaryClinton.com on Compete.com

On Google.com/Trends, Google reveals trends in the data it collects and records on what people have been typing into the search engine. I compared searches for Barack Obama, John McCain and again Hillary Clinton for all searches originating in the United States over the past 12 months. While searches for John McCain briefly overtook Barack Obama around the time of the Republican Convention, Barack Obama has had a steady lead.

Barack Obama v. John McCain v. Hillary Clinton in Google Trends

Zooming in to searches conducted in the past 30 days, we can see that interest in both candidates continues to increase as we get closer to election day on November 4. Barack Obama’s lead over John McCain in search traffic has accelerated, and by the end of October, Google searches for Barack Obama led John McCain by about 2.5 to 1.

30 Day Google Trends: Searches for Barack Obama v. John McCain v. Hillary Clinton

Google also gives us the top locations for search traffic, so we can easily see the top geographic hot spots for presidential candidate search terms, which should correlate to what people are thinking and talking about.

Top Regions for Presidential Searches on Google

Not surprisingly, there is a high overlap between the areas with the most searches for presidential candidates and the battleground states where the campaigns are the most intense. All of the key battlegrounds except Florida are in the top 10 regions in terms of presidential candidate search traffic, with the hottest races in Indiana, Ohio, North Carolina and Missouri at the top of the list.

Battleground States Map from New York Times

One of the insights Bill Tancer demonstrates in the book Click is how traditional television media can drive search traffic. A television advertisement can raise awareness of an issue, and then lead us or even explicitly give us a “call to action” to go to the Internet to dig deeper.

It is easy to jump to conclusions, because with the free web analytics used here, we don’t know what motivates the search behavior. It might easily be buzz about a parody of a candidate on Saturday Night Live, Steven Colbert, or the Daily Show with John Stewart, with a flurry of web searches to catch the clip on YouTube or Hulu.com. Some things we know for sure. First, the objective behavioral data of the Internet has proven many previously untested assumptions to be wrong. Second, despite the fact that campaigns produce more 30 second television sound bites than ever, our ability to dig deeper and learn more for ourselves means that it is a completely new world this time around.