Disruptions: Facebook’s Real-Life ‘Spidey Sense’
Facebook has so much power online that they have the ability to buy something at a low price and then make it go high by directing traffic accordingly,” said Jonathan Zittrain, a professor at Harvard Law School and a co-founder of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. “Sociologically, this is called the Matthew effect, where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.” (He notes that the term comes from a line in the Gospel of Matthew.) In other words, Facebook can create its future.”
Mining Twitter for Trends
Two MIT students are doing wonders with Twitter data. They’re latest project is an Ngram equivalent for Twitter, meaning they can mine for the trending appearance of specific words on Twitter.
The graph above shows our linguistic tendency to refer to days by their name right up until the day before. At that point we start referring to the next day as tomorrow.
Take a look at the rest of their analysis at this blog post and definitely play with the data. My favorite word to search so far: startups.
Awesome Design: TEDx
We’ve been hearing about Parallax designs for quite some time, and while I’ve always loved the effect, I’ve never seen it so wonderfully implemented in a typography-centered environment. Leave it to TEDx to implement the effect perfectly right alongside their striking red white and black color scheme. To top it all off, the site is built on WordPress.
Simple, striking, beautiful, and perfectly built for the context.
If you’re interested in building a Parallax theme yourself on WP, try out Five3. I’ve also seen a few others out in the wild, but this seems to be the most popular.
View it Live: http://tedxtrondheim.com/
Is China the Future of Social Commerce?
If you don’t believe in the future of social commerce, this post isn’t for you. If you still think social could serve as an avenue for shopping transactions, the idea that China could take the reigns and lead the way to social commerce business models is an interesting one.
After all, China has come a long way in adopting e-commerce in just a few short years. Hamid Sirhan writes:
When I lived in China 2006/2007, it was nigh impossible to order physical goods online – trust in infrastructure was simply not yet there. The impressive growth in e-commerce sales indicates a greater trust in China’s postal network and e-commerce sites.
The issue of trust is important in marketing to Chinese consumers. Peer-to-peer recommendations have a more profound impact, as the McKinsey report says this is likely due to a distrust of formal institutions. Building networks of trusted influencers – not as a commodity but as groups of people who can and will trust your products and messages – will be crucial to online interaction with Chinese netizens.
Sirhan goes on to say that this environment is ripe for innovations in social commerce, and I agree. All this makes total sense, but I can’t help but wonder how/if the Chinese version of social commerce will translate immediately to the drastically different social landscape of the Western world.
Whatever the case, I’ve always maintained that someone will crack the social commerce code, and I’m not just talking about more special offers and 20% off discounts. I’m talking about an entirely new way to shop. A means for buying online that affects commerce the same way Zynga transformed the world of gaming and social media.
Get ready. It’s coming.
YouTube Comedy Viewership Trends
I’ve been knee deep in YouTube analytics lately and can’t help but feel that the data users can cull from YouTube’s puts the platform far behind much of the rest of the web. For example, channel owners can’t attribute views to subscribers vs non subscribers, mark viewer movement through an owned channel, and the list goes on.
It’s only a matter of time before YouTube catches up, but until then much of the data you see on YouTube is either totally junior or cleverly obtained through hard labor or custom built solutions. That’s why I’m impressed by ChannelMeter.com, a site that features stats (like the one above) on specific channel verticals.
According to this analysis of comedy videos, prank, comedy, and fail are top commedy content while top tags include girl, funniest, fun, stupid and awesome. (Ironically, guy does not make that top tag list.) The post also found that videos of 5 – 7 minutes in the comedy vertical are the most viewed.
Interesting findings, and impressive given the lack of data out there. Still, it’s time for someone in the industry to go deeper. Much deeper.