AIM Meets Social Network Theory 212
dan moore writes "A student at Caltech has created a website (BuddyZoo.com) that tracks cliques within groups of peoples' buddylists. It also measures buddy popularity and allows you to do a six-degrees type search for other screen names. An interesting approach to social network theory."
Interesting (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Interesting (Score:5, Interesting)
Also, LiveJournal has a few features built directly into the site that do somewhat similar things. You can get a list of friends who are popular with your own friends, and a listing of all the most recent posts of your friends' friends.
LJ friends lists analysis (Score:3, Informative)
LJ Connect [petekrawczyk.com] is the page that lets you find how many steps away you are from someone else on LJ.
For what it's worth, though, they don't read the userinfo pages; they read the friends information from a special simplified web interface designed just for such tools. (The details of the interface aren't public, but you can ask the LJ admins for more information.) The end result is the same, though.
Marnanel
author another tool to analyse friends lists [marnanel.org]
Re:Interesting (Score:3, Interesting)
There's a paper on weblog popularity here [shirky.com]. (It got slashdotted IIRC)
Re:Interesting (Score:2, Interesting)
err (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:err (Score:3, Informative)
Re:err (Score:2)
Useful? (Score:2, Funny)
Conspiracy theory ... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Conspiracy theory ... (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't use AIM much (read: only in specific cases) and prefer ICQ (I know, I know... ICQ is owned by AOL). I only use the AIM Express client anyway so I don't have to install their software.
Re:Conspiracy theory ... (Score:3, Interesting)
great... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:great... (Score:3, Interesting)
Sure, but my short list of buddies are people that I actually know. So all the girls on my list are real girls.
I can't wait for the meta-analysis of the BuddyZoo that shows that half these people are bots and the other half are hairy middle-aged men who like to be called something like Jen^^Cutie16.
Re:great... (Score:2, Funny)
now where's the element of surprise in that?
Re:great... (Score:2)
smarterchild's popularity score: 38. This is the number of members who have smarterchild on their lists.
Popularity ranking: 1 (percentile: 100.00).
smarterchild is the most popular person.
If you want to feel even worse about yourself, check that out. It's pretty sad when the most popular person is actually an AIM bot.
Re:great... (Score:2)
Buddy collecting (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Buddy collecting (Score:2, Interesting)
Buddies (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't actually get it. I think instant messaging is great, but only for business purposes (communicating with other branches, overseas contacts, etc).
To me, a buddies are people that you go to pubs with, go to cricket matches with, etc. I'll never be online after work hours or on the weekends, those time should be reserved for outdoor pursuits or social pursuits. There's nothing like doing 4x4 trails on the weekend, especially in Southern Africa. Or going horse-riding, playing golf, etc. Come on, guys.
I don't know. Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but I don't think sitting on PCs for hours a day chatting with MSN/AIM/Yahoo buddies is healthy. The USA is an amazing country with plenty of things to do. Go and check them out. That goes for people in other countries as well - there's more for you to do than just sit on your PC. There's a wealth of recreational activities in any given country that's waiting to be explored. Heck, one of the programmers at work used to be like that, sitting on his PC for hours a day playing games or chatting. We've converted him to an outdoor man by going camping, sky-diving and horse-riding. Now he seems a lot more relaxed and has a wider social circle of people - In real life!
Re:Buddies (Score:5, Insightful)
There are some good uses to instant messaging. However, you can certainly get by without it. I truly hate the way instant messaging and technologies such as SMS seems to affect today's youth with the Trash-talk virus: thye wil b typin liek this til u lose ur mind and don't even see a problem with it.
Re:Buddies (Score:3, Insightful)
Granted, but I find email a better medium for this. I don't deny that if someone feels more comfortable with IM'ing their relatives or friends overseas, that it would be a very handy tool for that kind of communication, though.
Re:Buddies (Score:5, Interesting)
Infidel. (Score:2, Funny)
Don't you know you're supposed to humiliate and denigrate your opponent? Sheesh. You never would have made it in the cut-throat world of high school CX debate. :)
Re:Buddies (Score:3, Interesting)
Also, when I'm in a room full of people running ICQ, I find that dumbass "Uh-Oh!" wav bloody irritating... :-)
Re:Buddies (Score:2)
Re:Buddies (Score:2)
Re:Buddies (Score:2)
Re:Buddies (Score:2)
Trash typing is a KID thing in every era (Score:3, Informative)
Hell, look at stuff carved into picnic tables or scribbled on billboards from the 1950s or even before. You'll see phrases like "U R my tru luv". In the antique era of handwritten letters, kids did the same thing -- shorthand and shortcut the written word as much as was feasible, even if it's just using an ampersand instead of "and". Kids see this as a sort of "economy" as to how mu
Re:Trash typing is a KID thing in every era (Score:2)
Re:Trash typing is a KID thing in every era (Score:2)
The difference is that it takes a modicum of time and effort to carve long messages into wood. In other cases, it can be expensive to send long messages (telegrams, f'rinstance).
With things like IM and SMS, it's sheer laziness, though at least for text-messaging on phones you've got the excuse of small screens and keypads not designed for the rapid input of lon
Re:Buddies (Score:2)
Clearly, the reason for that is you're a South African.
Seriously though, I both agree and disagree. I agree that programmers and others need to get a healthy life out there, but disagree in that I believe you're confusing a real 'buddy' with an IM buddy. As others have pointed out, IM's are a great, in many cases, only, way of keeping in contact with friends spread over the globe.
Heck, one of my current projects would be zilch if it hadn't been for Yahoo IM.
Re:Buddy collecting (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm a moderator on a major recording artist's forum, so there are lots of people who want to have me delete or lock threads. Sometimes ban a user.
So, I added everyone who posted regularly.
I don't need that quite so much anymore because I begged and pleaded for another mod. Now I'm down to about 50ish because only people I know in real life need to bug me, with the occasional close board friend thrown in for good me
Re:Buddy collecting (Score:2)
AIM used to have a limit of 160 buddies, but fortunately that restriction has been lifted. I just went through and cleaned out a few old screen names, so my list is down to 165 right now. Note that some people have multiple screen names (for example, one they use from home and one they use from work), so that's not 165 individual people, but probably closer to 100. Probably a little over half of them I've met in person; the r
Re:Buddy collecting (Score:2, Interesting)
Hello,
Thank you for writing to Yahoo! Messenger.
You are limited to 100 friends at one time on your friend list. We have
limited it to this number because your Friend List is stored on our
servers rather than on your computer. The drawback of this is that you
are limited to 100 friends. However, the benefit of this is that you
can go to any compute
Your popularity (Score:2, Funny)
Yet somehow the IM spammers find me...
opt in? (Score:3, Interesting)
Hmm.. 8,324 screennames on the site... (Score:2, Funny)
Does anyone else get the feeling these 8000 people who gave their screenames to the site are about to get a lot of very exciting offers for penis enlargement and Hot17F Hi! My name is cindy
Re:Hmm.. 8,324 screennames on the site... (Score:2, Informative)
whoa (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:whoa (Score:2)
Gorgeous but Unscientific and Ill-documented (Score:4, Informative)
I learned one thing from the visualsations... (Score:2)
...some people have the weirdest screen-names. Still, I guess I could have learned that from reading slashdot, joining YaHoo!Groups or logged onto the IRC-network.
While I realise that having a few thousand "Bob"'s on the same network - at least as long as the nick is the only unike identifier - why do people insist on picking names that are plain weird? Some may not see this as a problem, but as a user on AIM, I'm reluctant to accept IM's from people with such handles.
Bah.. I'm ranting.
Re:I learned one thing from the visualsations... (Score:2)
I made the site (Score:5, Informative)
I don't have the data already. Users contribute their lists to the site by uploading them.
I'm not going to spam people. I promise.
This load makes me glad I put the time into setting up mod_perl
proof that I made the site:
http://www.buddyzoo.com/images/slashdot.ht
Re:I made the site (Score:2)
It looks like it's actually standing up pretty well to the Slashdot Effect so far... of course, that's probably because it's still like 4am on the East Coast of the States.
Re:I made the site (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I made the site (Score:4, Funny)
After all, you now know people...
Re:I made the site (Score:2)
Re:I made the site (Score:5, Informative)
Right now smarterchild is topping the popularity rankings.
Re:I made the site (Score:2)
smarterchild is topping the popularity rankings
I can see a slight contradiction here...
Re:I made the site (Score:2)
Bizzare. Dana and I were looking at this just last night. Way to get Slashdotted ;)
-Brendan, who you don't know
wow (Score:4, Funny)
It's up to 15000+ and growing.
You dirty lying /.ers - YOU ALL ARE RUNNING AOL!
I have to wash my hands. I might get AOL, or Windows disease from you...
Re:wow (Score:4, Informative)
Oi! I'm running Gaim!
(Instructions are provided for converting gaim buddy lists to the format needed by the system, but it took me a couple of minutes to figure out the syntax, so here it is):
Re:wow (Score:3, Insightful)
Note that AOL and AIM are not at all the same service. Screen names share the same namespace, and there is some interoperability (improved dramatically over the last couple years from what I understand), but you can definitely run AIM while hating AOL.
Unless you hate the company, in which case you'd better also stay away from ICQ and WinAmp and Netscape and CNN and The Matrix and The Lord of the Rings movies and everything else they own.
Re:wow (Score:2)
I also use Mozilla and Netscape and WinAmp... omighod, I must be an AOLer in d
:-/ Not interesting... yet... (Score:2)
-jag
Networking for a job (Score:2, Funny)
(The sick thing is that I'm only half-kidding.)
/. friends network? (Score:5, Interesting)
Feeling up to it, cmdrtaco?
Maybe someone who's not an editor can do it too, if they can spider all the user pages. But I suspect it would take forever to do it without getting your IP banned.
I once came across a list of all /. users up to 5 levels in the friends chain from Cmdrtaco (i.e, friends of cmdrtaco, friends of friends, ...). I tried googling it now but can't seem to find it :(
The less popular the better (Score:5, Interesting)
The less people I know on AIM will effectively minimize my chances of existing on that site.
Unpopularity pays off here.
This can help out AIM in an undirect way. AIM spammers spam the living hell out of all members on that site. Users cannot set higher privacy settings (in chance of losing chances meeting new people and such), they can't have effective spam filters like spam killer for email. The spam is even more direct, it's not sitting in your mailbox, it's DIRECTLY on your desktop. Users find new IM screen names. AOL claims their AIM program is more popular due to the new 10 million users, who basically might be the same 10 million highschool/college kiddies.
Re:The less popular the better (Score:2, Informative)
n.b.: Privacy statement [buddyzoo.com]
Re:The less popular the better (Score:2, Interesting)
The next version of AIM could include an option to block messages from users not on your buddy list with a warning level above a certain percentage, since any spammers would be at a high warning level after the first few victims got angry at them.
Then the spammers would have to continually register for accounts, not the victims.
The results seem bizarre. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:The results seem bizarre. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:The results seem bizarre. (Score:2)
no, those are real AOL screen names. AOL is just running out of unique names!
My friends are constantly on AIM... (Score:2, Interesting)
Six degrees of separation (Score:5, Informative)
BTW, I wonder how online relationships will compare with real world relationships? One tends to have more acquaintances in meatspace, but our online friends are more diverse.
Re:Six degrees of separation (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Six degrees of separation (Score:2, Insightful)
Can we do the same with (Score:2, Interesting)
May be not, nevermind.
Getting the buddy list data (Score:2)
Privacy law #15 according to /.ers (Score:2, Funny)
Big Brother is watching.. (Score:5, Interesting)
It is a bit interesting, actually. I just wonder when his program will collapse, what the upper limit of number of users are.
I mean, this is a classical data-mining problem.
Philosophical / Paranoia:
When techniques like these functional enough to really work on large amounts of users, it's going to be candy for Big Brother.
They can just look at the graph over the people doing unwanted stuff and remove the spiders of those webs (the leaders of those underground networks). I think this is a great example of how important it is for us to develop freenet techniques.
Would AOL knock on your door too? (Score:5, Interesting)
Although I am not 100% on this, but AIM I believe is their trademark, and such they are going to defend it (as long as you are getting more hits than they ever will).
imaddict.com was an example. Their IM addiction survey and other stuff were REAL popular. I know they got legal letter from AOL regarding the trademark usage, and his attitude at first wasn't exactly yielding. Now I just tried going there again and it's not even on the DNS servers.
I am no lawyer, and I guess this is slightly off topic. But I am interested in something like this. It is an idea AOL might not have thought off and seems like they might be interested in something like this (given their current status, they probably have to increase AOL CDs so there's a higher chance someone will install their crap by accident).
Just a thought
email... (Score:2, Interesting)
The most usefull outcome of this, would hence be for the company to understand how it actually was organized, and also a tool to determine key persons in those groups.
Possible misuse? (Score:3, Interesting)
Similar to Social-Networking Bokmarks (Score:2, Interesting)
Even with the privacy issues being resolved, and preventing the list from falling in the hands of spammers, there is a deeper problem of whether people on the ground will embrace it.
I remember similar experiments with networking "BOOKMARKS" or "Favorites" and they never could get big enough for the "critical mass." I am not sure why, but purely using that as an apporpriate analogy, I think this concept needs to be refined further before it can become big. Maybe people hesitate giving data from which t
What a bitch. (Score:3, Interesting)
Just by sumitting my buddy list, I've automatically made all my buddies immensely more popular than myself, as they all appear on one buddy list (mine), whereas none of them have uploaded their lists, so I appear on no buddy lists. Funny how that works out.
Re:What a bitch. (Score:2)
Because there's really no other good way to monitor your warning level. (Or take a quick peak at your profile, with working hyperlinks.) So I know several people who have themselves on their own buddy list. It is actually useful.
ironic (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:ironic (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:ironic (Score:2)
aim:// ? (Score:2)
Re:aim:// ? (Score:2)
Re:aim:// ? (Score:2)
Newer versions of gaim come with a program called gaim-remote. Add a handler for aim:// that passes the URI to gaim-remote with the following syntax:
gaim-remote uri [uri]
Hope this helps.
-Brendan
Aimbase is similar (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Aimbase is similar (Score:2)
Which doesn't work in Mozilla...
Seriously - they use SVG, and there is no SVG viewer for Mozilla. The Adobe one will crash your browser, and Adobe refuses to release a new one for Mozilla.
Your other option is to try the incomplete Mozilla SVG [mozilla.org] browser, but if you want to see the buddy names, you'd better be running Windows XP. (Or whatever SP adds GDI+ to older versions of Windows.)
Over a year ago people noticed tha [xmlhack.com]
Beat to the punch! (Score:2, Interesting)
SixDegrees.com? Kevin Bacon Game? (Score:2, Informative)
And for those who are genuinely interested in Internet applications of network analysis, you might want to try the Oracle of Bacon [oracleofbacon.org]. It's an online version of the "Kevin Bacon Game" (who starred with whom) using data from IMDB.
Thoughts on it (Score:3, Interesting)
It also occurred to me that there are probably a lot of people who don't want their whole buddy list to necessarily be known, so I'd have to create some barrier to prevent directly seeing other people's buddy list.
Further, buddy lists are always in flux. The data would become dated fairly rapidly and just straight-out incorrect not too long after.
Finally, I realized that this idea was something that would be trivial for AOL to do. They have the data and they have it in real time. All someone would have to do is check off a "yes, you can use my buddy list for data collection" or something (though I'd imagine their EULA would probably already give them that right if the simply wanted to do it sans specific permission). It could be spun in a number of different ways to entice people to do so.
Just some thoughts.
Slashdotted (Score:2)
OK
The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.
Please contact the server administrator, dangelo@ugcs.caltech.edu and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.
More information about this error may be available in the server error log.
Apache/1.3.27 Server at buddyzoo.com Port 80
I bet the server admins were really happy about your hosting a Slashdotted site
zerg (Score:3, Informative)
Here's the
This seems really similar (Score:2)
dude, I suck! I am sooo unpopular... (Score:2)
Popularity
Your popularity score: 0. This is the number of members who have you on their lists.
Popularity ranking: 143044 (percentile: 16.29).
143043 people are more popular, 27837 are less popular.
Re:I know what's going on (Score:5, Funny)
We used to set up a card table in the hallway, outside the registrar's office. We'd hang out a little sign that said 'Coed Registration', and sit back and rake in names and phone numbers.
Today this would be called stalking, I'm sure. Those were the days...
Re:Quite possibly the most idiotic name ever. (Score:2, Funny)
Have most people even met all the people on their "buddy" lists?
Don't click the link! (Score:4, Informative)
Be careful...8')
No, click that link. Really. (Score:2)
Re:Little short on data... (Score:2, Informative)