Category Archives: Gadgets and Technology

Only 56% of Twitter accounts have ever sent a tweet

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There are over 900 million Twitter accounts but not everyone is actually sending tweets:

A report from Twopcharts, a website that monitors Twitter account activity, states that about 44% of the 974 million existing Twitter accounts have never sent a tweet…

Twitter said it has 241 million monthly active users the last three months of 2013. Twitter defines a monthly active user as an account that logs in at least once a month. By Twitter’s standards, a person does not have to tweet to be considered a monthly active user…

But having engaged users–those who are active participants in the online conversation–are particularly valuable to Twitter. For one thing, activity tends to make users more inclined to continue using the service.

Secondly, user tweets, retweets, favorites and other actions help Twitter generate advertising revenue. Over the last year, the company has made it easier for users to do those things and introduced user-friendly features such as pictures into the timeline…

Moreover, the report highlights Twitter’s user retention issue. It estimates 542.1 million accounts have sent at least one tweet since they’ve been created, suggesting that more than half of the accounts in existence have actively tried out the service. But just 23% of those accounts have tweeted sometime in the last 30 days.

And how many of these accounts are fake?

All together, the number of people actively using Twitter – meaning they are tweeting themselves, retweeting, interacting with others – is still limited. If you read a lot of Internet stories from journalists and bloggers, it sounds like lots of people are on Twitter doing important things. But, these users are likely a limited part of the population: more educated, have regular access to smartphones and Internet connections, younger. This doesn’t mean Twitter is worthless but it does suggest it is not exactly representative of Americans.

Research shows new mothers are less active on Facebook, aren’t flooding news feeds with babies

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A researcher finds that new mothers are quite a bit less active on Facebook after their children are born:

Recently, Meredith Ringel Morris—a computer scientist at Microsoft Research—gathered data on what new moms actually do online. She persuaded more than 200 of them to let her scrape their Facebook accounts and found the precise opposite of the UnBaby.Me libel. After a child is born, Morris discovered, new mothers post less than half as often. When they do post, fewer than 30 percent of the updates mention the baby by name early on, plummeting to not quite 10 percent by the end of the first year. Photos grow as a chunk of all postings, sure—but since new moms are so much less active on Facebook, it hardly matters. New moms aren’t oversharers. Indeed, they’re probably undersharers. “The total quantity of Facebook posting is lower,” Morris says.

And therein lies an interesting lesson about our supposed age of oversharing. If new moms don’t actually deluge the Internet with baby talk, why does it seem to so many of us that they do? Morris thinks algorithms explain some of it. Her research also found that viewers disproportionately “like” postings that mention new babies. This, she says, could result in Facebook ranking those postings more prominently in the News Feed, making mothers look more baby-obsessed.

And a reminder of how we could see beyond our personal experiences and anecdotes and look at the bigger picture:

I have another theory: It’s a perceptual quirk called a frequency illusion. Once we notice something that annoys or surprises or pleases us—or something that’s just novel—we tend to suddenly notice it more. We overweight its frequency in everyday life. For instance, if you’ve decided that fedoras are a ridiculous hipster fashion choice, even if they’re comparatively rare in everyday life, you’re more likely to notice them. And pretty soon you’re wondering, why is everyone wearing fedoras now? Curse you, hipsters!…

The way we observe the world is deeply unstatistical, which is why Morris’ work is so useful. It reminds us of the value of observing the world around us like a scientist—to see what’s actually going on instead of what just happens to gall (or please) us. I’d hazard that perceptual illusions lead us to overamplify the incidence of all sorts of ostensibly annoying behavior: selfies on Instagram, people ignoring one another in favor of their phones, Google Glass. We don’t have a plague of oversharing. We have a plague of over-noticing. It’s time to reboot our eyes.

This study suggests the mothers themselves are not at fault but the flip side of this study would seem to be to then study the news feeds of friends of new mothers to see how often these pictures and posts show up (and how algorithms might be pushing this). And who are the people more likely to like such posts and pictures? This study may have revealed the supply side of the equation but there is more to explore.

Is more Internet use correlated to a decline in religious affiliation?

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A new study suggests using the Internet more is correlated with lower levels of religious affiliation:

Downey analyzed data from the General Social Survey, a well-respected annual research survey carried out by the University of Chicago, to make his findings.

Downey says the single biggest cause of religious affiliation is upbringing: those you are raised in religious households are much more likely to remain in their family’s religion as adults…

By far the largest factor, says Downey, is Internet use.

In the 1980s, Internet use was virtually non-existent, but in 2010, 53 per cent of people spent two hours online a week and 25 per cent spent more than seven hours…

Downey says that his research has controlled for ‘most of the obvious candidates, including income, education, socioeconomic status, and rural/urban environments’ to discount a third factor, one that is responsible both for the rise of Internet use and the drop in religiosity.

Since the full story is behind a subscriber wall, two speculations about the methodology of this study:

1. This sounds like a regression and/or ANOVA analysis based on R-squared changes. In other words, when one explanatory factor is in the model, how much more of the variation in the dependent variable (religiosity) is explained? You can then add or subtract different factors singly or in combination to see how that percent of variation explained changes.

2. Looking at religious affiliation is just one way to measure religiosity. Affiliation is based on self-identification (do you consider yourself a Catholic, mainline Protestant, conservative Protestant, etc.) or what religious congregation you regularly attend or interact with. But, levels of religious affiliation have been falling in recent years even as not all measures of religiosity are falling. Research about the rise of the “religious nones” shows a number of these people still are spiritual or perform religious practices.

If there is a strong causal relationship between increased Internet use and less religiosity, why might this be the case? A few ideas:

1. The Internet opens people up to a whole realm of information beyond themselves. Traditionally, people would look to those around them, whether individuals or institutions, within relatively close proximity. The Internet breaks a lot of these social boundaries and allows people to search for information way beyond themselves.

2. The Internet offers social interactions in a way that religion used to. Instead of going to a religious congregation to meet people, the Internet offers the possibilities of finding like-minded people in all sorts of areas from hobbies and interests, people in the same career field, dating websites, and people you want to sell goods to. In other words, some of the social aspects of religion can now be replicated online.

3. The Internet in its medium and content tends to be individualistic. Anyone with an Internet connection can do all sorts of things without relying on others (outside of having a service provider). This simply feeds into individualistic attitudes that already existed in the United States.

It sounds like there is a lot more here for researchers to explore and unpack.

Tiny houses may be missing TVs, other modern technologies

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Tiny houses differ from McMansions in their size but perhaps also in another feature: a lack of TVs and other modern media technologies.

As I browsed the pages of both company’s full color, Robb Report-quality catalogs, one thing really stood out: In no picture of a fully furnished room did I see a single television. That can’t be a coincidence.

These are not the “Jewel Box” new homes filled with automation and electronics Gordon Gekko and his minions are supposedly building as all Baby Boomers are forced to downsize. Jewel Boxes? More like thumb drives if we are making an accurate size comparison.

There are clearly challenges to designing relevant A/V, home theater, whole house entertainment/convenience and security for a tiny home. Multi-purpose structures and thoughtful use of hydraulics just begin the scratch the surface. An exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York has a full size working model of a mini apartment that shows all sorts of folding and sliding stuff including a television. It almost looks like two different apartments, literally day and night.

This could suggest tiny houses are not just about having smaller houses: it is part of a larger lifestyle package away from consumerism that includes restricting television consumption. However, these two things don’t necessarily have to go together: tiny house or micro-apartment dwellers may have strong interests in different media including streaming TV and video games. I would suspect many tiny house owners have a laptop, tablet, and/or smartphone but I would also guess they don’t want their small homes to be dominated by things like large TVs that are often the focal points of social spaces in McMansions.

The evolving definition and usage of “selfie”

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The word “selfie” was the Oxford Dictionary’s word of the year in 2013 but its usage and meaning continues to evolve:

A selfie isn’t just “a photograph that one has taken of oneself,” but also tends to be “taken with a smartphone or webcam and uploaded to a social media website,” as the editors at Oxford Dictionaries put it. That part is key because it reinforces the reason why we needed to come up with a new name for this kind of self-portraiture in the first place.

Think of it this way: A selfie isn’t fundamentally about the photographer’s relationship with the camera, it’s about the photographer’s relationship with an audience. In other words, selfies are more parts communication than self-admiration (though there’s a healthy dose of that, too).

The vantage point isn’t new; the form of publishing is.

This explains why we call the photo from the Oscars “Ellen’s selfie” — because she was the one who published it. Selfies tether the photographer to the subject of the photo and to its distribution. What better way to visually represent the larger shift from observation to interaction in publishing power?

Ultimately, selfies are a way of communicating narrative autonomy. They demonstrate the agency of the person behind the lens, by simultaneously putting that person in front of it.

The key to the selfie is not that people are talking photos of themselves for the first time in history; rather, they are doing it with new purposes, to tell their own stories to their online public. This is what social media and Web 2.0 are all about: putting the power into the hands of users to create their own narratives. The user now gets to decide what they want to broadcast to others. One scholar described it giving average people the ability to be a celebrity within their online social sphere. The selfie is also part of a shift toward telling these narratives through images rather than words – think about the relative shift in updating Facebook statuses years ago to now posting interesting pictures on Instagram.

When a financially troubled suburb buys fake Twitter followers

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Fake Twitter followers are not just for celebrities and politicians: a company may have purchased fake Twitter followers for the Chicago suburb of Harvey as part of a social media campaign.

As of last month, the Twitter feed had just 25 followers seeking updates to its posts. After the Tribune asked Harvey about Lola Grand, that number jumped to nearly 1,200. Social media experts said the new followers had telltale signs of being fake accounts bought from online brokers, who sell bulk sets of “followers” to wannabe celebrities, politicians or entrepreneurs trying to appear popular.

For example, one of Harvey’s new Twitter followers was Lieni Alves, who hasn’t posted a Tweet in 19 months, and then it was in Portuguese. The account follows more than 1,700 people besides Harvey, including porn actresses, a Christian music company, Brazil’s president and a host of people who tweet in Arabic and Turkish.

StatusPeople, a London-based firm, created an oft-cited algorithm to count suspect accounts. That algorithm last week estimated that 88 percent of Harvey’s Twitter followers were fakes, a figure called “very unusual” by StatusPeople’s founder, Rob Waller…

Lola Grand declined to say how it boosted Twitter followers. It said it designed a website but is waiting for Harvey to review it before launching that and the blogs. It said its other social media efforts have directed “hundreds” of residents’ requests to Harvey officials. The firm and the mayor’s office touted additional behind-the-scenes work, such as “brand development” and “24/7 monitoring of social media channels.”

This looks bad for a community that is already struggling for cash. But, if everyone is doing it…

It also highlights a new form of civic boosterism. There is a long history of American communities talking up their advantages and trying to sell themselves to potential investors, businesses, and residents. Think the novel Babbitt. In the past, it may have been more about gregarious men working their good old boy networks but today this can include politicians sniping at other states (see these examples of Indiana, Wisconsin, and Texas seeking Illinois jobs), television and radio ads (lots of radio ads in the Chicago area for the city of Bedford Park for all of their available water and industrial space), and online spaces. This can include running Google ads, YouTube videos, and using Facebook and Twitter.

Microsoft hoping to sell lots of political ads on XBox Live, video games

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Ads in video games are not new but Microsoft is looking to use more recent technology and information to sell political ads in its online spaces:

Microsoft is trying to persuade politicians to take out targeted ads on Xbox Live, Skype, MSN and other company platforms as midterm elections begin heating up around the country. To plug the idea, Microsoft officials handed out promotional materials Thursday at CPAC, the annual conference for conservatives.

It’s the latest move by tech companies to seize a piece of the lucrative political ad market. The ads, which would appear on the Xbox Live dashboard and other Microsoft products, combine Microsoft user IDs and other public data to build a profile of Xbox users. Campaigns can then blast ads to selected demographic categories, or to specific congressional districts. And if the campaign brings its own list of voter e-mail addresses, Microsoft can match the additional data with individual customer accounts for even more accurate voter targeting.

The image of white male teens as the stereotypical average gamer is something of a myth; Microsoft says that of its 25 million Xbox Live subscribers in the United States, 38 percent are women. Forty percent are married, and more than half have children. Those numbers are important, because they represent key demographics that are among the most contested in political races. Microsoft is particularly aggressive in selling its ability to reach women, Latinos and millennials; across the company’s other platforms, such as MSN, Microsoft has developed consumer categories like “Ciudad Strivers” and “Nuevo Horizons” that attempt to describe a set of characteristics including age, type of residence and income level. At a time when virtually all politicians are resorting to microtargeting, this technology could help Microsoft become a major player in the advertising space…

Microsoft has made successful pitches to political campaigns before. In 2012, President Obama agreed to advertise on Xbox Live for his reelection campaign. The effort sparked some complaints among Xbox users who disliked the ad appearing on their dashboards. Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, meanwhile, opted not to participate. Obama has also advertised within games themselves. With the release last year of the Xbox One, it’s safe to expect Xbox Live to become another important platform in the political ad wars.

It will be interesting to see how users respond and then how effective such ads are. This shouldn’t be much of a surprise to users: we shouldn’t be surprised if we volunteer data online and then it is used for targeted ads. Plus, given the time people spend playing video games (particularly for demographics that might not be accessing more traditional media as much), this seems like a relatively untapped market compared to television. Yet, it is harder to argue this has many benefits for users. While some might argue targeted ads for consumer goods show people what they might want, what average XBox Live user wants to be presented with political content while trying to play a game?

Quicken Loans’ $1 billion bracket challenge set to find more mortgage customers

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Your odds of winning $1 billion from Quicken Loans for having a perfect NCAA bracket are really low – and the company will get great free data on potential mortgage customers.

To register for the contest, you have to sign up for a Yahoo account—a boon in itself for Yahoo, on whose site the contest is run. Then you’re asked to enter your name, address, email, birthday, and the answers to several questions about your home mortgage situation. All of this information goes to Quicken Loans, the fourth-largest mortgage-lender in the U.S.

It’s no coincidence that this information—where do you live? Do you want to buy a home? What’s your current mortgage rate?—is exactly what you need if you want to sell someone a home loan…

It’s not uncommon for companies like Quicken to pay between $50 and $300 for a single high-quality mortgage lead, Lykken says.

Quicken says the info-gathering is not intended for lead generation. Instead, the company says it’s building a base of relationships with people who may want home loans in the future. “The people that are playing the Billion Dollar Bracket kind of fit our demographic,” says Jay Farner, Quicken’s president and marketing chief. “But for the most part, unless they’ve opted in and said ‘please call me,’ it’s not a mortgage lead for us.”

This is the magic of the Internet for companies: users are willing to trade their information for some good. On Facebook, it is a trade of ongoing personal information for social interaction. In this bracket challenge, it is the trade of personal information for the chance to win both (1) $1 billion and (2) the ultimate bragging rights of having a completely correct bracket when millions of others couldn’t do it. Instead of having to make broad appeals to all consumers, companies can instead target specific consumers.

The argument in this article is that the particular trade here is not good for the average player: with the odds at “a 1 in 8,500 chance that anyone wins,” it is not worth giving up personal information. But, this is the sort of calculation that all Internet users must make all the time with all sorts of sites. Do I want to give up information about my music tastes to Spotify if they can use that to sell me targeted ads? What happens when Amazon gets information about hundreds of products I like? What if Google can see all of my searches? These trade-offs are harder to calculate and to avoid making them, the average user won’t be able to do much online.

“Save Darfur” social media campaign doesn’t accomplish much

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While social media is credited for helping the Arab Spring movement, social media movements don’t always succeed. Take the “Save Darfur” campaign as an example:

Focusing on the Save Darfur cause, which took Facebook by storm between May 2007 and January 2010, the team looked at the donation and recruitment activity of over one million members. Roughly 80 percent of the members joined via a referral, whereas only 20 percent joined of their own accord.Furthermore, of the one million-plus members, 99.76 percent failed to ever actually donate any money. 72.19 percent didn’t recruit anyone else, entirely missing one of the main advantages of online activism: the ability to reach out to a very large and connected audience…

“The study is an important counter-balance to unbridled enthusiasm for the powers of social media,” said UC San Diego’s Lewis. “There’s no inherent magic. Social media can activate interpersonal ties but won’t necessarily turn ordinary citizens into hyper-activists.”…

The research was published in Sociological Science and was co-authored by Kevin Lewis, of the University of California, San Diego’s department of sociology, Kurt Gray of the department of psychology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and Jens Meierhenrich, department of international relations, London School of Economics.

The advantage of social media for social movements is that it is easier to attract attention. Information can spread quickly and social movements can become popular things to support. The catch, however, is one that always seems to plague modern social movements: once people are informed, how exactly can they be convinced to actually act? Social media makes the bar for joining online quite low but that doesn’t translate into much physical action. Another example is the Kony 2012 campaign: lots of attention and views but limited follow-through.

Perhaps the difference between Save Darfur and the Arab Spring is that physical action was already occurring in places like Tunisia and Egypt and social media helped fan the flames. But, starting everything through social media is a tall order.

Smart highway features coming to two Chicago highways

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A stretch of I-90 will be a “smart highway” within several years:

By 2016, the Tollway plans to install an elaborate system of sensors, cameras and overhead signs on a heavily traveled stretch of the Jane Addams Memorial Tollway (Interstate 90) between the Kennedy Expressway and Barrington Road in Hoffman Estates.

The plan is similar to, but more sophisticated than, a $45 million initiative that the Illinois Department of Transportation will implement during the next two years along the Edens Expressway and the northern stretch of U.S. Highway 41.

The Tollway plan includes installing signs with red and green signals over each lane at every half-mile that would advise motorists about safe speeds and warn of lane closings from accidents or breakdowns…

The goal is to make the Addams, which handles about 317,000 vehicles a day, “a true 21st-century, state-of-the-art corridor,” Tollway officials say.

The fiber optics and other infrastructure being installed on the soon-to-be rebuilt stretch of tollway will be able to accommodate even more sophisticated technology, which might someday automatically drive cars, officials say…

Tollway officials said Washington state’s experience with ATM has been compelling. The system is in use on I-5 in Seattle and on I-90 and State Route 520 between Seattle and Bellevue, and since 2010, the Seattle area has seen an 11 percent decrease in primary accidents and a 40 to 50 percent decrease in secondary accidents, officials said.

While highways in the United States are an engineering marvel, the lack of information about conditions on them has always struck me as a bit odd. It sounds like this new system is intended to provide information for two main purposes: warn people of upcoming obstacles which could then lead to fewer accidents and also to tell people of slower travel times so they can then make decisions about what roads to use.

Up to this point, motorists have been limited to varying levels of information:

1. You see what is front of you. Sometimes, you can spot some of these problems a long way away and get off sooner. But, too often, the line of sight is blocked and before you know it you are in a slow stretch without any alternatives.

2. Traffic reports on the radio. The veracity of these reports can vary.

3. Traffic data now available on GPS and smartphones. These seem to be generally accurate.

4. Cameras along heavily traveled routes. For example, see this set of images from cameras along I-80/94 at the bottom of Lake Michigan. This is more useful these days with smartphones.

Of course, this article also hints that this may just help set up the infrastructure to have completely smart cars where all of the information may be wirelessly passed between cars and limit the human dimension all together.