Eric Gilbert and Karrie Karahalios of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have begun to study how social media can be used to predict tie strength in a sample of 2,184 Facebook relationships:

They asked 35 people to rate a number of their Facebook friends that were randomly selected. Then they looked at the Facebook behavior of these people to see if could accurate predict the strength of their ties as reported by the participants. Dimensions such as the use of words associated with intimacy and intensity, duration of communication, social distance, and other factors were looked at for their predictive power. The complete set of variables was combined to form the predictive model that worked in 85% of the instances.

The authors used 74 predictive variables, spanning connection intensity, intimacy, duration, reciprocal services, structure, emotional support, social distance, demographics, and usage: Continue Reading…

It’s the Social Media Roundup, and I’m just bitter I didn’t get to go to sunny Austin.

…because if I had, I may have been part of the world’s longest live-streamed crowd surf.

SXSWhatever

So once more, the nation’s geeks, nerds, and wannadorks gathered in Austin, TX this week for a meeting of the memes at SXSWi.  But there was no joy in Mudville; this year it was different.  Folks fled the Twitter keynote interview in droves, and generally had a lousy time.  Except all these happy, smiling people.  Pay no attention to them.

It’s our page, we set the rules, it was ever thus

Nestle heard from their Facebook fans today.  A fairly innocent, though perhaps heavy-handed trademark-defending request turned ugly, and the page administrator handled it rather poorly.  Twitter mobs, to arms!

YouTube goes all Marty McFly

Yes, I’m a metrics guy.  But sometimes the math just gets a bit wonky.  For instance, YouTube announced this week that users are uploading 24 hours of content to the vid-sharing service every single minute. One day every 60 seconds. I envision servers run by tiny Deloreans with tinier Mr. Fusions to power it all.  I have an active imagination.

We like our social media, but we have to find it first

A couple of studies out this week shed new light on where social media fits in the average person’s day-to-day.  The BBC, for instance, tells us that search sites take the largest chunk of traffic among the top 100 sites on the Internet, with social networks and blogs much lower.  But when we find them, we sure are hooked.  Retrevo reports that roughly half of us are tweeting after bedtime, and a quarter of respondents under 25 have no problem texting from the toilet.  I’m a little grossed-out just typing that.

A newly-announced service from Twitter, called @anywhere, will eventually allow people to add the Twitter experience to any website:

Imagine being able to follow a New York Times journalist directly from her byline, tweet about a video without leaving YouTube, and discover new Twitter accounts while visiting the Yahoo! home page—and that’s just the beginning.

The service will debut on several major web destinations, including Amazon, AdAge, Bing, Citysearch, Digg, eBay, The Huffington Post, Meebo, MSNBC.com, The New York Times, Salesforce.com, Yahoo!, and YouTube.

See ya later February. It’s March. Here is the first Roundup of the month.

OK Go! Video

And you thought setting up a game of Dominoes with your old CD collection was tricky. OK Go! released another stunning video this week that very quickly went viral. It currently has nearly 3.5 million hits and friends have shared the video with me about a dozen times. It’s embeddable against their record labels policy <tsk, tsk> and features one of the most fantastic Rube Goldberg Machines ever. A convoluted way of saying ‘you can’t stop us from sharing!’?

Social Media Policy Tool

For those who need rules or at least need to set some up for others, look no further. Web design and development company rtraction has created a tool to get you started– and quickly. With the tagline ‘Need a policy? Need it quick? Get started today.’ You should be set up in no time.

Wave? What Wave? Google Wave.

Oh, that Wave. I know, I sometimes forget about too. But not anymore. The company more famous for updates than Courtney Love’s Twitter has introduced email notifications for their useful but sometimes forgotten service, Wave. Now we’ll all remember to use Google Wave until it becomes habit like those other social sites we know and love.

Social Media in the Classroom

If your grandparents are still bugging you about ‘playing with social media’, tell them to check out this video from the University of Texas at Dallas where one prof has made Twitter a huge part of the classroom calling it, The Twitter Experiment. One student has even ditched his laptop for a phone because who needs paragraphs or even sentences? 140 characters or less, right? If only collaboration hadn’t been called cheating when I was in school.