I have been particularly interested in how to search the collective consciousness and also in how we can mine these information flows for sentiment (tip: it’s not an easy task!) especially since they are all becoming realtime now.
There is a huge amount of activity in the social web profile analytics space right now because this is the first time people have had access to such an enormous amount of detailed realtime data. In the past, researchers had to spend most of their time collecting data so that they can analyse it, but with the social web we are publishing so much information that the focus can shift to how we filter that data.
When Marshall Kirkpatrick from Read Write Web recently asked Kevin Marshall from Wow.ly what he thought about Twitter giving everyone access to the realtime message stream, he gave a very interesting response:
“The more I do with and around social data, the less interested I seem to become in ‘realtime’ and the more interested I become in ‘over time.’ When I first started hacking on Twitter (and Facebook) apps, I was in love with the idea of parsing and analyzing data in real-time and I was very link/content focused. But the more I build and use these tools, the more I see the value in the history and the trails of the data set – especially when you consider that we are all living in a more asynchronous world then ever before thanks to things like blogs, Tivo, Hulu, iTunes, and other media-on-demand stuff. I don’t think it’s really so much about ‘what are you doing right now’ as it is ‘what have you done that’s interesting to me right now?’… and I think you get that by aggregating and analyzing.”
What have you done that’s interesting to me right now? – bingo. Until now we haven’t had enough data to be able to answer questions like that, but it is quickly becoming available to everyone. One of Google’s major advantages in the market so far has been the sheer amount of data they have access to, and that has given them a huge head start in this space – but now everyone else is rapidly catching up and that means very good things are ahead for users.
The answers are coming.
465 views, since being posted during April 2010.
@rosshill me on Twitter or email me to comment about this page. Keep reading?
