Demography of Facebook

Facebook demographics of 2011 has been revealed. The figures are interesting to look at :

Facebook is giving more control of personal data

Facebook is going to give a functionality to download personal data such as pictures, videos, comments etc. It is very exiting and personally I feel that it is a good option to have. Let's watch the video how it works :

Facebook will remain free !

I have been noticing many rumors in Facebook that its users have to pay for using its services. Many Facebook groups are therefore made for free Facebook campaign. Today I read an article (available here ), which gives solid reasons why Facebook will not take fees for its basic services. I liked the logics and facts in the article and I'm going to share the points here:

• Why do people worry Facebook might start charging soon? Probably because Facebook users feel like they're getting something valuable for free, and everybody knows there's no such thing as a free lunch.
• How Facebook survives ? Because Facebook makes its money bringing together as big of an audience as possible and then selling that audience's attention to advertisers. It's a business that works.  
• What happens if Facebook is not free ?  If Facebook started charging users, its membership would start shrinking fast -- and so would its revenues. So while Facebook may charge you for certain bonus features, such as gifts for your friends, or credits to play games like Farmville, it will never charge for basic access to the site.
• Facebook is not free but sponsored ! - The fact that you keep coming back to Facebook makes it easier for Facebook to sell more ads -- and make more money. Your lunch isn't free, it's sponsored.

Real-time web search

I loved this article because it provided me an information about real-time web searching which is at its infancy. Real-time web searching means searching the real time content. For example, if a great politician dies, people generate content exponentially. Providing relevant information in real time is not so easy. Here I'm listing some of the points that I liked in the article.

• Now a delay of minutes on a breaking news story is unacceptable
• Real-time search starts by determining that something important is happening in, well, real time.
• Real-time search today is in its infancy, but it's the next stage in the evolution of Internet search.
• RT Searching should address how can the explosion of instant content produced by news organizations, blogs, and social-media users be organized so that results can be provided instantly
• what is "real-time" content?: -it centers on the concept of microblogging, or instant publishing of content to the open Web from social-media services. But in practice, "real-time search is still primarily Twitter search
• two components to real-time information: the actual content of the status update or post, and the link that is being shared within that update.
• Why web search providers want to buy Twitter's 'Firehouse' ?... Why spend the money? It's simply too difficult to crawl Twitter the way traditional search engines crawl the Web. All three major search engines (Y,G,B) at this point have inked deals to have Twitter push its content directly to them, saving those companies (and Twitter) time, energy, and money.
• deadlines are dead in the real-time world.
• So if search engines are to remain relevant themselves, they'll need to make sense of this content. And unless social-media networks are able to make their content discoverable, they won't turn into the types of content-discovery engines that their public-relations people like to imagine are already here.
• Expect the importance of real-time search to only grow over the next several years. For example, Yahoo's search deal with Microsoft does not include real-time indexing and ranking efforts, as the company believes that it's too important to give away.

Interesting Links:

• Oneriot.com - Assumes that the content based on on the premise that the link being shared within the status update is more relevant than the message itself.
• Wowd.com - An example search engine of real-time web searching

Digg: Social News Website

Digg is a social news website where people share links and stories. Each registered user can vote and comment on the shared items. The contents are ordered based on the user's voting: the more people vote, the higher its ranking will be. Wikipedia mentions that social networking website are motivated by Digg's idea of sharing and voting features.

Freebase - an open database of world's information

Recently, I watched a one hour long video about Freebase,  an open database of the world’s information, built by a global community and free for anyone to query, contribute to, and build applications on. Drawing from large open data sets like Wikipedia, MusicBrainz, GNIS, EDGAR etc., Freebase is curated by a passionate community of users and contains structured information on millions of topics such as people, places, music, film, food, science, historical events, and more.

Freebase is designed to store the amorphous kind of data that you find in everyday life. To store data about the prolific Bob Dylan --who composed songs, sang and performed, wrote books, acted in movies-- which relational table should we use? The "song composer" table, or the "singer" table, or the "book author" table, or the "film actor" table? The answer is that we need to store data about that same person in all those different tables. This complexity is not limited to prolific people; a building could start out as a church, be turned into a hospital during a war, and later become a tourist destination. The apple is a fruit, but also an ingredient in numerous recipes, the logo of a company, and a literary device in the story of Snow White.

What's more? Those million topics are very intricately connected. A certain politician might have run a campaign funded by a pharmaceutical company, whose board consists of some people who used to study at some particular Ivy League schools. Topics in different domains (politics, business, education, etc.) are linked together, spanning across virtually any combination of tables. Real life is intricately interconnected, and so is Freebase data.

Freebase is not only a web site that people can use directly with their browsers, but it's also a collection of web services that your own web applications can use to achieve things that wouldn't be possible without additional data or a hosting platform where you can develop and run securely your web applications directly in Freebase's own server infrastructure.

Quick Links:

1. APIs
2. Query Editor

Delicious - A Social Bookmarking System

World is amazing because of web which is amazing because of amazing ideas that have been producing amazing applications for free ! One of the amazing applications is Delicious which is a Social Bookmarking service, which means we can save all our bookmarks online, share them with other people, and see what other people are bookmarking. It also means that it can show us the most popular bookmarks being saved right now across many areas of interest. In addition, their search and tagging tools help us keep track of our entire bookmark collection and find tasty new bookmarks from people like us !

It has APIs available to add, edit, delete and to do many more with the bookmarks. Tutorials of using APIs are available here.

Definition: Feed distillation task

The task of identifying the most relevant feed for a given topic or query term is  known as the “feed distillation task”.

How is blogosphere growing ?

According to some estimates, “the size of the Blogosphere continues to double every six months” and there are over seventy million blogs (with many that are actively posting). However, some studies indicate that of all these blogs and feeds, the ones that really matter are relatively few.