Google+ tagline

“Google+: real life sharing, rethought for the web. Google+ aims to make sharing on the web more like sharing in real life.”

What exactly does Google expect me to share offline that translates to the Google+ online environment? Offline I share paperclips, tea, t-shirts, online I share links. I am just trying to grasp this tagline. It doesn’t make any more sense in Dutch “Het doel van Google+ is om delen op internet meer te laten lijken op delen in het echte leven.” I don’t share “friends” offline. Nor do I share articles by photocopying them for my colleagues but maybe I’m just a selfish person offline.

1. Get all movies categorized with “Vampire” from IMDB and sort by release date: http://www.imdb.com/keyword/vampire/?title_type=feature&sort=release_date
2. Copy paste all 758 titles to a spreadsheet
3. Import spreadsheet in Google Refine
4. Search for all dates and note down number of movies per year in a spreadsheet
5. Visualize spreadsheet using Google Docs

Absolute number of movies from 1916-2011 labelled with "vampire" by IMDB

The image shows the absolute number of movies tagged with keyword “Vampire” from 1916-2011 with, interestingly enough, a few releases during World World II, a growth in the early seventies and a big peak in 2009. It would be great to normalize the data with the total number of movies released that year but I do not seem to be able to find that data in IMDB. For example: “Number of movies released in 2009.” If anyone has an idea on how to approach that, please feel free to leave suggestions in the comments :)

Please note that these are not necessarily all vampire movies but movies labelled with the keyword “vampire.” The small exercise served as a good recommendation filter as well because I found a Pedro Almodóvar movie I have not seen yet. Los Abrazos Rotos (2009) is not a movie about vampires but contains several references to vampires. Feel free to work with the spreadsheet, there might be more interesting things in there.

UPDATE
Thanks to Breyten (see comments) I was able to get the total number of movies per year in the IMDB to calculate the relative number of labelled vampire per year. The seventies are back! :)

Relative number of movies from 1916-2011 labelled with "vampire" by IMDB

While we are used to skim through the results for the most relevant results, the social buttons produce an artifact that disrupts the search index. A result titled “Is VTP a proprietary protocol of CISCO?” is the fifth, unrelevant, result and is only shown due to the fact that they are using a Facebook social button on their website.The social buttons are flooding the index with keywords such as Facebook, Twitter, Share, Add that as a side-effect of sharing technologies. Because of the high penetration of social buttons this may also disrupt research practices on the web.

The following example shows what happens when you search for the keywords Facebook homosexuality in Google Scholar.

None of the shown results are relevant for my query and are shown because of a Facebook social button on their website. Social buttons are producing an artifact that disrupts search.

Summify renames http://scripting.com/stories/2011/09/24/facebookIsScaringMe.html into http://summify.com/story/Tn3zdo3fhyiIAD6A/scripting.com/stories/2011/09/24/facebookIsScaringMe.html

By rerouting all hyperlinks through their service they are able to gather statistics on shared stories and track how many times a story has been tweeted, liked and shared, and of course, clicked, which is not visible to users but to Summify only. They are creating data-rich links because the link does not only refer to the location of the source on the web but also carries quantitative metadata and possible affective metadata, think for example of the possible new Facebook intentions of ToRead and Want. Short-url services such as Bit.ly operate on the same principle: By transforming hyperlinks they are creating short but data-rich links.

What bothers me, as a researcher, is how this framing of the sharable web may break hyperlink analysis and affect research.

Look for example at the LinkedIn digest which provides me with the “Top Headlines in Internet, Online Media.” LinkedIn also renames the headlines’ URLs into LinkedIn URLs and presents these headlines in a frame with a LinkedIn toolbar on top.

LinkedIn toolbar and frame

Because LinkedIn renamed the original URL into a data-rich LinkedIn URL, this is the URL we will now be working with, whatever action follows next. This seems disastrous, not only for services such as Delicious, but also for researchers because the original URL will now also be saved (and possibly shared) as a LinkedIn URL, a Summify URL, or any other service that renames URLs. I am a URL purist and I want to save and share the original URL and not a renamed URL but many users will simply share or save the URL they are presented with. This means that tracking the original URL is no longer sufficient for analysis if the URL is also shared and saved as different URLs.

On top of that the LinkedIn URL is either badly formatted or Delicious is not able to interpret it correctly. In any case, attempting to save an article I discovered trough the LinkedIn digest to Delicious is impossible as it attempts to save the generic “http://www.linkedin.com/news?actionBar=”.

Failed attempt to save a bookmark on Delicious

Finally, some websites such as the New York Times do not allow their content to embedded within (social-sharing) frames which breaks the user-experience:

Should I be worried as a URL purist and researcher about social sharing sites and short URL services renaming URLs?

This post is part of a larger series that looks into the status of the hyperlink in Web 2.0.

Mark Zuckerberg describes how your Facebook profile acts as a five minute introduction when you meet someone and you share your common demographics such as your name, age, job and interests with them. The Facebook stream represents the next 15 minutes where you slowly get to know someone by seeing what they share and like. Facebook introduces the Timeline as the new heart of the Facebook experience to tell the story of your life by gathering all your stories, all your apps and all your activities in a new place as a new way to express who you are.

Curating your life
Facebook Timeline taps into two big webtrends: Documenting the self and the curation of stories (eg Storify). In ‘Identity 2.0: Constructing identity with cultural software‘ I depict a historical account of the documentation of the self from ping messages to personal homepages, to blogs to social network profiles to lifestream platforms. Now Facebook wants to become the new central player for documenting and curating your lifestory. Facebook wants to be the database to store your life. It aims to provide a place that feels like home where you can highlight and curate all your stories to express who you are.

Your life was previously documented on your wall, the News Feed, but it provides a very fleeting type of documentation where old content is only accessible by infinitely scrolling down. Content and activities in the Timeline, on the other hand, are neatly organized per year or filtered by content type. Activities are presented in reports and a summary of what you’ve done is deemed to be more relevant than all things you have done. These reports, or summaries, provide quantified overviews of your activities which may be capitalized on by Facebook.

Timeline is not a new concept, the documentation of the self is reminiscent of the ‘old’ Microsoft MyLifeBits project which in itself is based on Vannevar Bush’s 1945 Memex:

MylifeBits is a lifetime store of everything. It is the fulfillment of Vannevar Bush’s 1945 Memex vision including full-text search, text & audio annotations, and hyperlinks. (Microsoft)

Re-centralisation of the self
Whereas MylifeBits documented produced content and aimed to interlink it, the Timeline is a “re-centralisation of the self” (Carolin Gerlitz). It recentralizes all content and activities performed on external content through the Facebook platform using the Open Graph API (Helmond and Gerlitz 2011). While activities for Facebook were previously confined to Liking and Sharing the Timeline opens up for new applications and new activities. A smart move is that Facebook is now re-centralizing all “quantified self” apps through its platform. During the F8 keynote the example of the Social Running app is shown and Facebook will now know how many times a week you run and how far. While quantified self apps are often used to document and evaluate the self in private Facebook will now open up this trend to more public sharing with your friends.