Facebook patents recommendations from contact lists

The USPTO awarded Facebook US Patent 9,338,250, titled "Associating received contact information with user profiles stored by a social networking system" (inventors: Michael Hudack, Christopher Turitzin; Edward Baker; Hao Xu). The patent covers the now standard feature in many social networks, both consumer and professional, where the system finds potential connections in your imported contact list and recommends adding a person who is currently not in your network.

From an innovation methodology perspective, the invention solves a typical problem that arises when users need to be migrated from an old technology space into a new one. In the System model, an effective solution improves scalability, by dramatically reducing costs of adding Sources and Tools during the synthesis phase.

tags: facebook, innovation, invention, patent, social, networking, synthesis

Predicting smartphone addiction in kids

A study of South Korean elementary school kids has found that stress and lack of self-control are the strongest predictors of the "smartphone" addiction. Although the device to deliver the addiction is the smartphone, the real hooks for the addiction are Social Networking (SNS) and entertainment services (via BBC news).

Since the mobile has become a dominant platform for delivering entertainment services, in a period of two generations we can expect a migration of television advertisement money into online services. The TV and the web are going to go into oblivion like the newsprint. We can also expect that Twitter will not catch up with Facebook or other major SNS'.

Also, it appears that the humanity is running a large-scale Stanford Marshmallow Experiment, dividing kids into those who can exert self–control and those who cannot. 

The first follow-up study, in 1988, showed that "preschool children who delayed gratification longer in the self-imposed delay paradigm, were described more than 10 years later by their parents as adolescents who were significantly more competent."
A second follow-up study, in 1990, showed that the ability to delay gratification also correlated with higher SATscores.^[5]

From an innovation theory perspective, the smartphone represents the Dominant Design, while online services - the Dominant Use.

Lunch Talk: Robert Shiller on Innovation in Financial Markets

Recognized as one of the most far-seeing political economists of our time, Robert Shiller is known the world over for his brilliant forecasts of financial bubbles and his penetrating insight into market dynamics and how human psychology drives the economy. For his empirical analysis of asset prices, Robert was awarded the 2013 Nobel Prize in Economics.



tags: innovation, finance, lunchtalk, networking, money

Smartphone: the greatest personal device ever?

According to Gallup, more and more people can't imagine their life without their smartphone:

The device has become our ultimate interface into the world of social interactions and productivity. It's hard to find in the history of technology a device that is more personal than that. Adding more devices to one's personal network is likely to increase our dependance on the smartphone.

tags: invention, innovation, mobile, interface, social, biology, networking, psychology

Facebook patents video messaging (again!) US 9,071,725

Facebook continues to mine successfully the AOL patent portfolio the company acquired from Microsoft. On June 30, 2015 the United States Patent Office issued US 9,071,725 titled "Methods and user interfaces for video messaging."

The patent dates back to U.S. provisional application No. 60/220,648, filed Jul. 25, 2000. (15 years in prosecution!). The application has already resulted in two good patents – US 8,087,678 and US 7,984,098. The new Facebook claims cover a concurrent video and text interactions between two computing devices, including mobiles (See claim 7).

This is a broad, strong patent that possibly reads on many existing video systems, including Skype, Google Hangouts, Snapchat, etc.

tags: patent, facebook, mobile, video, social, networking

NY Times picking your friends' noses

"You can pick your friends, you can pick your nose, but you can't pick your friends' noses," so an old saying goes. This notion has become largely obsolete in the age of social networking. For example, when you sign up with your Facebook account on a popular website they typically get not only your public profile, but also your friend list.

Imagine now doing real business, e.g. making a purchase or contacting customer service, using your social networking profile as a login. For the price of the transaction the other party gets access to your entire social graph, which (with a little bit of triangulation through other customer logins) provides an incredible wealth of marketing information. As a result, you give up a large chunk of your privacy for free, without even being aware of it.

We used to think about privacy as a trade-off: you get access to free content by giving up your right to stay anonymous, i.e. providing the content distributor with the information about what kind of content you like to read. If the current trend continues, people will be giving away for free not only their own privacy, but also their friends' privacy too.

tags: trade-off, trend, social, networking, composite actor, privacy, internet

Scalable Innovation - a quiz (Session 2-2). Social Networking.

1. What trends can be identified in this Venture Beat article about Mark Zuckerberg's predictions?

2. Name major technology innovations that power the trends you've identified.

Examples of trend categories:

- Business
- Technology
- Science
- Finance
- Demographics
- Social
- Market
- Regulatory
etc...

Linking users and concepts - a Facebook patent

Facebook continues building up a strong patent portfolio for graph-based technologies. On January 6, 2015 the USPTO awarded the company US 8,930,378 patent on a social-like network between users and concepts. The patent is titled "Labeling samples in a similarity graph", inventors Pierre Moreels and Andrei Alexandrescu.

On the figure above, circles with Us in them mean users and circles with city names mean concepts. The dotted lines show a calculated confidence level that a particular concept is "linked" to a user who is not connected to it directly.
Since the concept can describe anything in the real as well as abstract world, Facebook patented a technology that figures out the user's connection to objects, places, and other stuff based on the user's social connections.

For completeness, here's Claim 1 (click to enlarge):

The claim looks very clever, but it's hard to believe that the idea has not been covered in the prior art. Detecting infringement of the patent would also be quite difficult because an accused piece of software would be embedded deep down in the guts of a server-based implementation.

tags: patent, facebook, graph, social, networking, internet, portfolio

Facebook patents a tech to provide socially relevant ads - US 8,924,406

On December 30, 2014 the United States Patent Office awarded Facebook a patent titled "Ranking search results using social-networking information" US 8,924,406 ( Inventors: Christopher Lunt, Nicholas Galbreath, Jeffrey Winner).

The patent covers a technology that provides a new way to determine relevant ads and/or additional content shown to the user along the search results. According to the invention, a search engine takes into account the popularity of sponsored links associated with the results. The popularity is calculated based on clicks in the user's social network and a social relevancy threshold (degrees of separation).

From a business perspective, Facebook continues strengthening its challenge to the Google "relevant ads" model created in the early 2000s. Today, some of you may already see sponsored relevant links inserted in your Facebook stream or page. The patent would be a good illustration to the brief discussion "GOOGLE VERSUS FACEBOOK: THE BATTLE FOR THE CONTROL" Max and I outlined in Chapter 22 of our book Scalable Innovation.

Another interesting aspect of the patent: it shows the brave new "Me-centric" world of social networking (see Fig 1 above). From a technical and business perspective it indicates a large-scale transition from relational (excel-like rows and columns) representations of data to a graph-based one, with nodes and edges. The patent also provides a good working definition of a social network:

the social-networking system comprising a graph that comprises a plurality of nodes and edges connecting the nodes, each edge between two nodes representing a relationship between them and establishing a single degree of separation between them, wherein the first user corresponds to a first node of the graph.

tags: patent, facebook, innovation, invention, social, networking, search, control, internet

Facebook patents user tracking for advertisers and content providers

Today, August 19, 2014, USPTO awarded Facebook patent 8,812,591 titled Social networking system data exchange (Inventors: Kent Schoen and Gokul Rajaram)

The patent covers a technology that tracks users across multiple service providers by matching service provider ID and social network ID. The match results in an aggregated user profile that determines user eligibility for content and ad targeting. The system uses a tracking pixel instead of the web cookie, which makes it suitable for mobile applications.

The technology breaks the wall between different publishers with regard to what they know about the user. As the patent says:

...a publisher may know very limited information about a user visiting the publisher's web page or the publisher's application. Thus, a publisher is unable to effectively target content item and advertisements to the user based on the user's interests and characteristics. The exchange server aggregates a user's information from several sources, including a social networking system, publishers, retailers, content item providers, etc.
The exchange server matches advertisements to users based on whether users' characteristics as provided by the aggregated social graph match the advertisements' targeting criteria. Additionally, the exchange server selects one or more advertisements to display to the user based on expected revenue to be generated from displaying the advertisement to the user.

tags: patent, invention, innovation, facebook, social, networking, graph, content

Facebook US Patent 8,627,506: a blunder or strategic omission?

The vagueness of Facebook patent claims keeps surprising me. Take, for example, their latest one: US 8,627,506 "Providing privacy settings for applications associated with a user profile," (Inventors: Nico Vera, James Wang, Arieh Steinberg, Chris Kelly, and Adam D'Angelo).

The patent is supposed to cover a transfer of user private information to third party apps based on friendship relationships (social graph) in a social networking system. I wanted to use the invention to illustrate the concept of "aboutness" in our system model (Scalable Innovation, Chapter 5).

Even a brief system analysis of the claims shows that the third party app does not provide any definite information about the second user to the social networking system, i.e. a key "aboutness" element is simply missing. Only in claim 4 we find a vague statement about a second user "who is connected to the [first] user in the social networking system." We don't know the nature of the connection, nor the degree of connectedness. Maybe she is a direct connection, or maybe she is one of the billion people on Facebook. Who knows...

Since the social networking system doesn't know much about the second user, it can either give out all private data or no data at all. In short, according to the patent, where third party apps are concerned privacy is non-existent; the apps are entitled to receive the first user's entire social graph. Using this graph, they can fish for other users' social graphs, and so on.

Let's give the patent the benefit of the doubt and assume that it tries to cover a minimally useful configuration with no privacy. Then, there should be at least one dependent claim that describes what information about the second user is required to determine the amount of private data transferred to a third-party app. Unfortunately, no such claim exists in the patent.

Some people believe that such vagueness — they often confuse it with broadness — is harmless. But is it? Imagine that a patent troll looks up Facebook patent applications when they are just published and files a patent application that covers a scenario with a more specific privacy information exchange. When the troll gets its patent issued, it can sue Facebook for damages because in a real social networking system specific "aboutness" for the second user has to be exchanged to determine privacy boundaries. As a result, Facebook is going to be rightfully punished for sloppiness and vagueness in its patent portfolio.

Complaining about trolls and software patents is easy. Getting your patent house in order is more difficult.

tags: system, aboutness, patent, invention, social, networking

Logical Reasoning: Twitter popularity numbers

According to @Mediabistro, the current popularity ratings for individuals look like this:

Find a name that DOES NOT belong with the others.

tags: media, aboutness, logic, social, networking

Separating self from Facebook

CNet runs a story about people getting tired of Facebook:

A majority of Facebook users, or 69 percent, say they plan to spend the same amount of time on the site this year, but more than a quarter, or 27 percent, say they will spend less time on Facebook this year.

Will Facebook follow the typical boom-to-bust pattern for all new games? Will it be different for LinkedIn and other social networking services?

tags: social, networking, creativity, trend, facebook

The Web is Dead, a social media edition.

(San Francisco. Jan 30, 2012) Facebook Inc. said its mobile daily active users exceeded its desktop daily active users for the first time in the fourth quarter of 2012.

The trend hasn't touched the enterprise world that much yet - a huge technology opportunity.

P.S. VentureBeat and Yahoo Mail web pages are the worst browser hogs ever. The pages contain sloppy scripts and flash widgets that pull data constantly, even when the the page is not visible in the tab view.

tags: s-curve, internet, web, mobile, social, networking

Online tracking: social networking vs analytics

Hi-tech websites seem to use a lot more social networking tracking than business sites (figs below). For example, wired, VBeat, Cnet and other tech-oriented content services are more geared toward generating "buzz", while biz sites use good old spying techniques to sell ads.

 

Tracking on wired.com

(all four major social networks present)

 Tracking on bloomberg.com

(no social tracking but extensive analytic  data collected)

tags: technology, media, control, detection, social, networking, business, model

Social Networking: a Bubblecovery?

An interesting perspective on social media's economic impact:

...the social media bubble has played a very important role in the U.S.' post-2009 "bubblecovery" or bubble-driven economic recovery. The social media bubble has helped to create nearly 500,000 U.S. jobs in recent years (a very high percentage of newly-created jobs) and has helped to launch a housing and commercial real estate recovery in hard-hit San Francisco and parts of New York City. The social media bubble has contributed to an explosion in post-2009 entrepreneurial activity, with the number of startup incubators tripling from 2009 to 2011. The social media bubble is also important, because it has been one of the few glimmers of economic hope that many Americans have had in recent years, especially for young aspiring-professionals who see few other appealing career options (1, 2, 3).

The recent election cycle may have contributed to the expansion because politicians of all parties embraced social media as a vehicle for delivering their messages. It's a relatively easy task to influence one's vote (i.e. to "buy" a political preference) through online tracking and ad targeting because the vote is free for the person to give. A harder task would be to convince one to buy a product or service online when s/he has to part with real money. Even Zynga with its freemium business model is having trouble.

tags: distribution, cycle, social, networking, business, advertisement

Facebook patents, July 2012.

	PAT. NO.		Title
1	8,230,046		Setting cookies in conjunction with phased delivery of structured documents
2	8,225,376		Dynamically generating a privacy summary
3	8,224,716		Methods and systems for facilitating the provision of opinions to a shopper from a panel of peers
4	8,219,562		Efficient storage and retrieval for large number of data objects
5	8,219,500		System and method for managing information flow between members of an online social network
6	8,214,457		Post-to-profile control
7	8,213,924		Providing distributed online services for mobile devices

#5 on the list looks most interesting. The original patent application was filed in May, 2004!
It's a good illustration that, in system terms, Facebook represents an instance of Distribution and Control.


tags: patent, facebook, example, social, networking, distribution, control

Teens flock to Instagram/Facebook. Youtube next?

(Sept. 8, 2012. CNet) According to Nielsen, Instagram is the top photography site among teens ages 12 to 17, with 1 million teens visiting the site during July.
Also, a Pew report presented over the summer about teenage online behavior found that 45 percent of online 12-year-olds use social-network sites and that the number doubles to 82 percent for 13-year-old Internet users. The most popular activity for teens on social networks is posting photos and videos, the study found.

10 years ago, the conventional wisdom was that mothers of small children were the most avid picture-takers.  Kodak, HP, and others spent billions of dollars marketing to this demographic. Furthermore, when digital cameras emerged, the old guard saw an increase in picture printing revenues because people took more pictures and, out of habit, printed them. The entire business model was based on the trade-off: the more pictures one wanted to share, the more money she had to spend on printing them.

On the other hand, social networking and cheap mobile cameras broke the trade-off. That is, taking/sharing pictures became free and teenagers could finally afford an infinite amount of sharing. As the result, Kodak went out of business and HP's printing division tanked. At the same time, Facebook and Instagram soared.

A similar situation happened in the personal video space. Sony and other consumer electronic companies lost, while Youtube and Facebook won. If Google continues its momentum with Android (driving video content to Youtube), they might capture a large portion of ad revenue associated with social interaction.

tags: s-curve, trade-off, media, facebook, social, networking, google

Lunch Talk: BBC - The Human Mind (part 3).

How the brain works to relate to other people.

link

tags: lunchtalk, brain, social, networking 

Predicting people's future locations with mobile data.

MIT Tech Review reports on an algorithm that allows mobile tracking systems to predict our future locations:

Beyond merely tracking where you've been and where you are, your smartphone might soon actually know where you are going—in part by recording what your friends do.

Researchers in the U.K. have come up with an algorithm that follows your own mobility patterns and adjusts for anomalies by factoring in the patterns of people in your social group (defined as people who are mutual contacts on each other's smartphones).

The method is remarkably accurate. In a study on 200 people willing to be tracked, the system was, on average, less than 20 meters off when it predicted where any given person would be 24 hours later. The average error was 1,000 meters when the same system tried to predict a person's direction using only that person's past movements and not also those of his friends, says Mirco Musolesi, a computer scientist at the University of Birmingham who led the study.

 From a philosophical point of view, in a dense social network one's freedom of the will seems to be quite limited.

tags: social, networking, mobile, detection, control, aboutness