Twitter in action: Reports Amsterdam plane crash supposedly 15 minutes earlier than traditional media

When I woke up this morning, my Twitter contacts had just started to report about the plane crash in Amsterdam – the news pages I check only had one line of breaking news, but no full coverage. The #schiphol hash tag was bursting with quick messages; a Google Mash-up popped up with the exact location and distance to the runway, Twitterfall is even after a few hours still interesting to follow, citizen journalists have their five minutes of fame (@nipp reported directly from the scene and went from a handfull of followers to several hundred of followers within an hour). A lot of this reminds me of the  Hudson river landing a few weeks ago: the first picture of the plane in the river was published by a Twitter user as well.

What concerns me is that people were copying or retweeting head counts obviously replicating false messages for a while and I was wondering about the ethics of reporting in this new way. The head count rumors went from 0 (everyone survived), to 1 (although right away denied by the Turkish government), up to 5-7 (at the moment – unconfirmed). This seems to be the only way to collect information when official reports are not available in a crisis: the official press conference won’t start until 1:30pm today (about 4-5 hours after the crash).

In crisis communication, social media tools are prone to be used to report false information, but also have the ability to quickly correct (see Facebook messages during the Virgina Tech attacks) – this procedure is comparable to the mistake eliminations on Wikipedia. The current communication during the aftermath of the plane crash in Amsterdam supports Lea Winerman’s findings recently published in Nature (“Social Networking in Crisis Communication” -> abstract):

Messages appear on Internet-based social networks within minutes of disasters occurring. Lea Winerman investigates how to harness this trend to create official community-response grids.

Is online social networking making us sick?

The Institute of Biology, UK, has published a paper called “Well connected: The biological implications of ‘social networking’” (pdf file). In this paper, the author Aric Sigman argues, that the more time people spend online, the less they have direct contacts with other human beings.

Here is the abstract:

One of the most pronounced changes in the daily habits of British citizens is a reduction in the number of minutes per day that they interact with another human being. Recent history has seen people in marked retreat from one another as Britain moves from a culture of greater common experience to a society of more isolated experience. She is in good company, as Americans too step back from one another in unprecedented magnitude.

Get offline to stay healthy…

Facebook’s Terms of Use and implications for network researchers

I just posted this on the “Complexity and Social Networks Blog“, Harvard’s Program on Networked Governance:

The changes of Facebook’s Terms of Use were quickly followed by massive protests of thousands of users requesting to abandon those changes. The Consumerist Blog was one of the first to ask their readers to boycott Facebook and look for alternative ways to connect with friends.

About a week after the change, Facebook made the decision to revert back to their original TOS (from Sepember 2008) and now works with their lawyers and legal specialists to come up with an improved version.

For researchers the TOS are critical: not just for understanding how Facebook will use our own data, but we also need to understand how we can use network data to analyze emergent social structures and the way users create, maintain, or abandon their online ties. The current TOS leave us in limbo – not knowing what is allowed and to what extent.

To understand this better and to collect the wisdom of the social network analyst crowd, I recently started a discussion on this topic on the SocNet listserver. I am trying to find arguments that will help to explain my research interests to an Institutional Review Board. The discussion is still going on. A few highlights are:

• Facebook does not allow research (or anyone) to store data more than 24 hours, which makes it difficult to clean, analyze and of course at the end publish the data.
• Data needs to be anonymous (especially in SNA network data cannot be anonymous – we need to know what kind of actors are nominating other actors and longitudinal data analysis seems to be impossible).
• So far I have identified three different ways to collect/use Facebook data, although at this point it is unclear how people can comply to the first two bullet points.

1. Bernie Hogan at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, UK, has created a Facebook application available on iTunesU to analyze Facebook data (open iTunes -> iTunes -> Oxford University).
2. Dataverse project at Harvard’s Berkman Center has made available Facebook data.
3. Create an application or a group on Facebook where you can find a way to have people give their consent to collect data on their online behavior and contacts.

We have set up an informal meeting at the annual INSNA (International Network of Social Network Analysis) conference in San Diego to exchange some of the ideas and information available. In case you are interested in joining us – please email me at ines_mergel(at)yahoo.com. I will post an update after the conference in March.

“Oh Crap. My Parents Joined Facebook”

“Oh Crap. My Parents Joined Facebook” website shows conversations between kids and their various family members.

Here is one example directly linked from their website:

MC Hammer at HBS explaining Twitter

A new expert on social networking, MC Hammer, spoke at HBS about how he uses Twitter effectively. Instead of letting other people talk about him, he says that Twitter is a way of controlling what people hear – directly from him. The session was taped for a special issue on Twitter for Good Morning America. As Andy McAffee (HBS) says in the Good Morning America piece: Twitter is a low cost very public way to share information online:

(Picture linked from The Crimson)

Update: Here is the video from Good Morning America with the coverage.

Vote on list of recommendations for an Open Government Directive

The NYT reports about the Open Government Directive: on the website of the Sunlight Foundation’s Our Open Government List (OOGL) you can vote on how much information the new federal Chief Technology Officer (CTO) should make publicly available.

Kudos to Facebook for returning to their previous Terms of Use

I found the message below this morning on my Facebook profile. Kudos to Facebook for reverting back to their previous terms of use. An example of peer pressure:

Terms of Use Update

Over the past few days, we have received a lot of feedback about the new terms we posted two weeks ago. Because of this response, we have decided to return to our previous Terms of Use while we resolve the issues that people have raised. For more information, visit the Facebook Blog.

If you want to share your thoughts on what should be in the new terms, check out our group Facebook Bill of Rights and Responsibilities.

“Did you know?” YouTube video on the progression of IT

Royal Web 2.0

The royal Website got a revamp and now includes a Queen tracker… talking about royal Web 2.0:

Queen tracker

Lazer et al. on “Computational Social Science” in Science

SOCIAL SCIENCE: Computational Social Science

Lazer et al.
Science 6 February 2009: 721-723
DOI: 10.1126/science.1167742

Found on the Web: The people and their food consumed in a week, by Joao Batista

Joao Batista’s photo series on “The People and the food they consume in a week” made it onto Facebook and is spreading. The last picture is the most impressive:

Ecuador: The Ayme family of Tingo

SNA in Social Sciences – Article in Science

Network Analysis in the Social Sciences , Science

Abstract: Over the past decade, there has been an explosion of interest in
network research across the physical and social sciences. For social
scientists, the theory of networks has been a gold mine, yielding
explanations for social phenomena in a wide variety of disciplines from
psychology to economics. Here, we review the kinds of things that social
scientists have tried to explain using social network analysis and provide
a nutshell description of the basic assumptions, goals, and explanatory
mechanisms prevalent in the field. We hope to contribute to a dialogue
among researchers from across the physical and social sciences who share a
common interest in understanding the antecedents and consequences of
network phenomena.

* [31] Network Analysis in the Social Sciences, Stephen P. Borgatti, Ajay
Mehra, Daniel J. Brass, Giuseppe Labianca, 2009/02/13, DOI:
10.1126/science.1165821, Science Vol. 323. no. 5916, pp. 892 – 895 [31]

http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1165821