Phil Bradley's weblog

HiveMindMap

I've seen a few Twitter visualisation tools, and the HiveMindMap is one of the most attractive. Just take a look:
You can search for particular words or tags, but it's not (meant to be) comprehensive, so you'll only get the recent stuff. You will see links between terms, with the thicker the line, the more important the connection. You can drill down into the words, getting information on a phrase, related terms, key users and so on. It's not just pretty, it's quite useful as well.

Curaytor

Curaytor.com is supposed to be a conversation search engine. They've had a good old pop at Google+ and Facebook, so they're clearly up for a bit of a tussle. I watched the 'Who are we' video and quite frankly was left none the wiser. I tried I few of my usual search queries - nothing. I tried the help link - it's basically an email form. I looked at what they defined as 'trending' conversations. Nothing that I would regard as 'trending' at all - no news, just what seems to be a series of almost entirely random tweets. Next I tried 'Popular', and again it seemed to be nothing other than random tweets. 'Latest' gave me the same. 'Staff picks' - the most recent was a week old.

Next I tried a few of their examples - maybe it was just me? They suggested a search for the topic 'mobile' and the top tweet that came up was 'make sure your site is mobile friendly' which was tweeted almost 24 hours ago. I tried a few more of their examples - utter rubbish.

I sometimes find engines and resources that are - well, just let's say they're not very good. This one has raised (or should it be lowered?) the bar on 'total rubbish'. I can't even begin to describe how poor this thing is. Leave well alone would be my advice.

Why the new Facebook Graph Search is important for librarians

Well, the news is well and truly out now, and as many people have been predicting, Facebook has launched their own search engine. The video at the end of my post gives you a quick overview of a few of the things that it's goingo to cover, but I'm obviously interested in looking at it in terms of the information professional.

It's being rolled out slowly, with limited testing in the United States, so the rest of us will have to wait awhile before we can start to play with it, but you can request early access as well. It's still very basic at the moment, but the thrust of where Facebook is taking search is very clear. To start with, it's NOT a web search engine. You can't use it to find all the pages on the web where there are references to a particular football team for example - it's designed to leverage the huge amount of content that's contained within Facebook. That's a really big reason on its own as to why librarians and other information professionals will need to have access to Graph Search (as well as the rest of Facebook of course), because it's a huge information resource. To deny access to Facebook is to deny access to an extremely large portion of the internet experience - I'm not going to replay all the figures associated with Facebook here; you can check out my Pinterest collection of social media statistics or run on over to Visual.ly and do a search for Facebook Statistics and either of these resources should give you the information you need.

Graph search is starting out around the Ps - People, Places, Photographs. The idea is that you'll be able to do a search to find out what your friends like, so you could find out which boardgames your friends like, or which boardgames your married friends with children enjoy playing. You could locate a dentist based on recommendations from friends, or the restaurants in a particular area that you'll probably enjoy eating at based on trusted (ie friends) recommendations. You'll be able to explore particular areas and see the photographs that friends or colleagues have taken, so you might decide to grab photographs of London that friends took on holiday, which the pictures that work colleagues took may be of conferences or convention centres because they were in London working.

Don't worry - privacy will still be a big thing, and the information that you can get will be based on whatever settings people have chosen, but you'll also be able to get data on information that people have shared publically, and that's still a large number of people - about 25% of the Facebook community. However, Facebook does have a very patchy record when it comes to privacy issues, so this is something that you'll need to look at when it comes to using the service yourself - or when your friends do!

So, up until now, Facebook has been about you and your friends. There's certainly an element of leverage here in that the Graph Search will collate a lot of that information together in new and interesting ways. Does this make it a Stalkers toolbox? I think that's going to be down to the settings that you choose for yourself, but it's going to make us think really hard about why we want to use Facebook and importantly how we use it. Is it just for 'friends' or are those friends actually 'colleagues'. In the video, one of the engineers makes a really interesting point that in future we're going to be able to use Facebook - not just to find our friends and colleagues, but to find people that we perhaps should know, or who can help us do something that we currently can't.

This is where the value and importance of Facebook Graph Search starts to come into play, and hopefully you're already seeing how a library could utilise this. I would suggest that every library (public, private, corporate, academic etc) needs to be on Facebook. Your library needs to be found. Now of course, it can be found when people are doing generic searches on Google and the rest of the search engines, but the important point here is that if people are already logged into Facebook, they're more likely to use the search option in the future - particularly if they've found that it works well for them. So if you're not there, you probably won't exist or be thought of by the searcher. In exactly the same way that a few years ago I would argue that a library or business needs to be on the internet, because who uses the printed Yellow Pages any more? If you're not on the net, you don't exist. If you're not on Facebook, pretty soon you won't exist either - it really is that simple.

So - the library needs to have a Facebook presence; it's becoming vital. However, that's only stage number one. Stage two is that library and other professional staff also need to be on Facebook, so that they can be found. For example - I have an interest in American History (the Civil War to be precise) and if I'm going to the States to speak at a conference, I'm going to be keen to see if I can pop in some visits to places that will interest me about the Civil War. Yes, of course I can do a general search and get some stuff, but that's still very clinical. However - if I can see who is going to the conference, and they're friends of mine, I can use Graph Search to find out if any of their friends are into the same interests, or work at a useful library and maybe I can get an introduction to hook up to an expert quickly. Because of the friendship element, I suspect that I'll have a much richer experience than if I just wander into the local museum or library.

However for this to work, that person with the Civil War interest needs to be actively talking about it on Facebook - they have to be engaging, writing about it, mentioning the really great restuarant at the edge of a battlefield that's worth going to, or particular sites, and sharing their photographs. So we're going to have to have an entirely new level of engagement with Facebook for that to work well, and we're also going to have to change - to an extent - our concept of privacy, yet again. If that friend of a friend keeps their interest private, I'm not going to have a chance to make that connection. However, if their information is public, it's a great contact for me. This doesn't mean that everything you do on Facebook all of a sudden has to be public - not at all. However it does mean that we're going to have to think very carefully about what we keep private and what we make available to all and sundry, or indeed if we should have different Facebook accounts for different purposes (which Facebook doesn't like of course, but hey, why should they have all the fun?)

If you - as a professional - have expertise in a particular area, you probably want to share it. You want to help people, or to promote your organisation or your library. You want to be able to reach out into a wider community, and Facebook is offering you a chance to do exactly that. If I'm going to a particular part of the country and I have an interest in local history, wouldn't it be great to be able to see a collection of old photographs or prints of that area which have been shared on Facebook by the librarian in the local public library? If I have a few moments I may then decide to pop into that library to look and see what other stuff is available for me to use. Simply by doing what it is that we do - preserving and presenting information, and working with communities to get more stuff available, we're getting out to that wider audience, and increasing our profile.

This also has an advantage for Facebook as well of course. The one thing that Facebook can't cope with is inertia. This isn't so much a problem for Google, because there are always new things happening that it can index and make available to us, but if we're stuck at 6 Facebook friends that's not really adding that much to the Facebook universe, because you're not sharing content widely or making new connections. However, if you're active on Facebook, and doing more, sharing more and contributing more content Facebook is growing. So, if we move away from the concept of 'friends' and more towards the concept of 'colleagues' there's an entirely different option for Facebook to grow, as we make more friends and share more stuff.

Make no bones about it though, there's a huge impact in other areas as well. If we're moving away from an organisational presence to a personal presence (and I've argued that point well enough in the past, as it's the way that we need to go), how does an organisation respond? Sure, someone can still be responsible for putting up the local history photographs but someone needs to decide to do that, at some level. If we're going to encourage professionals to share their expertise for the benefit of both the organisation and the community, we have to let them do it themselves. This is not going to go down very well with the web development team or the people who produce the Council guidelines on internet use. I would argue that it's our role as information professionals to point out that Facebook is not what it once was, and that it needs to be regarded in a completely new way.

I've already seen people complaining that the new Graph Search isn't going to help brands promote themselves; Larry Kim (CTO of Wordstream) says "It remains unclear on how advertisers will be able to use this Graph Search product to better market and sell their products to Facebook users." I beg to differ. It's perfectly obvious to see how this is going to work, because it's going to be much more down to individual users of products to market and sell products themselves, based on their own recommendations. If I like a product, I'm more likely to recommend it to my friends, and if I dislike it, I'm going to be fairly vocal about that. Companies may well have to spend more time interacting with people than they've done in the past, and use their budgets to keep people interested and onside inside of using it to spend huge amounts on advertising to people who are not interested. So advertising is going to have to continue to become more personalised. Once again there's a role here for the information professional. We are generally very well trusted by people, so we can help by talking about the resources that we use - the software tools that we like, the websites that we go to and so on. That will further help our members as well as the members that we don't have yet.I can also see that companies such as LinkedIn are going to have very considerable concerns about this move, since we'll be able to use Facebook to find out what jobs are available, do we already know anyone who works there, or is a friend of ours, we can see what that company does, the attitudes of people who work there and so on. Graph Search is going to very quickly become a cross between Yelp, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Amazon and so on.

Graph Search is a really big deal, and there is no doubt that it's going to really hit Google. Don't also forget the tie in that Facebook has with both Bing and Blekko, both of which integrate Facebook into their search offerings. This move is going to do them no harm whatever, and in fact will be a really big boost for them, but it will further leave Google out in the cold - because who is going to want some list of websites to look at when they can instead get personalised, tailored content?

Does this require us all to sit glued to Facebook at the expense of other methods of communicating? No, I don't believe that it does. It's perfectly easy to share content across social media with a quick click of a button - you can do it at the bottom of this post if you want to try it out! As we are looking for information, then finding it, we can do the next thing which is to recommend it. However, it does also mean that yes, I believe that we need to spend more time using social media, and that has to move further up the list of priorities. I think we'll be seeing Social media (or Real Time media) roles within information centres, and it should be part of the role that everyone has, not just a few people. We cannot escape it, nor should we - in fact we should be actively embracing it. If we don't, we shall find as Jessops, Comet, BlockBuster and HMV have already found - that we won't be around much longer. For a library and it's staff to flourish we cannot expect people to come to us in the building. We have to go to them, and they are on Facebook, Twitter and the rest.

So, in summary, Graph Search is important for the profession because:

It gives us access to more information to be able to do our jobs better and more effectively.

It will quickly put us in contact with people who we can contact for information, and who we may have a link with.

It's a way that we have of promoting our library to both existing and new members.

We can use it to provide more information than we've been able to do in the past.

It's a very positive way to demonstrate our own skills and abilities.

It gives us more control over the information that we have and how we demonstrate it.

There's another way that's now available to us which means that we can virtually leave the buildings behind us, and connect directly with our members.

 

Who is talking on social media network

I suppose that I have to review the Social Media Search Engine - Who is talking but I'm not very keen to. In the first instance, the name is far too similar to the rather more established and effective Whostalkin site at http://www.whostalkin.com/ while the URL of this one is http://whotalking.com/ Co-incidence? Two social media search engines with virtually identical names? I don't think so. The second reason that I'm not particularly impressed with this engine is the huge amount of advertising that you have to put up with. Every five lines of results, there's a banner advert. Really not impressed. The only thing in its favour is the fact that it's providing you results in a variety of different languages. Big deal.

Ok, I've reviewed it. Done my duty.

Open Status Search - Search Facebook

Open Status Search - Search Facebook without logging in This is quite fun in its own nosy, macabra way, since you can see what people are talking about on Facebook - at least those who have open status updates that is. Very simple to use - just type in whatever you want to search for, and you'll get to see what people are saying:

You can then click and take a wander into their profile. Of course, it's always a good idea to check your own, just in case!

Check changed Twitter biographies

with Bio is changed. Very simple really. Log in, telling them who you are on Twitter, and they'll send you emails when the people that you follow change their biographies. Why would you want to do that? Well, in case they get a new job, marry, have children or anything else that they think is important. They'll update you instantly, daily or weekly.

Followerwonk: Search by Twitter bio, name, URL, location, more

Followerwonk says of itself: "Who are you looking for? Whether it's new talent, customers, or just friends, we help find whom you're after.Login with Twitter and we'll overlay your follow status. Want precise tracking of new/lost followers?" It's a pretty good analysis tool. I like the option of being able to search through biographies in particular, which gives searchers a variety of ways of ranking and rating people. There's a really fun 'compare users' option, analyse and track followers and so on. It's packed full of helpful information, and you can get a lot of data without having to register to use it.

Little Bird helps find Twitter experts

Little Bird is an interesting tool. It's in private beta at the moment, but if you register you get a temporary password/user name so that you take a poke around. It's still very tiny at the moment, but it shows a lot of promise.

The first thing that you see in the site are sets reports in different areas, such as beer, wine, food and librarians interestingly enough. So naturally that's where I went. You are presented with a list of the top 500 experts, which seems to be defined by which librarians are most followed by 'insiders', which appears to be something of a self referential group. LibraryJournal for example comes top of the list as its followed by over 1,000 'insiders'. Then there is a listing of new accounts, but followed by insiders, 'listeners' which are people who are following insiders, the most followed insiders, the oldest and the most active accounts. It's worth spending some time wading through this information, since it does give you a good feel for who is who on Twitter - as defined by the other people who Little Bird thinks are important.

There's a very helpful section on what the insiders are sharing. This is a news curation tool which pulls link content directly onto the page so that you can read it there, rather than having to wander all over the web following up links. Next up is a 'comparison' option, to compare other individuals against 'the experts'. This tells you how many experts your victim is following, how many s/he is being followed by, which experts most recently followed that person, and which experts first followed that person.

There is a 'blogs' option - top blogs by inbound links, with listings on most recent posts. Finally, there is a search option which is powered by Blekko, and pulls up websites.

The main flaw - if there is one, is how the 'insiders' are defined. If you don't have the word 'library' or 'librarian' in your biography, then you don't stand any chance of being in the list. The more followers you have, the higher up the listing you go. So if Lady Gaga suddenly put librarian into her biography, she'd zoom to the top of the list, slanting the rest of the content. I think Little Bird needs to have another way of working this out, because it's an easy system to game if you are minded to. However, to be fair, looking at the librarians list, there weren't that many that I would have objected to, but I still find the WeFollow resource a good one to use.

This is another example of the way that the internet - specifically search and authority is now moving, which is towards the individual, and away from the website or the organisation. We're only going to see more of this happening in the future, and Little Bird is just an early example of where we're going to be going in the next few years.

Social Searcher - new search engine

As soon as one search engine disappears, up pops another one. Social Searcher is an interesting multi search engine that creates 3 columns, one each for Facebook, Twitter and Google+ There are a few tweaks - you can choose to focus on a particular country within the Facebook element of search, a location in Twitter and a language in G+.If you're interested in searching for images in Facebook, there's an option for that as well.

The engine can also be used as an interface to search any of those resources directly, and also MySpace and LinkedIn. The section on 'Social Leaks' is also quite interesting in that there are a number of pre-set search links that reveal who is talking about how much they hate their job, what their new phone number is and so on - simply from what people have personally and very publically revealed.

This is a real Swiss Army Knife of a social search engine - certainly one that is worth exploring. And of course, you don't need to have accounts with any of the services in order to use it!

surchur closes

surchur.com 'the dashboard to now' has closed or as they rather sweetly put it "indefinitely paused". It's always a shame to see a search engine close, but in all honesty, this wasn't one of my favourites.