Serendipity35

You won't be logging into Orkut any more - if you ever did log in. Do you know about Orkut? Maybe this post about its demise is also your introduction to Google’s first foray into social networking.

Started in 2004, Orkut saw impressive early growth and has been popular in some countries, but never caught on in English-speaking countries. It didn't help that 2004 was also the year that Facebook started in 2004.

Orkut by 2008 was the top social media site in Brazil and India. Eventually, Facebook overtook Orkut even in Brazil and India. In India, Facebook surpassed Orkut in terms of total registered users in 2010. In Brazil, the same happened in 2012. I have written about Orkut a few times and had created an account to see what it was all about, but never really found it compelling.

Meanwhile, Google launched its current attempt at a social network, Google+, in 2011. Plus has been more successful in the U.S. but is still struggling and user numbers still lag way behind those of Facebook.

Google announced it would shut down Orkut (as it has done with a good number of other services like Buzz and Wave) on September 30, 2014 and is no longer accepting new users. You can export your profile data, posts and photos using a service called Google Takeout that will be available until September 2016.

The New York Times lost half their traffic (80 million visitors) to the nytimes.com homepage in two years. Does that mean they lost half their visitors? No. It's visitors to their home page - that landing page that "starts" off your website. For this blog, that is http://www.serendipity35.net.

Why did that happen?  Well, did you arrive at this post by going to our home page and reading this OR did you arrive directly at this post's permalink URL because of a link from a search, or that you found on Twitter, Facebook, tumblr or some other location? The odds are very good that it was the latter.

Websites once tried very hard to get readers to that home page and not to the deeper links. The home page was not only the home of the brand, but also the page with the main "cover" advertisements and news. That is no longer the case.

An article from The Atlantic says that the incoming traffic from "Facebook, Twitter, social media, and the mix of email and chat services summed up as 'dark social' (dark, because it's hard for publishers to trace)" is the main source of traffic. That may not be what site owners want, but it is what they are getting. Social powers much of the Net today.

This is changing how news sites handle their home page and it should and will influence the design of other websites, including those for colleges.

Google+ is an amazing social media site that allows users to share photos, play games, listen to music and engage in chat.

OR

Google+ is another failed social experiment by Google.

You will get both sides if you talk to users and non-users.




Both networks roll out new features like local listings, Google hangouts and verified content.

Google+ has more than 100 million active users and still continues to grow. Facebook has almost 800 million users.

Both are making a play at business. They are in this area to make money. Google+ Communities is a way to tap into prospects and put your business in Google Places for Business. 

What about education? Google Hangouts are a very good way to interact with students, especially if your school uses Gmail and Google apps. Google Circles provide a way to organize classes and groups. How about free HD video broadcasting through Hangouts on Air?

Ripples is another newly introduced  Google+ feature that creates an interactive graphic of the public shares of any public post or URL on Google+ to show you how it has "rippled" through the network.

Education needs to look at how business uses Google+ and decide of there are educational application.  If a business integrates Google Maps with their Google+ profile, it can help them connect with local customers and provide guidance to their location. Does that help with the marketing of a school?

Right now, Google+ does not have the user frequency that other social media sites have, but its too big to be ignored and probably "too big to fail." It is time for schools to define their Google+ strategy. 

With all the attention that privacy (or the lack of it) received in 2013, there are some forms of snooping that you might actually appreciate.

If you use sites like Gmail or Facebook, you probably know that they are mining your data and usage in order to give you ads that are better-suited to your interests. I know that may not sound so great, but it is an improvement on getting ads that are completely irrelevant to your life. But sites like Amazon and Netflix are also mining your data, not to show you ads but to show you more relevant recommendations. Their systems have become more sophisticated and more granular at judging your preferences. On Netflix, they look at the genres that you watch. In the early days, this would have been broad categories like drama, comedy, action, romantic etc. But their genres have gotten very specific, sometimes to a humorous degree - as in Fight-the-System Documentaries, Period Pieces About Royalty Based on Real Life, Foreign Satanic Stories from the 1980s.

Alexis Madrigalis a senior editor at The Atlantic, where he oversees the Technology Channel. He's the author of Powering the Dream: The History and Promise of Green Technology. He wondered how Netflix with its 40 million users (more than HBO now) decides on the genres that a film fits into in order to quantify your personal tastes.

We sometimes call this taxonomy or folksonomy, when it is done by "the crowd."

His interest turned into a bit of an obsession and then he discovered that he could scrape (capture) each and every microgenre that Netflix's algorithm has ever created. He discovered that Netflix possesses not several hundred genres, or even several thousand, but 76,897 unique ways to describe types of movies.

You may not be a movie fan, Netflix subscriber or even very interested in Big Data - but organizations (companies anf colleges) are very interested in knowing about you. Therefore, you should have some interest and understanding of what is being done to you.

Madrigal wrote a script to pull that data and then spent several weeks understanding, analyzing, and reverse-engineering how Netflix's vocabulary and grammar work. He realized that there was no way he could go through all those genres by hand, so he used a piece of software called UBot Studio to incrementally go through each of the Netflix genres and copy them to a file. 

He discovered many very specific genres in the system, such as:

Emotional Independent Sports Movies

Spy Action & Adventure from the 1930s

Cult Evil Kid Horror Movies

Sentimental set in Europe Dramas from the 1970s

Romantic Chinese Crime Movies

Mind-bending Cult Horror Movies from the 1980s

Time Travel Movies starring William Hartnell

Visually-striking Goofy Action & Adventure

British set in Europe Sci-Fi & Fantasy from the 1960s

Critically-acclaimed Emotional Underdog Movies

In the article he wrote forThe Atlantic, there is a generator which will give you many of the genres. It is an imperfect system. He found an oddly large number of genres for the actor Raymond Burr (best known for an old TV show Perry Mason). Why? 

He explains: "The vexing, remarkable conclusion is that when companies combine human intelligence and machine intelligence, some things happen that we cannot understand. Let me get philosophical for a minute. In a human world, life is made interesting by serendipity," Yellin told me. "The more complexity you add to a machine world, you're adding serendipity that you couldn't imagine. Perry Mason is going to happen. These ghosts in the machine are always going to be a by-product of the complexity. And sometimes we call it a bug and sometimes we call it a feature. Perry Mason episodes were famous for the reveal, the pivotal moment in a trial when Mason would reveal the crucial piece of evidence that makes it all makes sense and wins the day. Now, reality gets coded into data for the machines, and then decoded back into descriptions for humans. Along the way, humans ability to understand what's happening gets thinned out. When we go looking for answers and causes, we rarely find that aha! evidence or have the Perry Mason moment. Because it all doesn't actually make sense. Netflix may have solved the mystery of what to watch next, but that generated its own smaller mysteries. Sometimes we call that a bug, and sometimes we call it a feature."