Survey_SetD

[|Andreas Weigend] STATS 252, Stanford University, Spring 2009
 * Data Mining and E-Business: The Social Data Revolution**

**Email to: stats252.homework@gmail.com.**
This assignment is optional but can be used for extra credit towards your homework grade. Students who attempt this homework will also be able to present their findings to the class.

Overview: The goal of this assignment is to create a comprehensive summary of the Survey Insights worth being featured in the press. Please work together on the following questions to make a cohesive entry that is ready to publish on sites as big as the New York Times or even TechCrunch.

Question # 8, 9, 10, 12, 20:

8. Some people share in great detail on Facebook, Twitter etc what they are doing. Has this changed your notion of friendship? 9. In what areas do you want to discover new people (for jobs, dates, …) 10. The web has had a huge effect to say the least, e.g., Craigslist has essentially replaced classified ads. Progess has been slower In other areas, such as online dating. What is your view of online dating? What works well? What does not work, why not? Any suggestions? 12. What difference does it make to you if someone sends you a virtual rose vs a real rose? 20. If you had one wish that Facebook could implement, what would it be?


 * Some people share in great detail on Facebook, Twitter etc what they are doing. Has this changed your notion of friendship?**

The class was split regarding the effect of social networks on their perception of friendship. Effectively, as shown in graph A, about 35% of the respondents believe that the likes of facebook and twitter have fundamentally altered their understanding of friendship. However, half of the students indicated that there did not seem to be a direct correlation between their notion of friendship and their activity on social networks.

It was interesting to note that the large majority of the respondents based their answers on their perception of news feeds. Generally, students who recognized the impact of social networks on their notion of friendship believe that updates about their friends’ activities have fundamentally strengthened their relationships with those friends. This claim was countered by some students who declared that they had no incentive to read about random updates concerning their acquaintances.

Even among the “Yes” responses, there seemed to be a disagreement concerning the impact of social networks on friendships. About 50% of those responses argued that social networks have revolutionized the ideaof friendship by adding a new dimension to it. Effectively, reading through acquaintances profiles help users learn more information about them. The fact that social networks expose so much information about its members speeds up the “friend discovery phase” tremendously. Social networks help people learn a lot about their acquaintances and members can quickly make up their mind as to whether they want to be friends with a particular person based on publicly available information such as interests, location, etc. Some students even pointed out the effect of social networks on face-to-face interactions.

Users are less likely to ask their acquaintances/friends questions whose answers can be found on a social network. The conversations between two “facebook” friends for instance will converge more rapidly towards their common interests than for two real-life friends. For instance, if person A learns through a social network that they share common interests with person B, they might want to push that person to realize those common interests so that the two persons can engage in common activities. Knowledge of person B’s hobbies might influence person A to push the conversation in a different direction.

A significant portion of the “Yes” responses acknowledged that social networks help them maintain their relationships with friends who live “far away”. However, about 50% of the students who thought social networks modified their understanding of friendship argued that the change lowered the overall standard of friends. In fact, those respondents believe that the term “friendship” has been redefined to incorporate “superficial relationships” with acquaintances as well. What does it mean for a person to be your friend on a social network? What are the requirements of friendship on facebook? Of a user’s 700-800 facebook friends, how many does the user actually know well? In contrast, how many of those “friends” are mere acquaintances? In fact, a better question to illustrate this claim would be: how many of your facebook friends would you even greet if you randomly ran into them?


 * What difference does it make to you if someone sends you a virtual rose vs a real rose?**

The large majority of the respondents (77 out of 96) declared that they were in favor of the real rose. The responses stressed on the fact that sending a real rose requires much more thought and effort on the part of the sender than for a virtual one.

Receiving a real rose carries a much richer message than receiving a virtual one. One commonly cited reason was the fact that real flowers carry unique scent, rarity and beauty that often have a large impact on the recipient’s emotions while a virtual one is fake and meaningless. In addition to that, the choice of the rose reveals a lot about the sender’s taste, thought process and experiences, facts that cannot be conveyed through a virtual rose. The fact that humans live in a real world makes it difficult for virtual roses to carry the same message as real ones. Real rose are attached to places, memories and emotions whereas virtual ones are standard computer graphics. Sending your significant other a real rose from the place of the first meeting cannot be replicated by sending a virtual rose.

About 12 of the respondents indicated that they were indifferent to a real vs. a virtual rose and that their decision is heavily dependent on the context and more importantly on the sender of the rose. Those students argued that they would rather receive a virtual rose from a friend but a real one from their significant other. The distinction between those two types of senders reveals the different messages that the virtual and real roses convey.

Real roses require more personal effort than virtual ones and are often associated with the feeling of love rather than appreciation so receiving a real rose from a significant other carries a much more powerful message than a virtual one. However, in case the sender is a friend, a virtual rose will suffice to show the intended message of appreciation and receive more views than if it were a real one. Receiving a virtual rose from a friend will play a role in boosting the recipient’s online status.

Finally, virtual roses can be thought of as public announcements of appreciation/love that validate already existing friendships. Effectively, humans care a lot about their reputation and their image, so if they publicly admit showing appreciation for a certain person, they accomplish two goals: 1) Testify that the recipient is a loveable person and that they like to be around that person/think highly of them. 2) Publicly announce their relationship with the recipient.

Receiving a real rose might not necessarily accomplish the two goals above due to the inherent hypocrisy of human beings. The sender of the rose might even deny sending that rose in public if the purpose of the rose was to accomplish a hidden “goal”.

The 7 remaining responses indicated that virtual roses were preferable to real ones due to both their low maintenance and the fact that they are publicly available to friends. Those responses seemed motivated by the role of virtual roses in boosting a person’s image through enhancing their online status. Finally, it was interesting to note that most of the people who are either indifferent to both options or in favor of the virtual rose were males.


 * In what areas do you want to discover new people (for jobs, dates, …)**?

There are a lot of social networks today, each catering to a diverse audience. Orkut, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn – each of these cater to a slightly different audience. Thus, it becomes imperative to know the tastes and motives of the users to cater to their interests better. To find this, a survey was posed to 150 students of Stanford University asking them what ‘areas’ do they wish to find new people in. The participants of the survey were primarily students of Engineering/Business at Stanford.
 * Motives for People Discovery**

To find the areas in which people would like to network 150 students from Stanford Engineering and GSB
 * Survey Goal :**
 * Candidates** :

There were different motives behind the use of Social Networks. Quite expectedly, the major focus was on the professional careers, to build new contacts and to find new people who share common interests. The figure below shows a rough view of the way the participants responded.
 * Survey Results:**

media type="youtube" key="UMkZUzjcOzo" height="344" width="425"

Whilst 63 % of the people were interested in the professional contacts, 25% wanted to use the social networks to build personal relationships and 13% wanted to use it to share their interests. The histogram below gives an approximate idea of this scenario.




 * New Insights :**

Some also indicated that they would prefer a professional network with a better personal touch than LinkedIn. Moreover, it was surprising to note that apart from professional goals, the students were inclined to collaborate and share their knowledge of outdoor sports. In particular, a large fraction wanted to discover new people sharing their interests in Hiking, Volleyball, Skating, Biking, Golfing and Photography. This revelation opens up another dimension to the existing social networks that are largely general and just help people to connect with one another.


 * The web has had a huge effect to say the least, e.g., Craigslist has essentially replaced classified ads. Progess has been slower In other areas, such as online dating. What is your view of online dating? What works well? What does not work, why not? Any suggestions?**

I have rated the surveys and placed them in a frequency bar graph. The x-axis shows the ratings which vary from 1 to 5 (1 stating that online dating is a really good idea, 3 being neutral, 5 stating that online dating is a terrible idea). People seem to be pretty evenly split between good/bad. The mean of the survey come out close to 3.16, which is pretty close to people being neutral.

From reading the surveys, however, I have come to the conclusion that there were two main barriers to online dating: 1) There is an initial barrier to online dating. This is the barrier where people think that online dating is "creepy" (the social stigma against online dating) and that some people believe that it is easy to be deceitful and non-authentic on the Internet.

2) After overcoming the initial barrier and setting up an online profile, the second barrier is that it is difficult to actually meet a person that you may be interested in. There are many reasons for this barrier, including the fact that there are more men on these dating sites, which means that women are getting far too much attention and the women gets to pick and choose, and the fact that there are very little visible interactions among users.

Allow us to describe the problems further: 1) Reasons for the initial barrier - social stigma against online dating: We all know that it is easy to pretend to be another person on the web. Who hasn't seen video clips of old men pretending to be a young female on a chatroom? Although now it is much easier to verify that the person that you're talking to is the person that they said to be (by webcam, photographs, facebook/myspace profiles), this notion has developed from the days before the wide usage of webcams and digital cameras. People have developed a distrust for people they meet on the web.
 * It is easy to be deceitful and non-authentic on the Internet.
 * There is a social stigma that online dating is creepy.

Also, because it is so easy to deceive people on the Internet, people have developed a stigma against online dating. And I believe that this stigma has been strengthened by the media's depiction of Internet users and Internet predators. There was a popular TV show on NBC called __Dateline NBC - To Catch a Predator__. Here's the Wikipedia's description of __To Catch a Predator__: To Catch a Predator was a reality television show that featured a series of hidden camera investigations by the television news-magazine Dateline NBC devoted to the subject of identifying and detaining those who contact people below the age of consent (or individuals whom they believe to be such) over the Internet for sexual liaisons.

Video clip on __To Catch a Predator__: media type="youtube" key="IPUZYSZLrJA" height="344" width="425" We can improve online dating by addressing the two problems stated above.
 * __How do we improve online dating?__**

1) Break the initial barrier: Breaking the initial barrier to create a genuine online profile has been done by social networking websites. It worked because it has destroyed the social stigma and the non-authentic factor. By having your friends sign up for these social networking websites and actually using them, the social stigma against using an online service has been destroyed. Nowadays, it is more common to be ridiculed for NOT using a social networking service (such as Facebook), instead of being ridiculed for having an online profile (such as having a profile on match.com or eharmony.com). The non-authentic factor has also been destroyed because it is hard to deceive hundreds of people (e.g. your friends on Facebook).

2) To overcome the difficulty of meeting other people, create user discussions: Allowing an algorithm to "match" people has not worked so well because it is easy to lie while setting up online profiles. However, by allowing interactions among users by discussion forums, etc, will create an opportunity to overcome these difficulties. For example, let us say that we have a female and a male user who are both interested in meeting a person who are devout Christians. By having a discussion forum on Christianity on an online dating website, these two people know where to go to meet people with similar interests. It allowed them to see each other's opinions by reading through their posts on the discussion forum. This is a great ice-breaker between two people because they can cite a certain post or opinion and use that as a conversation starter.


 * What is that one thing that you would want Facebook to implement?**

A group of Stanford students were surveyed to find out what is that one thing that they wishes Facebook implemented. The diversity of responses was tremendous and the students were very creative and innovative in their demands from Facebook.

A number of students felt Facebook should implement some effective means for filtering the noise. Suggestions included ranking friends by importance(or relevance) and have Facebook deliver the news you care about the most sans the clutter. Interestingly,Facebook has taken steps in this direction already. Facebook allows you to add your friends to a "friends list". You can add the people you would like to track to a list and Facebook will return all their information with high priority. You could create a similar list of friends you do not want to hear from too often and Facebook will ensure they get a lower priority in your feed. If users want enhanced friends-management they can use the Facebook application [|Inner Circle] which allows you to categorise your friends privately and view an RSS feed of each category of friends.Moreover, you can use [|Inner Circle] to incorporate RSS feeds so your friends can get all of your Internet news in one place. This [|Facebook Blog entry] that has details about more options on Filtering Friends and Status. Another interesting suggestion was Facebook should provide alerts about people one has not interacted with in a long time (maybe that interesting person you met on the airplane, your high-school Math teacher!)

Another legitimate concern that a third of the students had was regarding user privacy. People wished Facebook allowed fine-grained control over who can see your updates, wallposts, videos, pictures and other content. A good news for people with a similar concern is that Facebook already has this feature in place. Facebook provides privacy controls that let you choose exactly what you share with whom. You can block some of your friends from seeing your pictures, you can choose to notify only a set of friends about your status updates. Or you can let the world see the basic information on your profile. Some other privacy-related features on the Facebook wishlist included notifications about people ok who visit and disallowing people from tagging you in pictures without your permission.

Another group of students desired a better Search functionality in the Facebook system. If you are looking for 'Jane Dawson' chances are more than a hundred profiles will match this name. How do you then ensure you are friends with the person you have in mind? While Facebook cannot reveal more details about a user than the user permits Facebook to display(you can change this in the Search Settings tab in Facebook) they have recently rolled out a new feature that displays this information in a more clear manner with a full-size profile photo.

A very interesting insight obtained from this survey was people not being aware of many of Facebook’s features. Unless you are someone who keeps a tab on Facebook’s new features(and they do roll out a more than a dozen a month), chances are Facebook has that feature on your wishlist already in place and you may not be aware of it. This is interesting because many of these wishes came from Stanford students and most of whom are avid Facebook users and belong to the new generation of the so-called social-network-junkies.

Here’s a final wish for Facebook: Ensure people know about the cool features you add every other day!

If you have a wish for Facebook let them know :[|Feedback for Facebook]

Wish to stay updated about Facebook's newest features : do visit the [|The Facebook Blog] 

Student(s) responsible for this page (maximum 3 students):
 * 1) Emile Chamoun
 * 2) Tripti Assudani
 * 3) C.V.Krishnakumar
 * 4) Nam Kim (received permission from Enrique)

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