Social Data Nuggets Road privacy issues the biggest hurdle

With the development of social networks entering the bottleneck period, the value of the user data generated is much greater than the platform itself. How these data and content flows can be turned into a topic that Facebook, Twitter, and other social networking sites are constantly considering. With more and more advertisers, product makers and brand marketers eager to connect to the social networking world, the value of user data is emerging.

Facebook

Perfect search engine

Social giants Facebook and Twitter started their nuggets in social data early.

In May 2011, Facebook deepened its collaboration with Microsoft's Bing and began using Bing to deeply integrate Facebook's social database. By August 2012, Facebook was taking a big step forward in digging up the value of user data, acquiring Threadsy, a social data analyst that had developed social analysis tools Swaylo, which meant Facebook began to hold the initiative to tap the value of user data.

"The value of Facebook is that they have huge user data. The company will improve the search engine's results by linking pages, content, and social content. Christophe Henner, social media manager at X-prime Group, a French network technology company, clearly points out the prerequisites for Facebook's foray into search. Facebook's CEO, Zuckerberg, also says there are more than 1 billion queries per day on Facebook, and they have a dedicated team that will create tailor-made search engines for specific users.

Twitter

Subdivide data types

Unlike the strong chain of relationships formed by Facebook users, the link between Twitter users is a weak chain of relationships, and it also emphasizes itself as a social media focus that focuses on news dissemination and topical content discussions. Although the number of users is less than Facebook, many people think that Twitter's interest map is better than Facebook's social graph. The potential value of Twitter's user data is equally stunning.

In the mining of these user data, Twitter has also conducted a series of explorations. Not long ago, Twitter and Salesforce.com signed the Data Pipeline licensing agreement, so Salesforce access to all of the Twitter public data, which is also a signal of Twitter's social data and corporate applications directly docking.

Twitter has taken a real step in how to comb through massive amounts of data. Edwin Chen, the company's data scientist, said Twitter would like to try a new spark of large data systems. Spark is an open source cluster computing system based on memory computing, which is designed to make data analysis faster. This approach will greatly enhance Twitter's data Analysis Services.

By filtering user ownership, placement, and related keywords, Twitter builds a series of customized customer data streams. For example, by filtering movie title, location, and mood tags, you can tell what the most popular movies are in cities like Los Angeles, New York and London. And according to the user's personal behavior description, you can even search for foreign visitors in Canadian factories. If you combine social data with other financial data, you can even turn Twitter into a stock trading tool.

Privacy issues

Become the biggest obstacle

Since these data are produced from users, then the user's privacy will inevitably be touched, which is also engaged in the Nuggets user data can not evade the risk. Facebook has raised questions from privacy advocates by datalogix with data-gathering companies, tracking and using user data, and analyzing the data to assess Facebook's advertising effects.

On the road of mining and using user data, the problem of user's privacy becomes the biggest obstacle that restricts its further development.

When sharing has become a universal phenomenon, the advent of large data age is the trend of mass user data will create a huge value is already an indisputable fact. Mary Wallace, an IBM social analyst, said that while social media sites were collecting more and more data, they might be able to find better ways to capitalize on the data and replace it with advertising as the main way to raise revenue. The real value of these social networking sites may be in the data itself.

It is believed that in the near future, if we find both the full use of user data, but also reasonable to avoid the threat of user privacy, social data will be the huge amount of energy to be opened completely.

Zhao Qin