Timeline: "The Book of Life and Death" in the big Data age

The time axis can present the user more personalized, the privacy, the stereoscopic, the interactive data and the information, each kind of related form innovation product and the application, is considered will contain the huge commercial value.

A year ago, many foreign internet companies, such as Facebook and path, began to use the timeline (Timeline) function. Simply put, timeline is a user-edited personal timeline that records the user's behavioral trajectory and can control personal information only to those who want to show it. Timeline applications allow Facebook users to share their activities with friends and create a dynamic Timeline home page. The timeline gives users a carrier to connect their fragmented time on the Internet and to interpret their role in social networking in a new way.

The timeline can truly present the user more personalized, privacy, three-dimensional, interactive data and information, users can be flexible and convenient to share with different people different things, acquaintances, colleagues, classmates, family or strangers. As a result, Facebook has been able to fully and accurately present the full personal life of the user-not even just the things that are recorded around the time they are registered, but can "go back to the past" and add more relevant information on the timeline.

Chen, chairman of Renren, said: "The mission of the social network is to record all the bits and pieces of human life, to combine the lives of all people, and then to string together all the content into a human history." ”

With the timeline, as Zuckerberg said, "Since then, your life has been online." Qiping, editor of the Internet Weekly, has interpreted "life" as "a part of life that is related to meaning", and timeline will make each face a "book" of its own, and this book, which carries meaning, will be the important business value of Facebook's future. These book contains the consumer propensity, timeline helps to "data" mining analysis, greatly enhance the precision of advertising, but also for Facebook to develop more attractive to users of applications, and through user behavior to predict the development trend of many industries, The development of a one-to-one consumption-driven model, thus containing great commercial value.

The evolution of social networks

Facebook was used as a SNS concept by many people last year, but in the eyes of some investors, big data, such as the "Facebook listing leading the internet into the Big Data era" issued by Citic Securities (600030, shares), It is considered that the listing value is a large data concept of unstructured information processing. Facebook's release of timeline is considered by the industry's leading observers to be strategically important.

In fact, for large data, social networks theoretically have innate evolutionary genes and broad strategic development space.

At the end of 2012, Renren, who played the slogan "China's Facebook" in the United States, also launched a new version of the personal homepage-the timeline for everyone.

On the timeline, users can add a variety of stories, such as school, work, marriage, travel, and so on, the official news agency said. It can show itself through all aspects of life, in a new way to express who you are, and directly back to the day of birth. Through the timeline of Renren, all the stories of a user's life are highlighted and unfolded, presenting each individual's individuality in a whole new way and telling others who you are.

"It is the value of everyone's company to use social networks to record the history of human development and to improve the well-being of everyone," Chen said. The advent of the timeline has greatly improved communication efficiency and will be a revolutionary change for the entire Internet industry and even the development of human history. In the future, social networking sites without a timeline or a class of timeline will eventually be eliminated by the users because of inefficient communication and sharing. ”

For this major change in Renren, the industry's first general analysis of the view that the timeline is to make Renren more fit the source of SNS: that is, to create real personal and real social relations. When users log on to the new version of their homepage, they will find that their offline life is being copied to the line by 1.1 points, which makes the information of people's life more shape. Everyone's account will even become the user's personal business card, if a stranger wants to know you, go to your home page to see how you are a person.

The second is that the timeline is designed to match the future of everyone's mobile-end strategy, creating a "circle of friends" like micro-letters. Time Axis combined with lbs real name friends, can facilitate the expansion of user groups, and record memories of the way to find old users. The segmentation of user relationship can establish more suitable information communication, and through geographical space, it can establish quicker information contact channel between same geographical users.

The third view is that the timeline is a strategy for Renren to attract more white-collar users and increase user activity. It is reported that around the timeline of this social map, Renren continues to improve the interest map, the current film, travel (footprints), music and so are integrated to the top of the personal homepage, a variety of display user's hobby and life. With the help of time axis, activate the user, make white-collar user more active, the timeline should become the exclusive individual territory, let the user backtrack past and look forward to the future.

In addition, for advertisers, the advent of the timeline is undoubtedly a good news. The timeline establishes a better, more accurate, and faster way of disseminating information on social networks. Friends, information over time with the full annotation more seamless display, the application of dynamic HTML5 technology, open Interface, so that users can introduce other web site information, so as to become a personal display portal. The comprehensive application of these logic results: a comprehensive understanding of another user, creating more topics, sharing, in order to stimulate the production of more content, more frequent interaction, more relationships to build, expand the way and efficiency of business information dissemination.

On Facebook, the advent of the timeline is a sort of conceptualization of the user's personal interests, through the timeline, accumulating user interest, exposing more users ' tastes, interests, attitudes, personalities, and letting advertisers know who they're talking to. It is reported that today's timeline is no longer a chronological display of user content updates, but rather based on the chart rank (graph rank) mechanism to aggregate content-related content. Therefore, when the user "praise" a brand page, this operation update shows no longer stay in the user's personal page first. The "Awesome" brand will be clustered and displayed in a set of time based operations. When the user pulls the page back, you can see more of the past. Similarly, because the timeline feature makes it easier to view the history of user records, the brands that users "praise" several months or even years ago can be mined. Although the number and format of the sponsors displayed on the homepage have not changed, the number of ads displayed on the personal page is already decreasing. In this way, let the user put more attention on the timeline page, increased the time axis content of the reading time, but also make the promotion of personal page marketing become more valuable.

A group of survey data show that timeline to get more attention to Facebook's ads. For example, "sponsored stories" participants rose markedly from 43% to 63%. The brand main Facebook timeline also adds a visual narrative of corporate history, adding and describing big events that are critical to the growth of the business, and highlighting important activity information consumers may miss about the brand. In addition to these features, Facebook employs a slightly modified, timeline-specific ad model that allows consumers to decide what they want to see in their Facebook ads.

Renren, a well-known real-name social network in China, has precipitated a lot of true social relationships and life records, official figures say. Everyone company up to now has 172 million active users, the monthly independent landing users reached 48 million, Renren album page about 8 million photos are uploaded every day, the status of the release of more than 20 million.

This accumulation of large data has also become a valuable asset for everyone, a large number of real data for all companies to provide a precise grasp of user groups and individual network behavior patterns of the foundation, if able to fully use, you can explore personalization, personalized, accurate and intelligent advertising push and service promotion services, Create a new business model that is several times or even dozens of times times more cost-effective than existing advertising and product promotion formats.

At the same time, Renren can also find ways and means to increase user stickiness, develop new products and services, and reduce operating costs by grasping large data.

Thus, although Renren users are buying the "timeline" presentation form, "time axis" can drive users to share more power of life, there are many uncertain factors, but to meet and grasp the big data era to SNS brought new opportunities, it seems to be the next step of everyone network can not be shaken strategy. "

The "Book of Life and Death" on the Internet

At home, this year also appeared more and more time axis products. For example, through a large number of micro-blogging behavior and data analysis launched by the "Mai Rui Bao Time" application, creating an epic of personal growth for Weibo users provides users with an interesting psychological and behavioral analysis that summarizes the time, behavior, mood, and personality characteristics of users ' tweets, and the way in which data is visualized, The overall presentation of our behavior patterns and personality characteristics on Weibo. There are netizens sigh "to see the micro Bo Rui Bao time Parade, see All to cry"; There are netizens in this passage, turned out their old photos, but also netizens sigh, "time parade is incredibly can choose which microblogging content is happy, which is sad, too god."

At present, QQ space, Renren, Philharmonic live and other communities have launched their own timeline. The reporter found that some of the domestic traditional new media sites have begun their own change and exploration, for example, the cradle network of mother and child, let the user (mother) in the community record the child's growth history, enhance interactive effect, such as mutual exchange, sharing, provide parenting advice, and through the user (including mothers and children) accumulated data analysis, Let experts provide one-on-one professional counseling for children, including choice of maternal and infant products, mental health, hobbies and personality, and so on.

Wired magazine once said: "Some of the activities that people use through these apps, including listening to songs, reading, running, cooking, donating, will be kept permanently, which actually makes Facebook a remote-controlled autobiography." ”

Qiping describes the timeline: It's hard to say exactly what you're like, but if a person grows up with you, the brain responds to this problem with such a kind of timeline. It is more file than the personnel file because it can control personal information only to those who want to show it.

With the help of data mining, theoretically, when a person chooses leather shoes, he only shows the historical data of his life related to leather shoes for marketing analysis, through which the merchant can predict the behavior of the customer, thus providing personalized service different from others, and even can provide to the third party's lifestyle designer, Advise the user on a one-to-one selection of shoes.

Such a timeline, thus also be qiping metaphor for the myth of the erotic system-"Life and Death book." The timeline links the meaning-related parts of user life to the survival of the "soul" part. "Soul" in the whole life, is the purse how to spend the system, is the management of the limbs how the system of action, a person's soul, the person's command took over. With the erotic system (that is, personal meaning system), a large number of data acquisition, the next challenge is to crack the soul, consider how to make the mass data more valuable.

Qiping that the timeline and lifelinear represent the new advances in artificial intelligence practices, that large numbers do not make humans fatalistic, that large data simply outsource the predictable parts of human nature to machines, allowing people to focus their freedom more on their own unique parts. With the information gathered from around us, we will no longer see human behavior as unrelated, haphazard, independent events. Instead, they should be part of a fascinating network of interdependence, a fragment of a series of interconnected stories. They will appear in the order of the casual, accidental appearance in unexpected places. Human behavior follows a simple and repeatable model, and these models are subject to broader patterns.