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The second competition of our competition series opens today: Xtract International Student Design Competition 2008. It is opened for all students of the following art schools:

• London School of Communications, London, UK
• University of Art and Design Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland
• Akademia Sztuk Pieknych w Warsawie, Warsaw, Poland
• Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, USA
• California College of the Arts, San Francisco, USA
• Tama Art University, Tokyo, Japan

We are trying to educate people through this competition what real social networks are, not facebook buddies, but social networks of people who REALLY communicate.

Today, we are very excited since we are launching our first competition: Xtract Scenario Competition.

If you could see the social connections between your website visitors and find out who are the most influential ones – how could you utilise the knowledge to your business benefit?

Submit a presentation describing how you would utilise insight about your most influential users and the way your user base is networked, for example to improve your online marketing and advertising campaigns.

This is one of a twin pair competition, the other one being a closed competition for certain art schools around the world (opening October 22nd, 2008). We hope that these competitions will give some insight for both the online and mobile communities into the art of social networks and advertising in real social networks.

Any one with good ideas are invited to participate to the scenario competition, as it aims at being a vast brainstorm of scenarios of how to utilise the real social network of web sites.

The first prize is the Wacom Cintiq 12WX, read more on the competition website.

Social media is becoming more and more important — even more important than other media because it is closer to our human nature. Imagine yourself without any communication with people around you. And then, imagine making all your purchase decisions based on the adverts without an opportunity to ask questions and exchange opinions. How hard could that be? And yet, when we create the marketing messages and adverts we take into consideration everything else such as age, gender and behavior but, the impact of social interactions.

Taking into account social interactionss between people and the impact they have on your brand is very important especially on web and mobile social networks. When we create target groups for our online advertising, we need to utilise tools that take into account how and what people communicate to each other online and how that communication influences their decisions. Marketers have known for a long time that word of mouth has an enormous impact on purchase decision making - we could just not measure it. With web and mobile technologies, that is now possible.

If you’re interested to hear more on the topic and happen to visit CTIA Wireless in San Francisco, come and listen our Chief Strategy Officer, Jouko Ahvenainen speaking on September 9th. This is a special conference the day before CTIA Wireless IT opens doors called Mobile Web Strategies.”

Yesterday was a long day. The long flight from Helsinki to San Francisco via Frankfurt wasn’t really enjoyable, but the OpenThread made up for that. OpenThread was an OpenSocial developer event organized by SocialMedia and held at their unique office in SF.

The event opened by overview of OpenSocial by Lane LiaBraaten from Google and continued with Paul Lindner from Hi5 giving an excellent hands-on tutorial on writing the first basic OpenSocial app. The crowd consisted of developers so the discussion frequently went to more into details. Somebody was asking Paul about a Hi5 specific problem where his app was having problems with the 5s time-out from Hi5. Paul was quick to reply that he can change it to 8s if that helps – how is that for supporting developers. OpenSocial is currently moving into v0.8 which is promising to give even more tools for developers to write rich and connected apps. One of the main ideas behind OpenSocial is to unify development across the different Social Networking sites. Currently the status seems to be “learn once, use everywhere.”

The following panel discussion revealed that the main problem currently in writing to a new container is to learn which viral channels to use and what and how the users like to use them. So it seems that OpenSocial is getting close to the goal. The discussion seem to concentrated also much around what kind of apps would be the top apps in years to come (are we still pinching and poking)? Some offered that it might be those apps that can be monetized – which still seems to be very difficult. A few claimed that they were profitable by using micropayments and many agreed that there is a difference between the different geographical areas when it comes to monetization.

In the end, I started thinking that as OpenSocial has persistence features and furthermore provides developers methods to make requests to their own servers through the container, it might be possible to write a full-fledged social network spanning over all existing OpenSocial sites. It would not matter where your users are originally logged in, they could still participate in your network. However, you would probably need to provide server capability and therefore the monetization comes to play an important part again.

The night ended with SUN sponsored OpenBar and some interesting discussions. Unfortunately I had to retire quite early after the long day. Overall, it was a good meeting, so if you have chance to visit future OpenSocial meet-ups, just go!

The latest Technology Review has an interesting article about social network business and how social networks still have a lot of challenges to monetize their communities. New models, but also new solutions, are needed. And a key issue is to get advertising work properly in the social media.

Technology Review summarizes the new technologies to get advertising work in social media: “Startups that help advertisers and marketers better target the users of social-networking sites are fashionable investments for venture capitalists in North America and Europe. Such startups hope to sell advertisers detailed information about individual social networkers. They include the brand-new 33Across (which we profile in our list of 10 notable startups, which begins on page 50) and the more established Finnish company Xtract, which counts Vodafone, T-Mobile, and Blyk among its customers and has begun selling its software to advertising agencies and online marketers and publishers. ”

Jason Pontin, Editor in Chief and Publisher of Technology Review, commented in the Millenium Prize event that our solution is the most complete solution he has seen for solving “the multi-billion dollar problem.” It is nice to see that we have really found a way to build solutions to monetize digital communities.

Blog was not invented in China, but it has been hugely popular in this country. Nowadays, almost everybody has a blog, presenting whatever he/she feels like to. Its users range from Nintendo DSL gamers to pop stars, and its hosts range from Windows Live Spaces to the Chinese native blog host www.bokee.com. And nonetheless, many of these hosts are reported to have attracted a large number of users.

This popularity can be probably attributed to the common Chinese character of being self-contained. Many Chinese prefer to keep their opinions to themselves rather than speaking out aloud. However, they do have a desire to share their experiences and knowledge, if the communications channel is right. Blogs are clearly one of those. Very often, the Chinese simply exchange their blog addresses, and then, when sitting back at home, they talk to each other over the blog. Blogs have obviously facilitated information flow and the construction of social networks in this country and particularly among the youth.
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Chris Anderson, the author of the Long Tail book, has written a good blog post with the title “Social networking is a feature, not a destination” about social networking websites. His point is that social networking should not be the privilege of specialized social websites, such as Facebook or MySpace. Instead, every website should incorporate social networking features.

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Here at Xtract we get to work with data sets which are often in the form of networks. These may be, for example, social network data sets in online forums or links between web pages.

Often it would be useful to draw pictures of these networks, to understand better what their structure is. However, with networks that have millions of nodes, this is in practice impossible.

The problem of visualizing large networks is a common one and many different mathematical and aesthetical approaches have been taken to tackle it. Visual complexity is an interesting website, where a large number of network visualizations are presented.

We’re getting more content on youtube! Maybe we’ll end up having soon clips from last week’s Xtract birthday after party.

When Arlinda asked me to write something about my master’s thesis on the company blog, I was stumbled. Thus is not because I wouldn’t have anything to tell about the thesis. Instead, I have been basically living the thesis for the last eight months, which makes it difficult to pick any single viewpoint to the work.

The topic of my thesis work is Bayesian clustering of huge friendship networks. It discusses methods to find structure in large networks, such as networks of friendships and presents an algorithm for this purpose, originally devised by Janne Sinkkonen, the chief researcher here at Xtract.

The algorithm finds overlapping group (i.e., cluster) structure of nodes. In each group the nodes are expected to possess similar traits and each node may belong to multiple groups.

The method studied in the thesis uses a Bayesian model of friendship formation, which is based on the theory of homophily studied by sociologists since 1950’s. What is nice about the approach is that it not only tells into which groups each node belongs, but also about the certainty of the group assignments.

It was interesting to do the thesis for a company, because there was a real need for the algorithm: The algorithm and its implementation are now being taken into use in customer projects. This is different from the academics, where the developer may often be the only one to ever use a reference implementation.

You can read more about the algorithm from the abstract we wrote for the MLG’07 -workshop: “Inferring vertex properties from topology in large networks”.