hilary_mason_data hilary_mason_data-2010 hilary_mason_data-2010-48 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
Source: html
Introduction: Twitter Succeeds Because it Fails Posted: September 4, 2010 | Author: hilary | Filed under: blog | Tags: failure , twitter | 9 Comments » How can twitter be so popular and successful if it’s down all the time ? We base statements like this on the assumption that quality of a web application maps linearly to the application’s stability. This is obviously true for most sites most of the time, but things get interesting at the edge where rare, unpredictable failure actually enables more complex human interactions around the service. Unlike e-mail, twitter etiquette doesn’t demand that you read or reply to every message from every person you follow (or who follows you). Combine that lightweight social touch with occasional technical issues and human communication patterns, and we start to see some interesting behavior. Twitter’s lack of reliability as a platform allows us to use the technical failings to mask our own social imperfections . How often have
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1 Twitter Succeeds Because it Fails Posted: September 4, 2010 | Author: hilary | Filed under: blog | Tags: failure , twitter | 9 Comments » How can twitter be so popular and successful if it’s down all the time ? [sent-1, score-0.919]
2 We base statements like this on the assumption that quality of a web application maps linearly to the application’s stability. [sent-2, score-0.471]
3 This is obviously true for most sites most of the time, but things get interesting at the edge where rare, unpredictable failure actually enables more complex human interactions around the service. [sent-3, score-1.085]
4 Unlike e-mail, twitter etiquette doesn’t demand that you read or reply to every message from every person you follow (or who follows you). [sent-4, score-0.667]
5 Combine that lightweight social touch with occasional technical issues and human communication patterns, and we start to see some interesting behavior. [sent-5, score-0.876]
6 Twitter’s lack of reliability as a platform allows us to use the technical failings to mask our own social imperfections . [sent-6, score-0.623]
7 How often have you heard or said something like “I was sure I was following you” or “I must not have gotten that DM” or even “I think I tweeted that…”? [sent-7, score-0.628]
8 Even just a small percent of users behaving this way changes the social expectations. [sent-8, score-0.467]
9 I’d love to construct an experiment to figure out whether this idea has merit, and if so, what the optimal amount of unavailable operations for social deniability is. [sent-9, score-0.782]
10 Does it matter if any fail, as long as we believe that every so often failure occurs? [sent-13, score-0.965]
11 (How often do things really get lost in the mail , anyway? [sent-14, score-0.436]
12 ) It’s amusing to conceive of a system that succeeds socially because it often fails technically. [sent-15, score-0.838]
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same-blog 1 0.99999976 48 hilary mason data-2010-09-04-Twitter Succeeds Because it Fails
Introduction: Twitter Succeeds Because it Fails Posted: September 4, 2010 | Author: hilary | Filed under: blog | Tags: failure , twitter | 9 Comments » How can twitter be so popular and successful if it’s down all the time ? We base statements like this on the assumption that quality of a web application maps linearly to the application’s stability. This is obviously true for most sites most of the time, but things get interesting at the edge where rare, unpredictable failure actually enables more complex human interactions around the service. Unlike e-mail, twitter etiquette doesn’t demand that you read or reply to every message from every person you follow (or who follows you). Combine that lightweight social touch with occasional technical issues and human communication patterns, and we start to see some interesting behavior. Twitter’s lack of reliability as a platform allows us to use the technical failings to mask our own social imperfections . How often have
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Introduction: Conference: Search and Social Media 2010 Posted: February 16, 2010 | Author: hilary | Filed under: academics , blog , Presentations | Tags: algorithms , conference , research , search | 2 Comments » I recently attended the Third Annual Workshop on Search and Social Media , an academic workshop with very strong industry participation. The workshop was packed, and had some of the most informative and interesting panel discussions I’ve seen (not counting the one I spoke on!). Daniel Tunkelang did a great job of writing up the specific presentations on his site and on the ACM blog , so I won’t attempt to re-create the presentations line by line at this late date. Rather, I’d like to highlight a few open problems and research questions that came out of the discussions that I hope to see developed in the next year. Social search consists of a set of problems including (but hardly limited to) search of social content like status updat
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Introduction: Speaking: Title Slides + Twitter = You Win Posted: March 8, 2013 | Author: Hilary Mason | Filed under: speaking | Tags: slides , speaking , title , twitter | 2 Comments » Your title slide should focus on the title of the talk. It should also include your name and affiliation, your logo if you have a cute one, possibly your blog or e-mail address if you want people to get in touch, and your twitter handle. Here’s one of mine: I usually mention that the beginning of the talk that if people have questions they can tweet them at me. This isn’t just because Twitter is a great way to get questions from people too shy to speak up (or who don’t get an opportunity). Here’s the hack: letting people know that you’ll be reading everything they say about your talk on Twitter makes them more likely to say nice things. Further, in a multi-track conference, people who weren’t actually in your talk (or were there but not paying a lot of attention) will judge your
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Introduction: Create a group Twitter account Posted: January 22, 2008 | Author: hilary | Filed under: blog | Tags: hack , social networking , twitter , web apps , web dev | 13 Comments » Twitter rocks. It’s useful for all kinds of things , but especially for chronicling a live event as it happens, including the pre-event discussion and post-conference wrapup. We’re very excited to be hosting NewB Camp here in Providence, RI on February 23rd. In preparation for the event, Sara created a NewBCamp Twitter account and I coded up this quick script to pull in all tweets related to the conference. It examines all of your followers tweets for a particular phrase or tag, and then reposts those tweets containing the tag to its own timeline with the author’s name prepended. I’m running this as a cron job on my hosting account. You can see it in action here . This is a quick hack. It has a couple of issue that I’m aware of: Someone has to log in and manually add
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Introduction: Twitter Succeeds Because it Fails Posted: September 4, 2010 | Author: hilary | Filed under: blog | Tags: failure , twitter | 9 Comments » How can twitter be so popular and successful if it’s down all the time ? We base statements like this on the assumption that quality of a web application maps linearly to the application’s stability. This is obviously true for most sites most of the time, but things get interesting at the edge where rare, unpredictable failure actually enables more complex human interactions around the service. Unlike e-mail, twitter etiquette doesn’t demand that you read or reply to every message from every person you follow (or who follows you). Combine that lightweight social touch with occasional technical issues and human communication patterns, and we start to see some interesting behavior. Twitter’s lack of reliability as a platform allows us to use the technical failings to mask our own social imperfections . How often have
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Introduction: Speaking: Your Slides != Your Talk Posted: June 14, 2013 | Author: Hilary Mason | Filed under: speaking | Tags: design , obama , slides | Leave a comment » Slides are the supporting structure for your talk, not the main event . Speak the meaty and informative portion of the presentation out loud and use slides as a backdrop to set either the emotional tone or reinforce the message that you are trying to convey. For example, I love using this image of Obama in Berlin as a backdrop when I talk about the growth of social data over the last several years. In this image every single person has a device and is generating their own data about their shared social experience. The content of the image supports what is otherwise a fairly abstract statement, and you can feel the excitement of the crowd, boosting the excitement that I want to share about the possibilities of social data. This is a particular style of slide design will fail for situations wher
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Introduction: Following a group of Twitterers without exhausting SMS Posted: March 8, 2008 | Author: hilary | Filed under: blog | Tags: code , hack , sms , social networking , sxsw , twitter , utilities , web apps , web dev | Leave a comment » I’m at SXSW, and I want an ability to see the latest Tweets from the group of Twitterers that I follow who are here in the area. I also have a limited number of text messages on my phone (1500, but still). I coded up a quick app that allows you to great a group of twitterers and see their latest tweet on a mobile-friend page. Check it out . Comments are welcome!
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Introduction: Twitter: A greasemonkey script to show who follows you Posted: January 1, 2009 | Author: hilary | Filed under: blog | Tags: extension , firefox , greasemonkey , script , socialmedia , status , twitter | 9 Comments » A couple of days ago I saw @skap5′s comment : “Dear Twitter Is it too much to ask to add a follower marker so I can know if someone is following me and not just if I am following them?” I think that Twitter could benefit from displaying more information on the home page, and this idea was easy enough to code up. It should save some time and make the Twitter homepage that much more useful. The script displays a tiny icon on top of the portrait of people who are following you back on your Twitter home page. It leaves your non-followers alone, though it would be easy enough to develop a version that puts silly mustaches on them. This is only a first version, and I welcome your comments and suggestions. If you already have Greasemo
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Introduction: One Random Tweet, please. Posted: February 18, 2013 | Author: Hilary Mason | Filed under: projects | 4 Comments » One random tweet. It’s easy to believe that other people use social networks in the same way that you do. Your friends largely do use them the same way, which gives us an even more biased perspective. Unfortunately, most networks don’t provide a way to explore representative communications that you’re not connected to. Well, now you can! One random tweet , please. Update: There were some slight technical difficulties due to hitting Twitter’s oembed rate limit. They should be repaired now. (Note: between this and bookbookgoose.com I’m on a bit of a random kick lately. There’s a method to this madness!)
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Introduction: What do you read that changes the way you think? Posted: August 21, 2011 | Author: Hilary Mason | Filed under: blog | Tags: books , philosophy , reading | 24 Comments » A friend asked me which of three startup business books she should read. Obama’s reading list since entering office has nothing surprising on it. The most valuable books I read this year have been stories of things very different from what I spend most of my time thinking about. One of my favorites was China Meiville’s The City & The City , which I loved for the ambition and artistry, and another was Simon Winchester’s The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary , which I loved for the descriptions of creating an analog, scalable information system. What have you read recently that was really great? Edit: Thanks for the recommendations! There are also a bunch over on Google Plus .
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