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Posts Tagged ‘social networks’

Actually, MyMicrobes does sound like an interesting project, even if we have a visceral reaction to any new social network or even the phrase social network or really anything relating to social networks that doesn't star Justin Timberlake. Peer Bork, a biochemist at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, Germany, is behind MyMicrobes. It's expensive to start--it'll cost about $2,100 to get your gut bacteria sequenced, which involves mailing a fecal sample to Germany (seriously). That's expensive compared to, say, 23andMe, which is inclined to host crazy sales even despite the cheap entry fee. But apparently the gut bacteria is a much trickier genome to sequence than the human, with a few billion more lines of DNA to decipher.

In any case, MyMicrobes is hoping to create a social network so as to gather as much data as possible from folks actually suffering from gastrointestinal disorders. They estimate they'll need about 5,000 applicants before they can really glean meaningful data out of the social network, which may be difficult due to the cost. Still, it's definitely a one-of-a-kind project, and if you love talking about the intricacies of your gut, there aren't a ton of places to do it.

[Nature]

In a statement this morning to other members of Parliament (MPs), Cameron let loose with this bit of totalitarian wisdom:

"Free flow of information can be used for good. But it can also be used for ill. So we are working with the police, the intelligence services and industry to look at whether it would be right to stop people communicating via these websites and services when we know they are plotting violence, disorder and criminality."

That was about all the detail Cameron gave, so, as Thinq noted, we don't know how he might approach the task of shutting down Twitter's, Facebook's, and BlackBerry's U.K. services--though of course it is possible. Several Middle Eastern nations, including the United Arab Emirates, have in the past blocked BlackBerry from operating on their soil. But for the U.K. to even think about such a step, and to express it in such a high-profile speech, is a bit shocking.

Shutting down social networks is not an unfamiliar approach--we saw it in a more severe form in Egypt, when the government shut the Internet down entirely in an effort to quell protests mostly by stymying the use of Facebook and Twitter as protest coordination tools. (That didn't last, of course, and Egyptian Internet services went back online after about a week.) But it ignores that social media is also being used en masse for beneficial coordination, like the 20,000-person-strong London Cleanup Facebook page. That's not even to mention the "Supporting the Met Police against the London rioters" page, which has garnered nearly a million Likes. It remains to be seen whether Cameron and the police forces will actually pursue this line of inquiry. In the meantime, authorities are using the country's ridiculously dense system of CCTV cameras (one for every 14 people!) to identify looters.

[via Thinq]

Google+ is, despite that difference, essentially Google's riff on Facebook. It may not seem all that new at first, but it is a very big idea and implemented into Google's myriad properties, especially Gmail, on a scale we haven't seen before. Facebook was an outcropping of networks like MySpace and dating sites--centered around the profile page. Google+, though, is a sharing engine. Google describes the main thrust of Google+ as sharing: It's designed to let you share status updates, links, videos, and whatever else with exactly who you want.

To do that, Google created "Circles," which are essentially groups into which you place specific clumps of people--family, friends, co-workers, that kind of thing. Sharing is done to those circles, rather than to everyone in your social network (which might include coworkers, exes, relatives, and other undesirables). The layout of the Circles is pretty cute; removing a contact from a Circle blasts them into a puff of smoke, to which you are free to add your own laser noises. Interface has historically been a weak spot at Google, as many Android owners (or foes) will tell you, but the head of design for Google+ is an ex-Apple designer who seems to be overcoming Google's design woes.

There are a few other ways to communicate with a set group of people: There's an instant-messaging-type service for small groups, and a video chat service called Hangouts that lets you spontaneously jump into group video chats. The latter feature is definitely something we haven't seen before, and it's emblematic of Google's new strategy with Google+: Google wants you to spend as much time as possible in Google+, rather than the typical Google method of getting you in and out with your data quickly.

Then there's a feature called Sparks, which is sort of like an automated news feed--add your interests, and it gives you a stream of things you might care about, a bit like StumbleUpon, which you can then share with whomever you want. Presumably, Google Reader, Google's excellent RSS reader web app, will also have lots of Google+ sharing options. Sparks will run alongside your social feed (updates and shared items from people you know), though Google hasn't ruled out combining the two feeds sometime in the future.

Your actual network is created from other Google users, but you can add anyone, even if they don't want to use Google+. Just add an email address to a Circle, and that person can be emailed updates just like everyone else. According to this startlingly in-depth look at the birth of Google+, Facebook integration is not in the cards--apparently, Facebook is unwilling to work with an obvious competitor.

Google+ will be all over Google; aside from an Android (and, soon, iPhone) app, you'll see a link to your Google+ page whenever you use any Google web service, alongside the links to search, Maps, Reader, and all the rest. It's in a small private beta for now, as Google works on the kinks to avoid another Buzz situation. But this is going to be a major part of Google's identity from now on--if we're to believe the hype, this isn't just a new app. This is a new direction for Google itself. Whether people will use it...well, that remains to be seen.

[Google]

One Facebook user warned Jason Valdez that a SWAT officer was hiding in the bushes outside the motel room where he was holed up with a hostage.

“Thank you homie,” Valdez replied. “Good looking out.”

Valdez, 36, is in critical condition after shooting himself in the chest as SWAT officers stormed his hotel room, according to the AP.

Valdez was charged with drug possession back in March, and a judge issued a warrant for his arrest when he didn’t show up for court June 1. Police tried to serve him with a felony drug warrant Friday afternoon, and he barricaded himself inside the Western Colony Inn in Ogden, AP said. He said he was with a woman named Veronica, who police described as a hostage.

His first Facebook post, updated at 11:23 p.m. Friday, reads in part: “I'm currently in a standoff ... kinda ugly, but ready for whatever. I love u guyz and if I don't make it out of here alive that I'm in a better place and u were all great friends.”

In all, he posted six updates, including pictures of himself and Veronica. He received more than 100 comments from family and friends, many of whom pleaded with him to “do the right thing,” AP notes. Others offered words of support, even “liking” his update about shooting at police. Click through to the AP's account for a full re-telling of the tale.

Now the police are debating whether to charge any of his friends with obstruction of justice for hampering a police investigation. His friends' responses, including words of support and details about the scene, gave him an advantage, police said.

This could be a new realm for law enforcement and attorneys — how do you file charges for activity that happened in an online setting?

"We're not sure yet how to deal with it," said Ogden Lt. Danielle Croyle.

[AP]

Experiment shows potential value of citizen medicine

The effort started after a tiny 2008 clinical study involving 16 patients suggested the chemical lithium carbonate could slow the progression of ALS. The disease gradually robs patients of muscle function, ending in death. One drug, riluzole, has been shown to slow the disease’s progression, but the prospect of a new drug excited many ALS patients, most of whom only live about three to five years after diagnosis.

Lithium is already approved to treat a wide range of other disorders, including mental illness, so a group of ALS patients convinced their doctors to provide them with the drug. It wasn’t a randomized trial, but for the patients involved, that wasn’t the point.

“While not a replacement for the gold standard double blind clinical trial, our platform can provide supplementary data to support effective decision-making in medicine and discovery,” said Jamie Heywood, co-founder of the network PatientsLikeMe.

Heywood, whose brother succumbed to ALS in 2006, he has been an advocate for biotechnology to treat ALS and other disorders.

After the 2008 study was reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, PatientsLikeMe created a data-acquisition form that allowed patients to track their disease status over time, as Ars Technica explains. More than 3,500 patients started tracking their progress, with 150 beginning lithium therapy.

To come up with a control sample, PatientsLikeMe used an algorithm to compare patients who took lithium with other patients who had similar disease progression. Ultimately, the social network found lithium therapy was not having any observable effect on the patients who used it — not even a placebo effect. The evidence was reported earlier this month in the journal Nature Biotechnology.

A recent clinical study with similar findings lends even more weight to the patient-generated study, Ars Technica reports.

Though the results were disappointing for ALS sufferers, the study suggests crowdsourced data can be useful for accelerating clinical discovery. PatientsLikeMe has about 100,000 patient members who suffer from more than 500 conditions, so there are likely many potential study candidates and plenty of information waiting to be tapped.

[via Ars Technica]

While sales of video games in physical stores is declining, the amount spent online on digital goods for games is skyrocketing.

Market researcher NPD said today that gamers spent $2.6 billion to $2.9 billion on digital online goods, such as downloadable games on the consoles and social network games on the PC. The new data should ease fears that the video-game business is declining as a whole, while supporting the notion that games are becoming even stronger as an industry by transitioning to broader business platforms beyond the old boxes-in-stores model.

Gamers still spent $3.7 billion on console and PC games purchased in physical stores in the first half of 2010.

The digital goods figure includes revenue from used games (which are often bought online, but can also be bought in stores), game rentals, subscriptions, full game digital downloads, social network games, downloadable content, and mobile game apps. In other words, NPD is including its best estimates on the full bucket of the game industry, including its fast growing parts such as Facebook and iPhone games.

Dollars spent on physical retail items such as hardware, software and accessories still accounts for the majority of the total consumer spend. But when you factor in digital content, the total consumer spend is 40 percent larger than new physical retail sales alone.

“Our expanded research coverage allows us to assess the total consumer spend  across the growing number of ways to acquire and experience gaming, including social networks,” said Anita Frazier, analyst at NPD.

NPD does its research through point- of-sale and consumer research tracking.

[photo credit: lolcatpics.com]

Tags: Facebook games, iPhone, mobile games, Social networks, video games

Companies: NPD

People: Anita Frazier

What’s really nice about the new Twitter is the way it puts a lot more information about a tweet in front of you navigating away from your Twitter stream. A two-pane interface keeps your stream on the left and fills the right pane with information about individual tweets as you select them. Click on a tweet in your stream, and the right pane populates with that user’s last few tweets, anyone mentioned within the post, people who have re-tweeted it, etc.

Also cool: the way the new interface lets you access media within individual tweets. If someone embeds a pic or a video within a tweet, rather than just linking out to that content on another page, it shows the full-size photo or video player in the right pane, letting you get right to the content and then back to cruising your stream without ever leaving Twitter. Even cooler: you can share an entire Flickr gallery via a tweet, which populates the right pane with thumbnails for the collection. You can even launch a Flickr slideshow in the right pane, again without leaving your stream.

Those are the highlights, which are punctuated by other little improvements, like a new set of hot keys (including one to refresh your stream), the display of people’s real names next to their Twitter handles, and a slimmer, less dominating “What’s Happening?” box – the one where you actually pen your tweets – letting the stream of content take center stage (according to TechCrunch's live blog of the announcement, this was to play up the idea that you don’t actually have to contribute to the Twitter dialogue to take advantage of it as a media exploration tool).

You don’t have to take our word for it. The new, sleeker Twitter is live here.