Mediaboss Marketing

Building 16 at Facebook headquarters is home to the Fishbowl, Mark Zuckerbergs private all-glass corner conference room that sits beneath a red vintage sign that reads The Hacker Company. Not far from the sign a very visual proclamation that the social networking giant is eternally intent on building new stuff and improving the stuff it has already built youll find one of the companys most important operations: the News Feed engineering team.

These are the programmers who oversee the Facebook tool that instantly streams all sorts of new information including status posts, Likes, links, and photos to more than a billion Facebook users across the globe. The teams ultimate task is to make sure your news feed delivers content youre actually interested in. Thats important because Facebook wants you to keep using its social network, but also because this stream of information includes ads and other sponsored content, the stuff that makes the company money.

At the helm of this enterprise is Lars Backstrom, a 31-year-old with a computer science Ph.D from Cornell University. My day job is to improve the quality of News Feed, he says, during a recent interview at Facebook HQ, in Menlo Park, California.

This week, with a paper published on the online academic research site ArXiv.org, Backstrom revealed one of the recent fruits of his labor: an experimental algorithm that analyzes your personal network of friends, seeking to identify your strongest relationships. Developed alongside his former Cornell thesis adviser, Jon Kleinberg, the algorithm is strong enough to independently identity your spouse or romantic partner and even predict when youre headed for a breakup.

Eric Horvitz

Yes, odds are youve already told Facebook who your romantic partner is via your profile page. But this algorithm does much more than that. Its not a party trick. Its a way for Facebook to better understand who you are and, ultimately, serve you more stuff that you wan to see.

Backstroms research is part of a growing movement at companies and universities to use machine learning and large amounts of online data to better understand human behavior and interactions and interests. Extending our knowledge about people through the computational lens provided by large scale online services is unprecedented, says Eric Horvitz, managing co-director of the Microsoft Research lab in Redmond, Washington. These kinds of data analytics are revolutionizing social science and changing our deep understanding of people as social beings.

Some projects will even explore how information that ripples across the web can help us better analyze the effects of the world we live in how Google, Microsoft and Yahoo searches can be used to detect drug side effects, for instance, or how social media can predict epidemics. Backstroms algorithm predicts relationships, and as it turns out, that helps improve the online services that give us all that data in the first place. There is a deep scientific interest in the structure of human ties, says Horvitz. Understanding peoples preferences and interests is core in providing an engaging and informative service.

Whats more, an engaging and informative service can directly translate into profits in the form of improved sales and better advertising, and that means companies like Facebook, Microsoft and Google are doubly interested in this kind of research.

Backstroms project draws from studies done in the 1980s by sociologist Scott Feld on the organization of social ties (.pdf). But it introduces a new metric that can capture some of the complexity and nuances of social lives a metric that could be used to make predictions about peoples activities and interests.

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Why Guessing Your Romantic Partner Is So Important to Facebook

October 31, 2013

redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports Your Universe Online

Social networking titan Facebook is testing new Web and mobile tracking methods that would drastically expand the breadth of data it collects from members in hopes of better understand user behavior, The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday.

Ken Rudin, Facebooks analytics chief, said the social network may start collecting data about user interaction with various types of content, such as how long members hover their cursor over an advertisement and whether a user is viewing parts of their news feed on a smartphone.

Ultimately, Facebook seeks to enhance its existing set of demographic and behavioral data on members, and would use the additional information to improve its products, Rudin told WSJ during an interview on Tuesday.

Facebook currently collects two kinds of data from its members demographic and behavioral. The demographic data captures a users life outside social media, while the behavioral data, such as a persons likes and friends, is collected in real time on the network itself.

The latest tests would greatly expand the behavioral data that is collected, and are part of an ongoing comprehensive technology testing program, although the company should know within months whether it makes sense to incorporate the new data collection into the business, Rudin explained.

It is a never-ending phase. I cant promise that it will roll out. We probably will know in a couple of months, Rudin told the Journal.

As the head of analytics, Mr. Rudin is preparing the companys infrastructure for a massive increase in the volume of its data.

Facebook uses a modified version of the open-source Hadoop distributed file system, which stores large amounts of data on clusters of inexpensive machines, to manage its data. There are additional software layers on top of Hadoop, which rank the value of data and make sure it is accessible, Rudin said.

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New Web, Mobile Tracking Methods Being Tested By Facebook

Indian apparel brands are finally getting up close and personal with consumers through social media.

Its Fashion Week all year round for some apparel brands, with social networking sites turning out to be the new age marketing tools that designers are now delving into to advertise and retail their collections.

Apparel majors have realised that no other medium provides room for such an up close and personal relationship with consumers on a mass scale. Though consumers need to like what they are going to buy and wear, and design and style is ever important in this category, brand is all important when it comes to establishing a real emotional connect with the customer.

Brand importance has increased tenfold for fashion consumers. And apparel manufacturers, who were once relegated to only receiving feedback from retailers, now have the power to engage directly with customers.

With social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube and even Instagram, Tumblr and Pinterest, apparel brands are hosting a Fashion Week round the clock, 365 days a year.

Adapting to the medium has helped prospective clients become aware about the latest happenings and launches regarding the designers brand, said Mahesh Solanki, social media artist, who consults at leading apparel houses in Mumbai.

He went on to add that creating a successful apparel line is very difficult as it is. Keeping it consistent and evolving with the audience over the long haul is more challenging.

Brands are not individual products. It is all about the products and marketing and multi channel experience and service and corporate identity, all sewn up together that bring on a greater deliverable to the consumer. Getting the right elements in place is not an easy task for many, said Solanki.

Fashion, he added, is discretionary. The promise of a brand must tug at a consumer's emotions to make a sale, for consumers express who they are or want to be by the brands they choose.

Tracking real-time social activity, which caters to audience growth, engagement, advocacy, and message propagation, is a tough task. However, with massive competition among fashion apparel brands, brands are in dire need of understanding what is in the minds of their consumers and which factors have influenced their shopping behaviour.

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Fashion Week, all year through

BRENTWOOD A Hampstead woman is suing Exeter Hospital and other agencies, claiming she became infected with hepatitis C through contact with her husband after he contracted the virus from serial infector David Kwiatkowski while being treated at the hospital.

In a lawsuit filed in Rockingham County Superior Court, Linda Sanborn says her husband, Alden Butch Sanborn, transmitted hepatitis C to her through intimate contact that occurred before they were aware of his infection.

Certainly its a fear of spouses and an understandable one, Linda Sanborns attorney, Paul Kleinman said of the partners of those affected by the hepatitis C outbreak caused by Kwiatkowskis drug diversion scheme while working as a hospital lab technician.

According to the suit, Butch Sanborn was admitted to the hospitals cardiac catheterization lab on Jan. 27, 2012, for a procedure.

The suit said he became infected with hepatitis C through Kwiatkowski, who has admitted that while working at Exeter Hospital he would swap out the pain killer fentanyl by taking a syringe of the drug and replacing it with a syringe containing saline. He would inject the drug and then refill the syringe with saline. The syringes dirty needle was then reused on unsuspecting patients.

Butch Sanborn was diagnosed with hepatitis C, a potentially fatal viral infection of the liver, in late March 2012 after he was admitted to a Boston hospital.

Linda Sanborn was tested for the virus last year, but the test result was negative at the time, according to Kleinman of Bouchard, Kleinman & Wright of Manchester.

What happened was it was one of those situations where the disease hadnt shown up at that point. This was a unique situation and one where it was passed on by someone who had a very, very significant viral load in terms of the disease, Kleinman said Wednesday.

New Hampshire Director of Public Health Dr. Jose Montero said Wednesday he could not discuss any particular patient, but he did confirm that only one person contracted hepatitis C through secondary transmission.

Experts say hepatitis C is transmitted when blood from a person infected with the virus enters the body of someone who is not infected.

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Wife of hepatitis C victim, claiming she's now infected, sues Exeter Hospital

The first phase of a clinical trial of an antibody therapy that increases a person's chance of surviving the potentially fatal Hendra virus will begin early next year.

The world-first trial will extensively test the safety of the therapy, which is the only known way of treating a person exposed to Hendra.

The human monoclonal antibody will be tested on between 20 and 40 healthy adults.

Queensland's chief health officer Jeanette Young says no side effects are expected.

"We think it's a very, very safe drug but we haven't done the work," she said in Brisbane.

Dr Young says the treatment must be administered within days of exposure for it to be effective.

The antibody has been used to treat a handful of people, but has never been tested extensively on humans.

If the trial is successful, the antibody could be routinely given to those exposed to the virus.

US Hendra expert professor Christopher Broder developed the antibody, which effectively blocks virus particles from entering human cells, hopefully allowing the immune system to fight off the virus.

"We are really excited to see that it might actually be an antibody that is going to save someone's life in the future, which is pretty rare when you consider the severity of someone getting the Hendra virus," he said via video link on Thursday.

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Hendra therapy set for human trial