The Human Social Dynamics group at Yahoo! Research just launched Friend Sense, a Facebook application that measures how much people know about their friends' attitudes and beliefs. It is surprisingly fun to play--even a little addictive--especially if your friends are playing as well.
Friend Sense helps you discover how well you really do know your friends. Guess their views on life, politics, and relationships. Answer questions about yourself and find out who knows you best! Friend Sense is part of a Yahoo! Research project on social attitudes and perceptions.
Who built it
How do I get it
Friend Sense is a Facebook app. You must be a logged in Facebook user to add the Friend Sense application. If you're already using Facebook, you can grab the app here.
Popularity: 15% [?]
Do your friends check themselves out in the mirror more than five times a day? Would they be willing to pay higher taxes to support universal health care? Do they believe in heaven?
Although we share some of our most intimate secrets with friends, at times it's startling to realize how little we know about them. The Human Social Dynamics group at Yahoo! Research has just launched Friend Sense, a Facebook application that measures how much people know about their friends' attitudes and beliefs. It is surprisingly fun to play--even a little addictive--especially when your friends start playing as well.
We were inspired to create Friend Sense by a remarkable finding in political sociology. Despite increasingly polarized political parties and ideological rhetoric, most Americans are neither consistently “liberal” nor “conservative.” In contrast to our image of a country divided into red states and blue states, America is unexpectedly purple. To give just one example, knowing someone’s view on affirmative action gives you little insight into their attitude on the death penalty. Friend Sense is both a test bed for our theories of political polarization, and a compelling Facebook app that gives people a rare view into what their friends, family members, and co-workers think.
The Human Social Dynamics team, part of the Microeconomics and Social Systems group of Yahoo! Research, is devoted to understanding the interplay between individual-level behavior and the social environment in which those actions inescapably play out. Our group is multi-disciplinary, drawing on tools from computer science, economics, statistics, sociology and psychology.
We hope you'll check out Friend Sense and invite your friends to play. And of course, we'd really value your feedback. Please don't hesitate to share your impressions by leaving a comment here.
Popularity: 11% [?]
PhotoSoup is a visual word puzzle generator built with tag-photo pairs from Flickr. This prototype uses public, Creative-Commons-licensed photos and Flickr's open APIs. The object of the game is to find all the tags hidden (up, down, across, and diagonal) in the puzzle square. The photos around the perimeter of the puzzle are the clues -- the player views a series of photos and tries to discover the associated tag-words. The player's objective is to find all the tags hidden in the puzzle before time runs out.
PhotoSoup began as a hack for Yahoo! Europe's internal hack day back in October 2007. When our puzzle hack won the "Coolest Hack" prize, we were inspired to finish what we'd started, and share the fun with the rest of the world.
To create and play a new puzzle, the player enters a topic (or tag), such as "zoo" or "landscape" or "food." Or, you can enter your own Flickr screen name to generate a puzzle built with images from your photostream. Of course, you can also try this with public photos from your friends and contacts, by entering their screen names.
Who built it
How do I get it
Finally, it's worth mentioning that it is also possible to embed a PhotoSoup puzzle on your homepage, or in a blog. Simply follow the link to embed the puzzle, and we will generate the code that you should include.
Popularity: 15% [?]
PhotoSoup started as a hack for an internal Yahoo! Europe Hack Day this past fall. Despite an approaching deadline for participation at the upcoming 2008 WWW conference, we could no longer resist the challenge, and had to participate. Over lunch in Barcelona, we started collecting and discussing ideas we could implement in 24 hours, that would have some potential to win.
We came up with PhotoSoup, a visual word puzzle generator that allows players to create word search puzzles with tag-photo pairs taken from Flickr. The tag is hidden in the puzzle, and the photo is shown as a clue. The objective is to find all hidden tags in the puzzle before you run out of time. The jury loved it, and we won the prize for "coolest hack."
Most of us on the PhotoSoup team work at Yahoo! Research in Barcelona, Spain. The Barcelona lab is one of Yahoo!'s three international research laboratories outside the U.S., and has a truly international character. We currently speak 14 different languages and represent an equal number of nationalities. The Barcelona lab is young -- just recently we celebrated our second anniversary. Our work is focused on topics related to Web retrieval, mining, natural language processing (NLP), and multimedia.
The photo above shows the PhotoSoup team members. Simon Overell is missing from this photo. At the time of our hack, he was an intern at Yahoo! Research, but now he's now back in London on a mission to finish his PhD at Imperial College. Lluis Garcia (Yahoo! Spain) is our man with Flash running through his veins. Lluis single-handedly developed the PhotoSoup front-end in Flex and connected all the back-end components produced by the other team members.
Saludos desde España,
Roelof
Popularity: 12% [?]
Roelof van Zwol, January 25th, 2008 on 1:30 pm
In the summer of 2006, I was fortunate enough to watch the World Cup final in Dolores Park right here in San Francisco. For those of you not familiar with the park, it's nestled in the heights of the Mission district; a gentle slope gives you a spanning view of downtown. At the foot of the park, a giant crane held a big TV screen. I was struck by the thousands of people who showed up to watch the game together with their friends. Check it out to the right here. It was packed.
I thought it a shame that you couldn't do this online. There was no way to get a far away friend and watch a video together online. And so myself and some others at the Berkeley lab built a little research prototype called Zync which allows you to share videos in sync with a friend through Yahoo! Messenger (if you're running Windows).
On our blog, we posted about Zync and we pushed it to the Yahoo! Messenger Plugin Gallery. We smiled when we had 50 users. And cheered at 100. And then at 250 you could hear us roaring. It kept growing and growing.
After six months, we had over 3000 users who opted-in for our research study. This was a great success. And so we began examining how people share videos in sync. In our studies, we found people liked synchronized sharing because it made them feel closer and more connected with their friends and family. You can read some of the studies that were published at ACM Multimedia and DUX.
As proud parents of our little prototype, we're happy to announce that Zync has grown up and is now a featured plug-in in the new beta of Yahoo Messenger 9.0. If you're running the Messenger beta, just send a video URL to your friend. If Zync knows how to play it, you'll see a button that says "Watch With Me" (pictured here to the right). Click it and Zync will load up in your (and in your friend's) conversation window and the video will start playing automatically.
We couldn't be happier. I'd personally like to give a good shout to everyone on the Zync Team and John D. at Yahoo! Messenger for all their hard work in helping Zync graduate.
Oh, and if you're not ready to try out the beta just yet (read: you're still running Yahoo! Messenger 8.1), you can still install Zync from the Plugin Gallery. :)
Popularity: 8% [?]
david ayman shamma, December 3rd, 2007 on 9:30 pm
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