The advantages and disadvantages of disliking

Facebook notably doesn’t have a dislike button and the site has no plans to add one. Likewise Google+ only has a liking system, however YouTube has both liking and disliking. Many people call for disliking to be added to Google+ and Facebook but equally many people call for YouTube to remove the feature. But is disliking a good or bad thing?

The problem with liking is that it only gauges how positive people are about something and can’t really gauge if something is a good or bad thing – it gives very limited feedback. If a post only has one like does that mean that nobody has seen it or does it mean that it is actually a negative thing and many people dislike it. Without disliking it is impossible to tell whether you should continue you doing something because you don’t know the proportion of people that like it.

Just having liking is beneficial in social communities however because it reduces negative feelings between people. It doesn’t make any of us feel great if we know that nobody likes what we have achieved.

Math can be applied to this problem as well. In May I designed this formula to evaluate how appreciated a video on YouTube is:

Viralness formula

The formula can be applied just as easily to social networks. Assuming that a post reaches 130 people (the average number of Facebook friends) and that forty people had liked it whereas seven people had disliked it (assuming disliking was available) and that it had been visible for three days we would find that the post had a score of 247 whereas if we only had data available for liking it would achieve a score of 1733 meaning it would appear significantly better over time.

Ultimately I don’t think that disliking is a bad thing however I think that it has to be available from the very beginning on a site. Therefore it should be kept on YouTube but it shouldn’t be added to Facebook or Google+. If I was coding a social network I don’t think that I would add it (in fact I’d be in two minds over whether liking needed to be added or whether to just stick with commenting) but I do think it is useful.

The new YouTube layout

YouTube has got a new layout. They have had a complete revamp based on Cosmic Panda. I vaguely remember that last time they had a major update nobody liked it at first and then everyone got used to it.

I like it but I don’t like all of it. The new layout works but it feels like they want to me to be as social as possible – there are Google+ and Facebook buttons everywhere. The new video watching layout is absolutely fine because you can make the videos take up a comfortable amount of room and with AdBlock+ you actually get quite a nice view.

The colors do seem a little weird though and I have noticed the icon has changed slightly. I don’t really have too many complaints, I just don’t think it is great.

MacBook Airs playing music in sync

I was in the Apple store and I’ve been meaning to film this for a while. I used iCal to set an event on each of the MacBook Airs to play a random song (incidentally it was the first song by the first artist I could find) at the same time. The video isn’t great quality and it is a little difficult to hear because it is so loud in the Apple store, however you can tell to a certain extent that they are playing the song in sync. These MacBook Airs were at 90% volume, however it is theoretically possible to set this up on all the Macs which might be a future project. Enjoy anyway…

Unboxing videos

YouTube has loads of rubbish on it and I have now found something worse than cat videos: unboxing videos. If you search for ‘unboxing’ on YouTube the first few results have over 20,000,000 views between them. I don’t get why. We’ll look at the video above. All I can gather is that this guy has gone and bought a limited edition of Modern Warfare 2* and he is going to film himself taking it out of the box. Excellent. So he takes it out of the box. He shows us that there are some discs in the box and how they are really cool. For god’s sake, he is opening a box and taking stuff out of it.

But apparently this works. People get a kick out of watching other people take stuff out of boxes. I don’t think that I will ever, ever understand it. I guess it makes sense if it is something expensive and incredible like a Mac Pro and you might want to be able to prove you’ve got one, but surely it is more logical to do a review video and not a video that probably runs a bit like the following:

“So, I’ve got the box”
“I’m gonna take it out the box and show it to you guys”
“Man, there’s some strong tape on this”
“You’ll need scissors or a knife for this part. Make sure you don’t cut yourself”
“So I’ve got the box open”
“There’s a load of packaging in this. We’ll keep that for later.”
“So you’re just going to slide off the first layer of polystyrene”
“Be careful not to damage it because this is so cool and I need to collect everything I get from Apple”
“I bought this off of Amazon.com by the way guys”
“And now we get to the actual computer”
“You’ve gotta slide this thing out real careful”
“If you aren’t all muscular like me you’re gonna need some assistance”
“Its wrapped in plastic to keep it safe. Make sure you don’t tear it too badly”
“And now I’m going to take out the computer”
“OMFG! Its scratched”
“I’m kidding. This is Apple. Apple doesn’t scratch stuff”
“Got the computer on my desk”
“Plugging in the power”
“Now I’m going to plug in the screen”
“I’m going in for the first boot”
“This is frickin’ awesome.”

Or at least that is what I can gather. If you are one of the weird people that makes/watches these videos could you please explain why in the comments.

*Note at this point I should point out at this stage I’m not a gamer.

YouTube in 10 years time

I was discussing with a friend earlier what YouTube will be like in ten years time, because the future certainly is uncertain. The site, currently owned by Google, is making losses of almost half a billion dollars a year and clearly Google needs to fix this to maintain the site, especially considering the only reason they can keep it up is because of profits from all the other Google services.

But what if Google did have to sell out YouTube? Could YouTube survive on its own? YouTube is certainly a very capable company, or department, in its own right because it has completely revolutionized online video sharing like no other website, however it is dying from the inside. I would be prepared to predict that in the next five years non-partner accounts will start to have videos removed from them – but only older and less popular videos.

Of course, if YouTube does survive the financial crisis it will probably be very similar to what it is now. It will probably still have ads (and we’ll still block them with AdBlock+) and it will probably have a very similar UI on desktop, because there isn’t much that they can really change. Its like Google, Facebook or Twitter – you can’t really change the way it looks because otherwise it will stop being the way that it is.

The only major thing that YouTube really has left to do is to open up live streaming to all users via webcams, because they have pretty much everything that users have wanted changed in the past year, and frankly I am quite happy with the service as it is. YouTube might even get further integrated into Google, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see a merger with Google+ within the next few years, which could make sense because YouTube is one of the most visited ‘social networks’ and combined with Google it definitely supersedes the user base of Facebook.

“Everything that can be invented has been invented.”

Charles H. Duell said that in 1899. In case you hadn’t realized, he was wrong because in the following century computers, the internet, toasters, helicopters, airplanes, nuclear technology, space shuttles, Big Bang Theory and television were all invented. I am not going to talk about all the fascinating exploits of inventors in the 20th Century, but the development of new social websites on the internet.

The reason I am using this quote is because right now it seems reasonable in regard to new social websites. We can pretty much share anything that can be stored in digital form; text, images, videos, audio, files, etc. We don’t really need any new social sites on the web, because they will only end up copying what has been done before. An example of something that has basically copied what existed before is Google+. Facebook already did 99% (1% being circles) of the things Google+ was about. Google+ didn’t really add anything new to the social landscape (though it signed up 50 million users+).

As well as few new, exciting social projects there haven’t really been any major social media developments since about 2006/2007. At that time Facebook did exactly the same thing it does now – lets people share stuff. Twitter let people share little bits of stuff. YouTube let people share videos. They all do exactly the same things that they were doing four or five years ago. The only major, major changes have been design updates.

I think that this lack in significant change was highlighted at the Facebook F8 developer conference. The big new feature was Timelines, and all that does is let users look back at everything they’ve ever done on the site. Facebook wasn’t reinventing the wheel and they weren’t adding anything amazing and new. It almost seemed that Timelines were there just to make sure that Google didn’t come up with the idea first.

I don’t agree that everything in social media has been invented because come next year there will be more developer conferences and more new stuff coming along. But I don’t think that social media will be the stage for the next big website, or the next Google, or the next Facebook. I very much doubt that Facebook will ever really lose its monopoly in the social networking area. It’ll be like Google – nothing anyone else creates will be better because Google and Facebook always have more data to work with and more customers.

Perhaps there won’t be many more social networks, but there will always be another new website…

Link sharing

There are loads if link sharing sites on the internet. I can go almost anywhere to find links to sites that I might be interested. Frankly, most social networks allow you to share links quite nicely anyway (Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Reddit, etc) however there are also other websites such as StumbleUpon and Google Reader Play that allow you to discover websites or blogs that you might be interested in based on your likes, interests and searches.

StumbleUpon works based on tags, and finds items that match tags that you like. So if I have Humor and Computing selected I tend to comics on XKCD coming up, because that is what I am interested in. This works quite well and allows me to like sites, so that I can get better suggestions in the future. It also allows me to suggest sites as well so that other people can view the things that I like and they might also like.

Google Reader Play works based on the power of Google and Google Reader. It finds blogs that similar people to you are subscribed to, and the kind of things we like in those blogs to find new content. It is also able to work on the sheer power of Google search. I frequently search for programming things, which allows me to view programming specific stuff on Google Reader Play. I am also subscribed to blogs like Gizmodo, Lifehacker and The Oatmeal. This means I frequently get a combination of Humor and Computing. Google Reader Play probably looks elsewhere as well because I frequently get very entertaining videos through it as well.

What I find interesting about link sharing is that the approaches to it are so different, but one thing is used across almost all link sharing sites: probability. It has to predict, based on odds, what I will like. Sites like StumbleUpon allow people to have a sponsored sites where SU get money from it when it gets a hit. Clearly these sponsored sites are thrown in more often, however StumbleUpon needs to ensure that they fit to make money.

Building a basic link sharing site wouldn’t be difficult. You would have a database of users, likes and sites. I could probably do it if I wanted to. The importance of probability, however, surpasses all of the other data: the Math has to be right.

Time spent on RickRoll

The RickRoll is probably the greatest of all internet memes, but internet, far too much time has been spent doing it. A good old Excel spreadsheet and a batch of YouTube search data has produced this:

That is to say that, incredibly, mankind has spent over 750 years being RickRoll’d. Basically its like Rick Astley’s face having been around since 1255. It really scares me. However, using the same approximation, Justin Bieber’s Baby has been played for 4000 years.

UPDATE: Haha, I’ve just calculated that the Nyan Cat has traveled around 500,000km based on it traveling 400 pixels a second on a 96dpi screen (this is an approximation).

Viralness Calculator

YouTube currently ranks videos based on the number of likes and the number of views – but both separately. However, this isn’t a particularly interesting way of ranking videos, and a few friends and I decided to build a simple formula that calculates how viral a video is – taking in number of views, days it has been up for, likes and dislikes. This allows us to compute how popular a video is, and the timescale that it has got popular in. To this post I have attached a spreadsheet that can calculate the viralness of a video, but here is the rough formula for it:

Viralness formula

Therefore, with this formula we can establish the following of these videos as of today, 24th May 2011:

1. Justin Bieber – Baby: 589,139
2. Charlie Bit My Finger : 1,806,195
3. Evolution of Dance: 1,070,846
4. Rebecca Black – Friday: 201,841

The reason that Friday has such a low rating is because it is not particularly appreciated, i.e. it is very disliked.

Viralness Calculator

Charlie Chaplin

For those of you who haven’t already noticed, Google has a completely different logo today to celebrate Charlie Chaplin’s birthday. There is a view from YouTube that Google has produced. You can see the video here. Unfortunately the video is both unlisted and doesn’t show how many views it has got, so it could well become one of YouTube’s most viewed videos, considering that Google gets two billion searches a day, Charlie Chaplin could easily become the most viewed viral video ever.

I most admit that I had to watch the whole video through once to figure out what it was, however something about it interested me: when it showed the search result page for Charlie Chaplin afterwards, Wikipedia came up first suggesting that Charlie Chaplin’s birthday would be tomorrow (16th April 2011), not today (15th April 2011). Not only does Wikipedia think this, but the official commemorative website does as well.

It may well be that ultimately Google leaves the video up as the logo for a few days, however they have only done this once before (with the Pacman game) so I would be very surprised if Google did that. The alternative would be that Google has made an utterly stupid error…

Interestingly, on Google trends you can see that the average number of Charlie Chaplin results are down…

UPDATE: On Google’s blog, they explained that they would be leaving the video up for 36 hours.