Visualizing YouTube User Networks (Lococitato.com)

I recently ran across a very nice little tool for visualizing the connections between a YouTube user, his or her subscribers and his or her "friends". The tool, called YT Visualizer, is in beta but has worked very well since I started using it yesterday.

A trial version of the software is available for download from Loco Citato, the website of XMT Partners, a UK software design firm. (Note: I scanned the software for viruses and spyware/malware with two separate programs and found nothing but, as with all software you download, you do so at your own risk).

To get it to work (after you have downloaded and installed the software), all you have to do is enter the user name of someone who has uploaded a video to YouTube. For demonstration purposes, I used "almasri002".

Almasri002 has uploaded 323 videos to YouTube, many of which are videos that appear to support Islamic extremism. According to his "channel" on YouTube, he also has 488 subscribers and 567 "friends". Understanding more about this social network could conceivably be valuable in understanding the who, what, when, where, why and how of Islamic extremism on the internet but trying to do so manually, given the size of the network, would seem impossible.

YT Visualizer solves the problem by capturing and graphing all of this data into an easy to understand chart. Talking about it makes less sense that showing how it works so I built a little screencast of the tool in action (using one of my other favorite web-based tools, Screencast-o-matic) below:



I only let YT Visualizer run for a minute or so in this demo and, as a result, only managed to import 30 some odd people into the graph (YouTube gets fussy when you send too many requests too rapidly to their servers).

The full version of the software allows as many as 1000 entities to be imported into the graph (the demo version I have allows only 200). As the graph gets larger though, the software cleverly starts to fade out the less important nodes making the graph readable regardless of the number of nodes.

As you can also see in the demo, YT Visualizer pulls in some of the other data available from YouTube so that, when you mouse over the nodes you can see who they belong to, etc.

For the real social networking geeks, the best feature probably is the ability to download the data behind the visualization into a CSV file so that you can then upload it into other, more powerful programs like ORA, UCINET or Analyst's Notebook. This feature is disabled in the trial version so I was unable to test it out.

XMT has a number of other applications for visualizing data on the net but none of them are quite as polished or as powerful as YT Visualizer.

As cool as this is, I am pretty sure that it would be more useful for business professionals than national security types. I can see it providing some sort of contextual information for the national security intel analyst (though that context is pretty limited when you think about the constraints on the data set). I can also see it providing useful leads of the "I gotta start somewhere, so I might as well start here" variety.

Business/competitive intel analysts, however, might really be able to use this tool to identify influence hubs (at least on YouTube) of supporters and detractors of their products.

The potential is also there, of course, for speculative leaps far beyond the scope of the data but the possibilities inherent in the technology far outweigh the risks (for a careful researcher) in my mind.

How Risky Is Your Social Network Activity? (Socialrisk)

Prof. Will McGill's students at Penn State's Information Scieinces and Technology/Security and Risk Analysis Program have done us all a real service.

They have taken a hard look at the risks associated with putting private data on social networks (such as Facebook, LinkedIn or MySpace) and have developed a structured methodology for analyzing and assessing those risks.

SNAPR (the Social Network Action and Privacy Risk Methodology) -- as they call it -- is a free, online, step-by-step method for evaluating the risk associated with your social networking activities.

We have quite a few security investigators come through here each year and all of them have indicated tha they look at social network sites in putting together their background investigations.

Social network site do's and don'ts go well beyond job hunters looking for positions in the intelligence community, however. This well-designed and well-thought out student project goes a long way towards helping anyone who is trying to balance the risks and the rewards of social networking.

Geographic Analysis Of World's Top Social Networks, Search Engines (Oxyweb via Digital Inspiration)

Digital Inspiration pointed yesterday to a very cool map put together by the writers at Oxyweb that shows the top social networking sites by country. You can see the map below (click on it to get a full sized version).

I am color blind so it is difficult for me to make out, but it appears that MySpace is only the most popular social networking site in the US and that Facebook has really good penetration in the Med. It also appears pretty clear that you need to be on Orkut in Brazil or India and something called "V Kontakte" appears to be very popular in Russia and parts of Central and Eastern Europe. Oxyweb has been building this map for the last three months so you can examine some trends as well.

The map of search engine popularity is a little more predictable with Google holding the high ground almost everywhere. The exceptions are very interesting, however. Again, click on the map below to go to the full image. Once you are done, check out the Oxyweb blog. It is fairly new, but with content like this, it looks like it is going to be worth following.

Journal Of Computer Mediated Communication: Social Network Edition

The Journal Of Computer Mediated Communication has a number of interesting articles in its most recent edition focused on social networks and social networking websites.