On Twitter's engineering blog, a fascinating description of how Twitter uses a blend of machine intelligence and Mechanical Turk tasks to figure out, in real time, what is going on in the world:

Before we delve into the details, here's an overview of how the system works.

1. First, we monitor for which search queries are currently popular.
   Behind the scenes: we run a Storm topology that tracks statistics on search queries.
   For example, the query [Big Bird] may suddenly see a spike in searches from the US.
   
   
2. As soon as we discover a new popular search query, we send it to our human evaluators, who are asked a variety of questions about the query.
   Behind the scenes: when the Storm topology detects that a query has reached sufficient popularity, it connects to a Thrift API that dispatches the query to Amazon's Mechanical Turk service, and then polls Mechanical Turk for a response.
   For example: as soon as we notice "Big Bird" spiking, we may ask judges on Mechanical Turk to categorize the query, or provide other information (e.g., whether there are likely to be interesting pictures of the query, or whether the query is about a person or an event) that helps us serve relevant Tweets and ads.
   
   
3. Finally, after a response from an evaluator is received, we push the information to our backend systems, so that the next time a user searches for a query, our machine learning models will make use of the additional information. For example, suppose our evaluators tell us that [Big Bird] is related to politics; the next time someone performs this search, we know to surface ads by @barackobama or @mittromney, not ads about Dora the Explorer.

Improving Twitter search with real-time human computation (via Waxy)

We've talked here before about the crazy things you can find when you read the "Methods" section of a scientific research paper. (Ostensibly, that's the boring part.)

If you want a quick laugh this morning — or if you want to get a peek at how the sausages are made — check out the Twitter hashtag #overlyhonestmethods, where scientists are talking about the backstory behind seemingly dry statements like "A population of male rats was chosen for this study".

Warren Ellis, always a shrewd observer of online media, supposes that we've reached peak social media, the point at which exciting new communications forms ossify into dull media titans:

Twitter alters its terms of access to its information, thereby harming the services that built themselves on that information. Which was stupid, because Twitter gets fewer and fewer material benefits from allowing people to use its water. And why would you build a service that relies on a private company’s assets anyway? Facebook changes its terms of access regularly. It’s broken its own Pages system and steadily grows more invasive and desperate. Instagram, now owned by Facebook, just went through its first major change in terms of service. Which went as badly as anyone who’s interacted with Facebook would expect. As Twitter disconnected itself from sharing services like IFTTT, so Instagram disconnected itself from Twitter. Flickr’s experiencing what will probably be a brief renaissance due to having finally built a decent iOS app, but its owners, Yahoo!, are expert in stealing defeat from the jaws of victory. Tumblr seems to me to be spiking in popularity, which coincides neatly with their hiring an advertising sales director away from Groupon, a company described by Techcrunch last year as basically loansharking by any other name.

This may be the end of the cycle that began with Friendster and Livejournal. Not the end of social media, by any means, obviously. But it feels like this is the point at where the current systems seize up for a bit. Perhaps not even in ways that most people will notice. But social media seems now to be clearly calcifying into Big Media, with Big Media problems like cable-style carriage disputes. Frame the Twitter-Instagram spat in terms of Virginmedia not being able to carry Sky Atlantic in the UK, say (I know there are many more US examples).

His closing remark is "I wonder if anyone’s been thinking twice about giving up their personal websites." Good question.

The Social Web: End Of The First Cycle

In "Credibility ranking of tweets during high impact events," a paper published in the ACM's Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Privacy and Security in Online Social Media , two Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology researchers describe the outcome of a machine-learning experiment that was asked to discover factors correlated with reliability in tweets during disasters and emergencies:

The number of unique characters present in tweet was positively correlated to credibility, this may be due to the fact that tweets with hashtags, @mentions and URLs contain more unique characters. Such tweets are also more informative and linked, and hence credible. Presence of swear words in tweets indicates that it contains the opinion / reaction of the user and would have less chances of providing informa- tion about the event. Tweets that contain information or are reporting facts about the event, are impersonal in nature, as a result we get a negative correlation of presence of pronouns in credible tweets. Low number of happy emoticons [:-), :)] and high number of sad emoticons [:-(, :(] act as strong predictors of credibility. Some of the other important features (p-value < 0.01) were inclusion of a URL in the tweet, number of followers of the user who tweeted and presence of negative emotion words. Inclusion of URL in a tweet showed a strong positive correlation with credibility, as most URLs refer to pictures, videos, resources related to the event or news articles about the event.

Of course, this is all non-adversarial: no one is trying to trick a filter into mis-assessing a false account as a true one. It's easy to imagine an adversarial tweet-generator that suggests rewrites to deliberately misleading tweets to make them more credible to a filter designed on these lines. This is actually the substance of one of the cleverest science fiction subplots I've read: in Peter Watt's Behemoth, in which a self-modifying computer virus randomly hits on the strategy of impersonating communications from patient zero in a world-killing pandemic, because all the filters allow these through. It's a premise that's never stopped haunting me: the co-evolution of a human virus and a computer virus.

Credibility Ranking of Tweets during High Impact Events [PDF] (via /.)

What's the deal with texting? Are you being sarcastic? Are you mad at me? Are you typing this while on the toilet? I don't wanna be a meme! Did you ever stop to think about how incredibly perfect Seinfeld would be in today's social media-crazed world? Thanks to the newly formed Modern Seinfeld Twitter account, you can get a 140-character (or less) idea at what a current episode of the "Show About Nothing" would cover. And when you consider all the "nothing" we do all day and how much awkward human behavior it causes, Seinfeld could probably find enough material to last twenty years. (via Twitter)

A monkey in a nice coat escaped from a cage inside its owner's car, opened the car door, and strolled into an Ikea in North York, a suburb of Toronto. The monkey was removed shortly thereafter. I have been stuck in that Ikea and I can testify that whatever your feelings about the ethics of keeping a pet monkey (or sticking it in a cage in your car), it is certainly a mercy to remove the monkey from that Ikea.

in the future, humour = twitter account creation

— Ikea Monkey (@IKEAmonkey) December 9, 2012

The incident spawned two parody Twitter accounts: @IKEAmonkey and @Ikea_Monkey, the former being more prolific (and having made overtures of peace and cooperation to the latter, without, it seems, any success).

At around 3 p.m. ET, the diminutive primate was spotted in the store’s upper parking lot, where it was cornered by several Ikea staff members, who also called animal control to come retrieve the monkey.

Mysterious monkey in posh miniature winter coat found alone at Toronto Ikea [National Post] (via MeFi)

(Image: Umm saw a monkey in the #ikea parking lot. by #broniewyn)