Here are the eight rules discussed in the Master Class “Big Data and Smart Users” at NYU in Singapore on January 18-19, 2012:

Start with the problem, not with the data
Share data to get data
Align interests of all parties
Make it trivially easy for people to contribute, connect, collaborate 
Base the equation of your business on customer centric metrics 
Decompose the business into its “atoms”
Let people do what people are good at, and computers what computers are good at 
Thou shalt not blame technology for barriers of institutions and society

By The Social Data Lab (socialdatalab.stanford.edu)

In today’s increasingly digitized world, we are creating data in unprecedented ways. Ubiquitous and conspicuous social and mobile connections have empowered social consumers to broadcast their locations, opinions, thoughts and emotions to the world in real-time with nothing more than a few clicks, many times a day, on multiple platforms.

Read the rest of this entry »

by Jason Lee, Evelyn Larrubia, Sameh El Amawy and Michael Marcotte

In 1993, The New Yorker published a cartoon by Peter Steiner of two dogs at a computer that became an instant classic, tacked up on bulletin boards everywhere.  The caption: “On the internet, no one knows you’re a dog.”

A recent survey of a group of 98 tech-savvy Stanford students shows that the world Steiner depicted may be behind us.  Asked about how they behave—or would behave—in a variety of situations online, students painted a picture that looked surprisingly like real life.

Read the rest of this entry »

Hi there, here is the 20-minute audio of the keynote on “The State of the Social Data Revolution” at the 2011 Predictive Analytics World in San Francisco.
Would love to get your comments. Thanks!

The reception in Beijing will be on Sunday 12 Sep from 4pm to 7pm at 798 Art District. We already have some great participants to celebrate the launch decision. Please email me if you are interested in attending.

Invitation (pdf)

The Office of the Mayor of San Francisco and the City’s Chief Information Officer are hosting an event that will change the way you think about data:

How the Social Data Revolution Changes (almost) Everything

Why do people share, what do people share?
And how does this influence their behavior?

Speaker: Andreas Weigend (@aweigend)
Location: One South Van Ness, 2nd Floor Atrium
Date: Tuesday, August 10, 2010
Time: The speech begins at 4pm, and is followed by a reception at 5pm, sponsored by Open-First.

youtube.com/socialdatarevolution
facebook.com/socialdatarevolution
wikipedia.org/wiki/social_data_revolution

Andreas Weigend studies people and the data they create and share. He works with companies that are eager to develop strategies to realize the untapped power of data, including Alibaba, Best Buy, Lufthansa, Nokia, and Thomson Reuters, and fun startups including San Francisco-based MrTweet.com and Skout.com (Boy Ahoy).  Previously, as the Chief Scientist of Amazon.com, he helped build the customer-centric, measurement-focused culture central to Amazon’s success. As a partner with San Francisco-based Open-First, he helps organizations absorb a set of insights based on data, mobile and social technologies.

Andreas teaches at Stanford and shares his insights at top conferences, such as the World Innovation Forum. He received his PhD from Stanford in physics, and lives in San Francisco, Shanghai, on weigend.com, and on Facebook.

Here are a few related press mentions (Summer 2010):

• Fast Company: Who are the New Influencers?
• London Evening Standard: Are these Online Nobodies the New Somebodies?
• NPR Marketplace: Data Mining Pushes Marketing to a New Level
• Minnesota Public Radio: Privacy… Just a Blip in History? and How Recommendations Now Use Entirely New Data Types e.g., Gotta Hunch?.

Shanghai, China. Quite early, 3:30am local time. (Or maybe very late? Actually just only barely back to my condo from a relaxing foot massage.) My US mobile rings. Austin Carr calling  from New York. Austin Carr? Sounds like a superposition of two friends, Austin Ku who took me to see CHINGLISH by David Henry Hwang in New York last month, and Jeremy Carr, my Stanford TA who kept the class in shape last quarter. But we right away started having a fascinating conversation… which made it into Fast Company very fast (and served as starting point for a great article Are these Nobodies the New Somebodies? with the London-based Evening Standard)! Here you go:

Amazon’s Former Chief Scientist on Influence, Twitter’s Fake Audience, and iPad Sex Appeal

by AUSTIN CARR Wed Jul 14, 2010

Andreas Weigend knows how to influence people. As the former chief scientist at Amazon, Weigend helped implement a series of ingenious tools to help customers “make better decisions,” from recommended purchases and one-click checkouts, to wish lists and book-interest sharing. With our recent launch of the Influence Project, we spoke with Weigend about what “influence” means on the Web. Weigend, a professor at Stanford, approached the subject philosophically, picking apart the complicated concept of influence by each attribute and nuance. Read the rest of this entry »

Hello, you can do four things with the speech I gave at the 2010 World Innovation Forum in New York:

1. Play or download the mp3 of the speech,

2. Leave your comments on the slides and see the annotations of others,

3. Leave your comments on the transcript and see the annotations of others, and

It was exciting to be part of the World Innovation Forum, an event packed with insights and a turnout of more than 800 thought leaders and a fantastic line-up of speakers. I had great company on stage, speaking between Chip Heath (who I went to grad school with) and Biz Stone (who co-founded Twitter).

I have put up the audio of my talk [mp3, 35 min, 32MB], the transcript [pdf | docx], and the slides [pdf | pptx]. And in terms of press commentary, check out what The Huffington Post, FastCompany, HSM, OnInnovation, and Steve Todd write about it, and please add your own thoughts via the comment box at the bottom of this post.

I am fortunate to present the insights on WIF2010 and the Social Data Revolution by two guest writers: Noah Burbank, a student in Stanford’s Social Data Revolution class this Spring, and Ted Shelton, the CEO of Open-First. And, as always, please do tell us what you think by leaving a comment below. Thanks!

WTF is WIF??

Read the rest of this entry »

This Thursday, May 20, 2010, Esther Dyson will share her social data revolution insights at Stanford.

Please post before Thursday noon as comment below or on facebook.com/socialdatarevolution one question you would like her to address. Be bold! Questions are at least as important as answers.

To come up with a question that has a good chance to be selected, just search the web for some good video interviews with Esther related to our topic (e.g., http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lheZeSoDgTA ), and/or some relevant posts (e.g, http://www.project-syndicate.org/series/net_world/description) , and/or listen to the mp3 of a conversation on Digital Exhibitionism two years ago.

by Chuanyang Chee, Ron Chung, and Andreas Weigend

Curious about the best response to the question from IDEAS PROJECT last week?

1. Ron Chung won the prize for the “best answer”.

Here is what Ron said about a “friend” in the era of the social data revolution:

There are two types of ‘friends’, (i) real ‘close-to-heart’ personal friendships, and (ii) online social friendships.

(i) In real personal friendships you more carefully screen and maintain that relationships.  In these situations, you provide more physical and emotional attention compared to online relationships.

(ii) Online social friendships form to maintain touchpoints with people we interact with (sort of like a large addressbook). In the context of consumer internet and social networks/media, an online ‘friend’ is someone you form a weak connection through some form of engagement. This engagement can occur through real world meeting or simply an online exchange (e.g. blog comments, Twitter message, etc).

Also, in these online friendships, there is ambiguity around bilateral versus unilateral ‘friendships’.  For example, Twitter uses ‘followers’ & Facebook uses ‘fans’ to represent unidirection relationships and Facebook uses ‘friends’ to denote bilateral friendships.  However, some Facebook ‘friendships’ are not truly bilateral. They are simply ways for one side to collect ‘friends’ for the sake of amassing a large audience. All of this points to a desire for people maintain touchpoints with people through online medium should they ever want to re-engage them.

In the end, online social friendships give us ambient awareness of what is going on with people, giving us a type of “reality-TV news” channel.

2. A few thoughts by Andreas Weigend:

Daphna Oyserman suggested:

• Someone whose happiness makes me happy and with whom I feel eager to share my own happiness (knowing that the feeling is mutual).

My favorite one-liner came from Jason Wei in my Stanford class:

• Someone I’m comfortable being myself with.

My own points (to the degree anyone can have their own points after reading through hundreds of responses) would be, that a friend to me is:

• Someone whose eyes I want to see the world through.
• Someone who can make me laugh until tears run down my cheeks.
• Someone who brings the best out of me, accepting me the way I am (or want to be).
• Someone who manages to pull me out of a (real or imagined) bad situation.

Please use the comment box below for your comments. Thanks!

3. Finally, Chuanyang Chee shares his insights on the longer SDR survey.

This survey on the Social Data Revolution was developed by Chuanyang and Andreas and taken by Spring 2010 students at Stanford’s The Social Data Revolution, and Tsinghua’s The Digital Networked Economy.

Finding that long-lost best friend from elementary school has become trivial ever since Facebook hit a total subscription of 400 million active users. But having not kept in touch for a couple of years or decades, what is the point of connecting now? Does he even still consider me a friend? Remember me? Read the rest of this entry »