Michael Bernstein, Adam Marcus, David Karger, Rob MillerMIT CSAIL
MIT HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION
Enhancing Directed Content Sharing on the Web
Firehose
Drip
Water Cooler
see everything
carefully limit intake
collaborative filtering
see everythingsee everything
managed time and qualitymiss interesting posts
personalizedmakes errorsrequires training
http://feedme.csail.mit.edu
1. Offer sharing for little time and effort2. Surface activity via awareness
indicators3. Learns personalized models passively
• Introduction• Related Work• Understanding Sharing• Supporting Sharing• Implementation• Evaluation• Discussion• Conclusion
Related work
• Mediating our information access– Information mediators [Ehrlich and Cash 94]
– Contact brokers [Paepcke 96]
– Technological gatekeepers [Allen 77]
• Information is shared via e-mail [Erdelez and Rioux 00] to educate and form rapport [Marshall and Bly 04]
• Recommender systems focus on discovery [Resnick et al 94, Joachims et al 97]
• Expertise recommenders focus on information needs [McDonald 00]
• The FeedMe namesake [Burke 09, Sen 06]
What drives social sharing?
Two survey (N=40 / N=100) on Amazon Mechanical TurkVetted for cheaters: none rejected.Paid $0.20 / $0.05
IntroUnderstandingSupportingEvaluationConclusionFe
edM
e
E-mail is still dominant
E-m
ail
Talk
ing
in p
erso
n
Socia
l net
wor
k sit
es
Inst
ant M
essa
ge
Twitt
er
Blogg
ing
plat
form
s
News ag
greg
ator
s
Socia
l boo
kmar
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Stum
bleU
pon
RSS/Fee
d Rea
der
0
5
10
15
20
25
30
35
40
Which tools do you use regularly to share web content?
Recipients want more
When asked to agree/disagree with:“I would be interested in receiving more relevant links.”
Median = 6
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
What explains interest in sharing?Sharing: likeliness of sharing web content with friends, family, and colleagues
“I often tell people I know about my favorite web sites to follow. “
Seeking: time and interest spent finding interesting web content
“I often seek out entertaining posts, jokes, comics and videos using the Internet. “
Bridging social capital: weak ties“I come in contact with new people all the time.”
Bonding social capital: strong ties“There is someone I can turn to for advice about making very important decisions.”
[Ellison et al. 2007]
β p-valuefactor
Seeking .74 < .001
Bridging Social Capital
.22 < .05
Bonding Social Capital
.01 .33
Adj. R2 = 0.56
12
34
56
7Sharing
1 2 3 4 5 6 7Seeking
IntroUnderstandingSupportingEvaluationConclusionFe
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Can we give active content seekers the means to share more?
FeedMe’s target usersFirehose: active information seekers• Purposely consume volumes of
content• Use aggregators like Google Reader
Thimble: recipients• Won’t use a new tool, but read e-mail
Recommendations
[email protected] [email protected] FeedMe today 0 FeedMes today
[email protected] FeedMes today
Type a name…
Add an optional comment… Now
Later
Lifehacker: Share with friends using MIT’s FeedMe
Awareness indicators
[email protected] FeedMes today
Address concerns about volume:“How much are we sending them?”
Give an indication of whether it’s old news“Oh, somebody already sent it to them?”
[email protected] FeedMes today
[email protected] it already
Building models without recipient involvement
[email protected] FeedMes today
[email protected] FeedMe today
MIT HCIResearch
Computer Science
Education
Recommendation details
design: 184tweet: 170web: 79
twitter: 48social: 43friendfeed:
32blog: 25
developer: 23
sports: 200baseball: 150
sox: 132lacrosse: 89workout: 41muscle: 30hiking: 23vitamin: 22
New post:
Friend A:
Friend B:
Does FeedMe help?
60 Google Reader users (46 male) recruited through blogsUsed Google Reader daily for two weeks with FeedMe installedPaid $30
IntroUnderstandingSupportingEvaluationConclusionFe
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Questions
• Do shared posts benefit recipients? • Are the recommendations useful?• Do the social features address
spam and volume concerns?
Do shared posts benefit recipients? • Surveyed 64 recipients, who reported
on 160 shared posts• 80.4% of posts contained novel
content• Appreciative of having received the
postLikert scale 1–7, mean 5.1 (σ=1.6)
Do overload indicators [email protected]
5 FeedMes [email protected]
Saw it already
We asked: What killer feature would get you to use FeedMe more?
We measured: unprompted responses regarding social features
14 of 28 without social features asked for them 3 of 30 with social features asked for them
Social Feature: One-click Thanks
“I would like a way to check how many times someone has liked what I have sent to them, compared to how many items I have shared with them.”
30.9% of shares received at least 1 thanks
E-mail as a delivery mechanism
“I'm pretty conservative about invading people's email space…I worry that they will take ‘real’ email from me less seriously”
E-mail as a delivery mechanism
“Email is a more direct way to communicate, and I feel that articles that are I read are more like 'ambient' information.”
Mixed-initiative Social Recommenders
• Sharers appreciate recommendations• High error tolerance• Low marginal cost to sharers• Applications to other AI-hard
problems– Social search– Expert finding“We think that your friend Sanjay can answer this question about Nikon cameras: […] Is he a good person to ask?”
FeedMe Not Installed: 93.8%
FeedMe Installed: 6.2%
Post Recipients
Bootstrapped Learning
30.9% One-click Thanks
Summary of Contributions
IntroUnderstandingSupportingEvaluationConclusionFe
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• Formative understanding of the process behind link sharing
• Leveraging social link sharing to power a content recommender
• Users acting as AI gatekeepers for others
Topic relevance drives enjoyment
Questionable content quality
It's awkward
I sent too much already
Too much effort
Might have seen it already
Unsure of relevancy
0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14
What is the biggest concern you have when sharing?
Topic relevance drives enjoyment“Those who know my politics usually send me very pointed articles – no junk.”
“I could care less about a cat boxing.”
Seekingx 10
Sharing x 10
Bridgingx 10Bondingx 10
Verify scale agreementnormality assumptionshomoscedascicityfactor loading
Multiple regression on sharing index
12
34
56
7Sharing
1 2 3 4 5 6 7Seeking
β p-valuefactor
Seeking .74 < .001
Bridging Social Capital
.22 < .05
Bonding Social Capital
.01 .33
Adj. R2 = 0.56
Hypotheses
1. Sharers seek out large amounts of web content
2. Sharers are especially social individuals