Ampush Media Acquires O...

Ampush Media , an online marketing startup, has acquired Academic Earth , an online education video site that’s sort of like a “Hulu for Education” and a Bill Gates-favorite. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. As we’ve written in the past, Academic Earth is a user-friendly, curated platform for educational videos that allows anyone to freely access instruction from the scholars and guest lecturers at the leading academic universities. The site offers 350 full courses and over 5,000 total lectures from Yale, MIT, Harvard, Stanford, UC Berkeley, and Princeton that can be browsed by subject, university, or instructor through a user-friendly interface. Additionally, editors have compiled lectures from different speakers into Playlists such as “Understanding the Financial Crisis” and “First Day Of Freshman Year.” Since the site’s launch in 2008, Academic Earth has grown to attract 400,000 unique visitors per month, primarily through word of mouth. Gates is a big fan of Academic Earth , and even mentioned the startup in his newsletter from the Bill And Melinda Gates Foundation, in 2010 as an idea that could help revolutionize online education. Ampush Media also works in the online education space, developing a technology platform that helps students identify higher education options that fit their interests. The company says it plans to invest heavily in building out social and interactive user features to Academic Earth and adding new lecture material to the site.

Harvard Study: Social N...

Here’s a bit of science that’s contrary to what a heavy utilizer of social networks might expect. Researchers at Harvard tracked the Facebook activity of hundreds of college students for four years, and came away with the rather unexpected result that the interests of friends don’t, in fact, tend to influence one another. That’s not to say it doesn’t happen at all, of course, but it’s clear that propagation and virality are subtler and more complex than some people (marketers and, I suspect, researchers) tend to think they are. But the study is also clearly flawed in ways that those versed in social graphs are likely to easily perceive. Pulling useful data from social networks is like catching lightning in a bottle, and I wonder whether the findings may in fact be, as the study attempts to avoid, “a spurious consequence of alternative social processes.” The central source of data for the study, in fact, doesn’t strike me as solid. Tracking the interests of college kids is a sketchy endeavor in and of itself, but tracking it via their Facebook favorites (i.e. what shows on your profile, not what you post about or share) seems unreliable. After all, not only does everyone use the network in their own way, but the network itself has changed. Putting Wilco in your favorites is a different act from liking Wilco’s Facebook page, their official band site, or posting their latest video. Gauging someone’s interest in a movie or band by the favorites factor alone is inadequate. Their findings are essentially that taste doesn’t diffuse the way you might expect. But while the data support this, nothing supports the data. Flattening huge sets of data and removing potentially conflative or distracting connections (“disentangling,” to use the researchers’ well-chosen word) is the bane of social research, and with a limited window on a huge field of data, like that these researchers had, it’s especially hard. Who among these people was a supernode? What were their Twitter counts? What was the most common unit of interest? How many total posts, how many total favorite changes, how many total friends? The process of disentanglement only gets harder and harder, and the amount of indispensable data grows. The researchers have used advanced statistical techniques, but the data they were interpreting doesn’t seem to be at all complete. The study does establish something that I think we perhaps understand is true already: you befriend people because of your overlaps in taste, but it’s rare that your existing friends change the tastes you already have. This is as much true out in the “real” world as it is online. It seems to me that taste doesn’t propagate because taste is rarely propagated to begin with. And on Facebook, the focus is not on the laying up of collections (increasingly all anyone even sees is news, not favorites), the collaborative appreciation of any item or media in particular (for the most part, your “likes” disappear into a vast ocean of other likes), or the influencing of others (there are supernodes and influencers, but Facebook isn’t the proper tool for the job). What propagates is individual items, events, songs, virals, and so on. To even collect, categorize, and weigh these collected items would not be to guarantee a meaningful result, since, as has been observed of the river, you never step into the same social stream twice. The status updates and comments of years past don’t strike me as a window into the soul of the user today. I have no doubt that some clever data divers and social archaeologists will find a way to make this data useful and powerful, but I don’t envy their task. The Harvard study does indicate another thing, which is that social networks are, for now, “light” social interaction. Breaking into a new genre of music, discovering a new favorite director, getting book recommendations, these things don’t occur nearly as much on social networks as their proponents and heavy users would like to think. That’s changing, but Facebook doesn’t appear to be in a hurry to make the change to “serious” social interaction: the kind of trusted exchanges you have with friends in conversation or in repeated encounters over years that slowly convert you into a fan of David Lynch, or Scarlatti, or David Foster Wallace. Those are still the province of real life, it seems, even among the Facebook generation. But for how long?

Twitter As Discovery Pl...

While Twitter is already a leading platform for information distribution, a few aspects of its redesign today show how it’s strengthening itself in this area. It’s improving inline media viewing and tweet embeds to aid viewing and sharing, and adding a personalized Stories section to help users more easily explore the wide world of tweets. The first, inline media viewing within tweets, is an adjustment from the way you could show media in the previous two-pane view. If a tweet in your home stream contains media, you can click on “View Photo” or “View Media” to reveal it without having to go to another page or pane. So, less clicking through panes, and more engagement as a result. If you share the location of your tweets, they’ll also appear here. Most interestingly, these inline views also appear to include third-party apps like FourSquare. Any app developer should think hard about how to take advantage of this new platform real estate. The second change is embedded tweets. While Twitter has offered a way to embed tweets for a year and a half through Blackbird Pie , the new version is more like YouTube, although more hidden in the interface. To get at it, you first click on a tweet to open it within the stream. Then you click on “Details,” the last link in the meta information in the tweet. This will take you to the landing page for the Tweet, which will then include the embed option. Once you open it, you’ll see a YouTube-style menu that includes HTML, shortcode and the link, as well as a way to adjust the alignment and a view of of what the embed will look like. The resulting tweet contains all of the context, including the Reply, Retweet and Favorite options. So happy to see @ twitter at the top of @ techmeme again techmeme.com #itsbeenawhile — Miguel Rios (@miguelrios) December 08, 2011 The third change is a conceptual shift: the personalized Stories section that’s the default of the new “# Discovery” page. Twitter has up until this point only shown raw streams of tweets, with the most advanced sorting mechanisms being lists. This new page is specifically designed to help users explore the world of Twitter, and it feels like a personalized newspaper. When I asked product managers at the company about how Stories are determined, the answer I got was a vague “your interests.” These interests are presumably who you follow, what you tweet about, what you click on, etc… I’m guessing they’re determined in a similar way to how Twitter figures out who-to-follow recommendations. The examples below, like the Virginia Tech shooting and Ice Cube, appear to be popular news stories that aren’t especially tailored to my interests, so we’ll see how Twitter refines this section in the future. But even if it’s not that interesting right now, this sort of algorithmically determined feature is that Twitter can quickly adjust it from this point forward to  match users interests. Stories feels like it could be especially useful for people who are relatively new to Twitter, who don’t fully understand all the parts of the service even if they know it’s a good place for discovering the information that matters to them. Check out the rest of our coverage of the changes today, in the links below: The New Twitter Brand Pages With Bold Banners And Pinned Videos @&#!!!! Twitter Wants To Own The Symbols With New Redesign Twitter Redesigns Around Four Concepts: Home Timeline, Connect, Discover, Me #LetsFly Live At Twitter’s “Come See What We’re Building” Press Conference #LetsFly

TC Gadgets Needs Intern...

Heyo! CES is right around the corner and we need some interns to work with us in Las Vegas after the holiday. If you like gadgets, think you can write/edit video, and are free January 10-13 and live in or around or can get to LV, we want to talk to you. Email me, john@techcrunch.com with the subject line “INTERN” describing your interests, skills, and why you’d make a good intern. Eighteen and over only, please, for various, non-creepy, legal reasons.

Google Launches Schemer...

We’ve been wondering exactly what Google Schemer is for some time now. Google has just officially launched Schemer , a new activity recommendations portal that allows people to ‘discover new things to do.’ Schemer basically helps people discover and share things to do in the offline world. Activities, or schemes, are recommended to you based on your location and interests. From Google’s announcement of Schemer: Whether it’s exploring a new city, checking out a friend’s movie recommendation, or just finding new activities for your weekends, Schemer lets you discover new things to do, share schemes with friends, and make the most of your day. There also seems to be a social component built around activities. You can find things to do, save ‘schemes for later’ and let friends know you are interested in specific schemes. The entire platform seems to be built around google+ as well. Schemer will also record all your schemes in your list of accomplishments and other schemers will be able to learn from your experiences. Over time, Schemer will recommend new schemes tailored to your interests and help you do the things you want to do. At launch, Google has teamed up with a number of media properties for schemes including Bravo, Entertainment Weeklym GeekDad / GeekMom, Idealist, IGN, Lifehacker, National Geographic, Outside, Parenting.com, Real Simple, Rolling Stone, Southern Living, Time Out, Thrillist, US Department of the Interior and Google-owned Zagat. We’ll update this post if we scrounge up some invites. Checkout Google’s video about Schemer below.