Twitter research: It's where the money and action is

Wellesley College profs investigating social media information trustworthiness, while University of Cincinnati students want to help you party

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Two professors from Wellesley College’s Department of Computer science have been awarded a nearly half million dollar National Science Foundation grant to build an application that gauges the trustworthiness of information shared on social networks, and in particular Twitter.

"Users leave a digital trace behind when they make an announcement," says Eni Mustafaraj a visiting assistant professor who along with Computer Science Professor Panagiotis Metaxas earned attention last year for research into Twitter bombing used to influence voters during the 2010 Massachusetts special congressional election (and there work has been built upon in other states, such as Indiana). "The application will follow those digital traces to determine whether a message sender is reputable, allowing the user to make a determination about whether a message should be trusted."

NETWORK WORLD’S HOTTEST TECH ARGUMENTS: Allow social media vs. Ban social media at work

Determining the trustworthiness of information sources on social networks is becoming more important as more people rely on such information to make financial, medical and other decisions. The researchers had planned initially to focus on spammer identification, but have broadened their effort to help social network users determine whether whatever information they are looking at should be trusted.

Factors going into trust measurement include past history of the originating sender, whether other Twitter users trust it and whether the same info is mysteriously surfacing from separate sources.

The NSF grant will also fund development of an online course to teach undergrads and high school students to think critically about information sources.

TWEETOGRAPHER IS BORN

Separately, a pair of University of Cincinnati computer science students will have to wait for their Twitter payday, but they’ve got a good start by creating a Web-based app called Tweetographer that helps users mine for useful data in Twitter about what’s going on in their area.

Billy Clifton and Alex Padgett’s "Tweetographer," their six-month senior project, is described as a real-time events guide extracted from information coming via large numbers of tweets. Their work included coming up with a queuing system to process the flood of tweets and deciphering shorthand used by tweeters for days of the week, locations and such.

"We wanted to explore data mining, which is an important area of research in Computer Science, in the context of social media," Padgett said, in a statement. "Although the concept will work with many social media platforms, Twitter was the most accessible. Everything is out there in public domain, a giant pool of untapped data, tagged with latitude and longitude. It’s very precise and lends itself to so many uses."

It’s possible that the Tweetographer might become publicly available by year-end as a Web app and mobile app, Clifton says: "We are working on giving the graphical user interface an overhaul, migrating servers, as well as some other maintenance."

Google -- Microsoft sues over Android because Windows Phone 7 has failed

The war of words between Google and Microsoft has heated up even further, with Google's patent counsel essentially charging that the only reason Microsoft has been going after Android phone makers for patent infringement is because Microsoft's mobile phone strategy has failed. He also warns that the patent system is broken and may dramatically slow down innovation.

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Tim Porter, Google's patent counsel, was interviewed by SFGate. He pulls no punches about Microsoft's motivations for suing Android manufacturers, or threatening them with suits as a way to get them to pay royalties. He says:

This is a tactic that Microsoft has used in the past, with Linux, for example. When their products stop succeeding in the marketplace, when they get marginalized, as is happening now with Android, they use the large patent portfolio they've built up to get revenue from the success of other companies' products.

Porter takes aim not only at Microsoft, but at the entire patent system, and comes close to arguing that software simply shouldn't be patentable. First he says:

You can look at the development of the software industry and see a point when (software wasn't being patented) and it was a period of intense innovation. You didn't see Microsoft's first software patent until 1988. By that time it had come out with Word, not to mention DOS.

So there's just no question you can look back and see that innovation happens without patents. It's also true that since there weren't patents, there wasn't software patent litigation.

Then when asked point-blank whether software should be patentable, he hems and haws, not quite calling for an end to software patents:

I think the question is whether the current system makes sense. During the period I talked about, software was protected by copyright and other legal protections. There are certainly arguments those are more appropriate.

Microsoft, of course, takes a very different approach, and says that the infringing Android patents cost the company money, and all it's doing is getting paid fairly for its work.

And Microsoft gets paid very well, indeed, by Android manufacturers who have signed royalty agreements with it. Goldman Sachs estimates that Microsoft will get $444 million from Android royalties for fiscal year 2012. Microsoft Executive Vice President and General Counsel Brad Smith and Corporate Vice President and Deputy General Counsel Horacio Gutierrez write in a recent blog that the Android agreements:

...ensure respect and reasonable compensation for Microsoft's inventions and patent portfolio. Equally important, they enable licensees to make use of our patented innovations on a long-term and stable basis.

Who's right here, Google or Microsoft? In this instance, I can't say that I know. But I do know that in general Google is right that the patent system is broken when it comes to software, and needs to be significantly reformed. Google's Porter points out that

The period of intense patent assertions (against things like the steam engine) resulted in decades-long periods of stagnation. Innovation only took off when the patents expired.