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Social Network Wars

Information Dynamics Laboratory, Hewlett–Packard Laboratories, Palo Alto, CA 94304

Edited by Harry L. Swinney, University of Texas, Austin, TX, and approved September 14, 2007 (received for review May 25, 2007)

The subject of collective attention is central to an information age where millions of people are inundated with daily messages. It is thus of interest to understand how attention to novel items propagates and eventually fades among large populations. We have analyzed the dynamics of collective attention among 1 million users of an interactive web site, digg.com, devoted to thousands of novel news stories. The observations can be described by a dynamical model characterized by a single novelty factor. Our measurements indicate that novelty within groups decays with a stretched-exponential law, suggesting the existence of a natural time scale over which attention fades.

Novelty and collective attention -- Wu and Huberman 104 (45): 17599 -- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

The "Forward to a Friend" page has been removed from the site. This is an attempt to make MemeStreams a bit easier for new users to understand, by making the user interface more similar to email. You can now choose who you are forwarding a post to on the same page on which you compose it.

This change simplifies a few aspects of the site. In particular, there are now buttons throughout the site that give you one click access to the interface needed to send a MemeStreams user a private message.

As always, let us know if you have any feedback or if you run into any bugs.

MemeStreams Update

We've made an update to MemeStreams that hopefully improves the look of the site. There are also some security fixes in here, as well as some new features which should help us fight spam more effectively going forward. In addition, Acidus contributed some improvements to the MemeBox to make it easier to sort and keep track of new messages. We'd also like to thank Eric White for some HTML input that helped us improve the look of the site and Terratogen for some graphics work.

As always, let us know if you discover anything that isn't working right...

(Safari users may find some color misalignment. We're going to address that in a future update. We wanted this out and we decided to optomize for FF and IE for the time being. Safair literally displays some colors differently in some contexts.)

Yes, we know the Inbox isn't lighting up when you have new memes. We should have that fixed up soon.

MemeStreams Look and Feel update

This comes with several improvements to the way messages are edited and displayed. In addition to inline display of images using the img tag, we have also added the HTML tags u, center, and pre, in addition to the already existing support for b, i, and a. blockquote can be used as blockquote, bq, or quote. When pre is used, any HTML tags within are escaped, so you can now display snippets of code and other previously impossible text without losing formatting. For instance, here is an example of an image tag:

<img src="http://kradmeme.local/meme_tail.gif" alt="Optional description">

Image tags can be justified left or right using the align attribute so text wraps around them, such as the image in this post. All implemented tags support standard HTML attributes to the degree we support the attributes.

When posting, the interface now displays error messages in realtime about formatting problems above the edit window. Eventually we will have this functionality include better information about to what types of HTML is allowed and how it can be used. In general, the system will display posts better and more uniformly. It is no longer so ridged about spacing after quotes, posts will now display properly regardless of if you have a newline after a quote or not. Characters such as > and < can now be used in posts without being part of an HTML tag as well.

Any Google/YouTube/Revver videos that are primary links will be displayed automatically at the top of the post. Videos can also be displayed inline with a tag like this:

<video url="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2f4heaG288" alt="Optional description">

We will add other video services as we become aware of them. Let us know if there is a service you would like us to support.

We would like to single out Acidus for praise. His help made this update happen. We are very excited to have him actively involved with MemeStreams developlment. His work is present in several aspects of this update, such as the on-the-fly picture resizing and the realtime post validity checking. Be sure to tell him how much he kicks ass. We have never worked with anyone better when it comes to web security and javascript.

Be sure to tell terratogen he kicks ass as well. For years now, he has been providing us with with all our graphic design needs. You can see his work in the site's logo and the various graphical icons used throughout the site.

As always, if you encounter any problems, let Rattle or Decius know. More information and site updates are on the way.

MemeStreams Update: Now More Sexy!

MemeStreams was first openned to the public on December 5th, 2001, so December 5th, 2006 was MemeStreams' 5th birthday. I'm sorry I didn't think of this until now. We're certainly not the media moguls that we thought we'd be when we started this thing, but its kept our attention and interest for a long time mostly because of all of the other people who hang out here who have interesting things to say and contribute. We thank all of you for being a part of it. Here's to another interesting 5 years!

An Important Anniversary

We have begun pushing out a series of upgrades to MemeStreams. Some new features will be working their way into the site over the next few days.

We are pleased to announce that user profiles have gotten a much needed makeover. Among the changes, is the ability to post pictures.

Currently pictures are only displayed in user profiles and on user blogs. As we start rolling out more features, pictures will appear in more places.

Enjoy!

MemeStreams Update - New Profiles & Pictures

Frustrated by MemeStreams? Sick of our bad UI design? Tired of all these stupid people and their insipid political ideas and boring personal interests? Why start a flame war when you can take out your frustrations like a man... with firearms! Send an email to tom@memestreams.net with your mailing address and I'll mail you some MemeStreams sitckers! Stick them to your car. Stick them to your laptop. Stick them to your little sister. Or better yet, take them down to the range...

MemeStreams Stickers!