A few months back, I wrote on a post on the interesting way that Myspace and MTV had come together to try and find a way to engage America's youth in the political process. Not to be outdone, and perhaps in an effort to show its "maturity" to a national audience, Facebook decided to throw its hat into the political ring by co-sponsoring a nationally televised series of debates which took place this evening - first between the current Republican presidential candidates, then between the Democratic candidates.
Because of the differences in nature between the New Hampshire debates and the MTV-MySpace "Presidential Dialogues", its a bit of an apples to oranges situation to compare the two. But I enjoy strawberry-banana smoothies, so who am I to complain about mashing fruit together =)
In case you have no idea what I'm talking about, essentially Facebook allowed users to share their feelings on certain basic questions involving the debate or certain candidates. For example:
What I had very much appreciated about the MySpace events was that poll results were shared with the candidate in real time. So in the case of my example above, the moderator would say something like "our voters are overwhelmingly interested in hearing more about your thoughts on the economy - could you please elaborate on that topic". Moderator Charlie Gibson seemed to have his hands full - so no such sharing occurred tonight. To be fair, the MySpace events were not debates (they were a single candidate at a time) and both their aim and audience was far different than tonights debates. But regardless it added an interesting dimension and interactivity to the experience and I was a bit disappointed not to see it in New Hampshire. Myspace also let viewers lay the smack down if the speaker was trying to give them garbage answers. And who doesnt love a good smack down?
But what Facebook did do that MySpace (to my knowledge) did not, was to leverage its pre-existing user data to provide more interesting meaning to the numbers. Don't pretend you havent always wanted to play the "Be a Political Analyst: Home Edition" game. Cheggit:
This chart above takes the results of a broad question, and shows how people responded based on their pre-existing political ideology. And all of a sudden the data starts to look a little more interesting. Facebook's breakdown also showed the effect that gender, and age had on peoples opinions as well. And this is not information that people were required to put in when responding to the poll - all of it was pulled behind the scenes from users Facebook profiles.
A few points in all of this.
First, I'm not really a statistics person, but I think its really fascinating to have an opportunity to see data like this emerge. I also really like the mashup style of bringing together the wide range of information Facebook has about you for a purpose other than to sell to advertisers ;-) And I most certainly appreciate any medium that seeks to engage people in the things that matter in our county, world, etc. Online communities for the win.
Second, the possibilities of a more sophisticated Flixster and the like are about as delicious as that smoothie I was talking about =) If you're a marketing person, I hope this stuff is jiving your turkey.
Third, do we have some potential educational implications in all of this stuff? There are most certainly parallels between these Facebook/Myspace polls and the new Clicker system that Penn State is rolling out. But clickers don't really work in online classroom environments... hmm.... Or imagine a beginning of the semester "get to know your class" survey. You ask 5 questions, and get the answers to those questions plus a truckload of other information - all pulled together by Facebook. And what about for research purposes? Obviously academics have long since found ways to gather survey data in order to conduct research - but does Facebook or something like it represent an entirely new way to collect heaps of data without forcing people to answer heaps of questions? Would it mean anything if 90% of the people who gave you a slammed your class in your end of year review considered themselves liberal? Would it matter if 27% of the people who got As in your class had "The Great Gatsby" listed as one of their favorite books? Or that 62% of the people who enjoyed discussion activities had the Hotness application installed? Obviously we're getting into an entirely new region of privacy concerns, and its entirely possible that you'd end up with a flood of nonsensical and totally irrelevant data... but then if you're reading this blog I can only assume you have some sort of fetish for nonsense and irrelevance anyway =)
Seeing as how we're coming up on 2am, its getting far too late to be pondering such things. At this point I'm just hoping I wrote this post in readable english =) But I feel like when I'm a bit more lucid, there might be something too all this. Something that just beyond my over tired grasp. We'll have to see...
Either way, I couldnt help but notice that, even with Facebook behind it, the debates still were not as awesome as my Stubstyle PTI debates.
Because of the differences in nature between the New Hampshire debates and the MTV-MySpace "Presidential Dialogues", its a bit of an apples to oranges situation to compare the two. But I enjoy strawberry-banana smoothies, so who am I to complain about mashing fruit together =)
In case you have no idea what I'm talking about, essentially Facebook allowed users to share their feelings on certain basic questions involving the debate or certain candidates. For example:
What I had very much appreciated about the MySpace events was that poll results were shared with the candidate in real time. So in the case of my example above, the moderator would say something like "our voters are overwhelmingly interested in hearing more about your thoughts on the economy - could you please elaborate on that topic". Moderator Charlie Gibson seemed to have his hands full - so no such sharing occurred tonight. To be fair, the MySpace events were not debates (they were a single candidate at a time) and both their aim and audience was far different than tonights debates. But regardless it added an interesting dimension and interactivity to the experience and I was a bit disappointed not to see it in New Hampshire. Myspace also let viewers lay the smack down if the speaker was trying to give them garbage answers. And who doesnt love a good smack down?But what Facebook did do that MySpace (to my knowledge) did not, was to leverage its pre-existing user data to provide more interesting meaning to the numbers. Don't pretend you havent always wanted to play the "Be a Political Analyst: Home Edition" game. Cheggit:
This chart above takes the results of a broad question, and shows how people responded based on their pre-existing political ideology. And all of a sudden the data starts to look a little more interesting. Facebook's breakdown also showed the effect that gender, and age had on peoples opinions as well. And this is not information that people were required to put in when responding to the poll - all of it was pulled behind the scenes from users Facebook profiles.A few points in all of this.
First, I'm not really a statistics person, but I think its really fascinating to have an opportunity to see data like this emerge. I also really like the mashup style of bringing together the wide range of information Facebook has about you for a purpose other than to sell to advertisers ;-) And I most certainly appreciate any medium that seeks to engage people in the things that matter in our county, world, etc. Online communities for the win.
Second, the possibilities of a more sophisticated Flixster and the like are about as delicious as that smoothie I was talking about =) If you're a marketing person, I hope this stuff is jiving your turkey.
Third, do we have some potential educational implications in all of this stuff? There are most certainly parallels between these Facebook/Myspace polls and the new Clicker system that Penn State is rolling out. But clickers don't really work in online classroom environments... hmm.... Or imagine a beginning of the semester "get to know your class" survey. You ask 5 questions, and get the answers to those questions plus a truckload of other information - all pulled together by Facebook. And what about for research purposes? Obviously academics have long since found ways to gather survey data in order to conduct research - but does Facebook or something like it represent an entirely new way to collect heaps of data without forcing people to answer heaps of questions? Would it mean anything if 90% of the people who gave you a slammed your class in your end of year review considered themselves liberal? Would it matter if 27% of the people who got As in your class had "The Great Gatsby" listed as one of their favorite books? Or that 62% of the people who enjoyed discussion activities had the Hotness application installed? Obviously we're getting into an entirely new region of privacy concerns, and its entirely possible that you'd end up with a flood of nonsensical and totally irrelevant data... but then if you're reading this blog I can only assume you have some sort of fetish for nonsense and irrelevance anyway =)
Seeing as how we're coming up on 2am, its getting far too late to be pondering such things. At this point I'm just hoping I wrote this post in readable english =) But I feel like when I'm a bit more lucid, there might be something too all this. Something that just beyond my over tired grasp. We'll have to see...
Either way, I couldnt help but notice that, even with Facebook behind it, the debates still were not as awesome as my Stubstyle PTI debates.
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