Mapping the World’s Friendships

Immigration is one of the strongest links that seems to bind these Facebook neighbors, as thousands of people pour over borders or over seas, seeking jobs or fleeing violence, and making new connections and maintaining old friendships along the way. Economic links, through trade or investment, also seem to be strong predictors of country connectedness. And finally, one of the most overwhelming trends we found as we explored this graphic is the strong tie that remains between nations and their former colonizers, whose continued linguistic, cultural, and economic ties still echo today.

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Try it yourself

(via tooyoungforthelivingdead)

Another very interesting article from The Psychology of Video Games; this one uses SimCity Social as an example, but nicely summarizes many of the popular psychological tricks used by the so-called “social games” to trick you into playing and spending more. It also has links to additional reading on the tricks to boot.

(Source: )

User Satisfaction vs Virality

If you find yourself mostly thinking about balancing satisfaction versus virality, you’re probably doing it wrong. The Quora question is a false dilemma, because it asks you to choose between satisfaction and virality, and then quantifying the tradeoff.

Click on the image and read Andrew Chen’s post.

by Raka. Browse more data visualizations.

(Source: orefakorede)

Well, just think of it this way… Let’s assume you own a very expensive piece of waterfront real estate, and you hire a broker to sell it for you. After exploring the market and after getting indications of interest, your broker advises you that $10 million would be a great price for your home.  You meet with the potential buyers and decide to sell it for $10 million.  After the $1 million commission you have to pay your broker, your net proceeds are $9 million. An hour later, you drive by the house and see your broker in the driveway shaking hands with some different people. You pull over to see what’s going on, and you find that the people you just sold the house to for $10 million are very close friends of your broker.  To your dismay, you also find out that those friends just sold your (former) house to somebody else for $15 million.

The same exact game is going on here, Mark. You’ll be selling 388 million shares of Facebook stock in your IPO. A likely scenario is that your broker “friends” are telling you to sell your shares at $40 per share. You’ll take their advice and sell at $40 per share, and the buyers will be Morgan Stanley’s biggest fund management clients. By the time you drive around the block, these folks will have sold their shares at $50 per share. In other words, using the same real estate scenario, you’ll have sold something of yours for $15 billion that is really worth $19 billion. And for that “unique” privilege, you’ll be paying your “friends” at the banks $150 million as a fee.

Why did Zynga’s stock drop when Facebook went public?

Zynga went through its own private flash crash. The straight drop and rise and drop in its stock after Facebook’s IPO is the classic signature of program trading. Whatever algorithms traders were using agreed that the stock was hugely overvalued, then undervalued, then overvalued again. So they all screamed “SELL” or “BUY” at the same time. 

Then they stopped. Trading resumed at a more human pace. Why the change? One plausible explanation is that traders unloaded Zynga stock because now they could buy Facebook stock. They did so en masse — until Zynga stock fell so far that it became too cheap to resist. Then they bought it en masse — until Zynga stock rose so far that it became too expensive to resist dumping. 

(Source: soupsoup)

News Orgs: their Fans and Followers, March 2012

The Onion, holding its own.

(Source: futurejournalismproject, via ilovecharts)

Via

(Source: visualoop)

ROI of company funded mobile devices

raiazlan:

ROI of Social Media 

The world’s largest photo libraries

For more info read the post from 1000memories here.