The study, entitled “Mapping the global Twitter heartbeat,” was published in the university’s peer-reviewed journal First Monday in May, and used what is known as the Twitter “Decahose” — which is made up of one-tenth of all the messages sent across the network. Access to the data was provided by Gnip, one of the companies that is licensed to sell Twitter’s full firehose, as part of a demonstration project with computer maker Silicon Graphics called “Twitter Heartbeat.”

For that demonstration, the researchers used the Decahose — which streamed more than 1.5 billion tweets from 71 million unique users during the period from October 23 to November 30 of 2012, an average of 38 million tweets a day — to show a real-time map of global discussion about topics such as Hurricane Sandy and the U.S. federal election. As part of that project, the team created one of the largest databases of global tweets with geographic data included, based both on GPS data and user profiles.

In addition to some interesting data about where most geo-located tweets come from (Jakarta in Indonesia and New York City were two of the top locations), the study looked at what the Twitter data shows about the way that social networks have changed the way we communicate. In many ways, the researchers said, networks like Twitter have “created a world in which a person may speak to another on the other side of the planet with just a few millisecond delay, effectively removing the geographic barrier.”

“Users on Twitter communicate with others both near them and half a world away, illustrating that the role of physical proximity in communication seems to be reduced in the era of social media.”

These maps of real-time connections produced for the Illinois study reminded me of similar maps created with Facebook data, such as the one that Facebook intern Paul Butler produced in 2010 (which appears below) — or the one that data researcher Pete Warden created by scraping Facebook user profiles, a fascinating map of connections that he later had to delete after the social network threatened to sue him for breaching its terms of service.

Although Twitter CEO Dick Costolo likes to talk about the service as the “pulse of the planet,” it’s worth noting that most of the world’s population still doesn’t tweet — and even most of those who do aren’t using it all the time: Twitter has about 550 million users, or about eight percent of the world’s population, but the top five percent account for almost half of all tweets sent. Of the sample the U of Illinois researchers looked at, one quarter tweeted only once.

In addition, the study notes that only 8 percent of all users had location data available. About one percent of all users surveyed accounted for more than two-thirds of all geo-referenced tweets, showing that geo-located are created by what the researchers called “an even more extreme subset of users” than overall tweets. They noted that studies relying on these tweets alone would have a “skewed view of the Twitterverse, especially over short periods of time.”

That said, however, it’s fascinating to see tangible evidence of how social networks like Twitter can help to erase geographical barriers and connect users around the globe in real time.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Dunechaser

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Whatever the case may be, agreeing to turn over data to the government might have seemed like a good idea at the time, but the potential downside risks of that particular slippery slope are fairly overwhelming.

The popular response to the NSA revelations may lie somewhere between mild disinterest and outright apathy, according to surveys like the one done by the Pew Center — in part because we seem to have gotten used to the idea that tech companies are monitoring our every move. But being seen as co-operating with the spy agency is still a fairly huge risk for cloud-based services. Not only that, but co-operating in even a small way makes those companies look like easy targets for further government pressure.

Who co-operated and to what extent is unclear

At this point, the actual truth of what is involved in the NSA’s so-called PRISM program remains a rapidly shifting target. The documents first published by the Guardian and the Washington Post a week ago seemed pretty cut and dried in their description of a system that allowed the spy agency “direct access” to the servers of Google, Yahoo, Facebook and about half a dozen other companies — something the Post originally said was provided voluntarily and gave the NSA broad access to information about user behavior.

Almost immediately, however, the details started to blur: not only did those companies deny providing “direct access” to their servers, but some sources said the data was only provided under duress, because of secret court orders related to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. As the days went on, other reports quoted anonymous sources saying the whole system (the one those companies had denied any knowledge of) was just an attempt to automate the processing of those legitimate FISA requests.

One report quoted anonymous staffers at several of the companies saying they only agreed to co-operate with the NSA because they were afraid if they didn’t do so, the government would demand even more of their data and that wouldn’t be fair to users. And finally, on Friday, the New York Times reported — using some conveniently leaked documents — that Yahoo had tried to resist the NSA’s attempts to compel it to provide user data, but was ultimately unsuccessful and was ordered by the court to comply.

User trust is a precious commodity

So what we have now are a broad range of conflicting reports about who did what — including semantic debates about what the term “direct access” actually means, as well as how much access was provided voluntarily vs. how much was provided under duress. So far, the only company that seems to have emerged unscathed is Twitter, which reportedly fought the government’s attempts to enrol the company in the PRISM program and succeeded, a tale that has burnished Twitter’s claim to be the “free-speech wing of the free-speech party”).

That said, however, there seems to be little doubt that many companies co-operated with the NSA, and may have set up “lockbox” or “clean room”-style facilities for providing data — and there are even suggestions that this group could go far beyond just Google and Yahoo and Facebook, and could include hundreds of other technology providers that have co-operated to some extent with the spy agency and given the NSA details about their equipment and/or products that could help its surveillance program.

These companies may have convinced themselves that co-operation was inevitable, or that they needed to do something to help the government catch terrorists, or that by automating the legally legitimate FISA process they could save themselves a lot of trouble and expense, or some combination of all the above. But in reality, they have not only shown themselves to be weak — which will encourage the NSA to pressure them even further because they know they can win — but also fundamentally untrustworthy, and that could cause them a lot more problems with users than they ever contemplated.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Shutterstock / Luis Louro, Shutterstock / Lightspring and Flickr user Thomas Leuthard

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But one replacement product that I wouldn’t use? An RSS news reader from Facebook.

In one sense, it wouldn’t be surprising for Facebook to launch an RSS reader at its press event next Thursday in Menlo Park, as some people have speculated. Anyone using Google Reader has to find a replacement by July 1, and it’s still a pretty wide-open market. Products like Feedly seem to have a head start, but there’s still time for someone to roll out a new product and win over users.

We’ve seen that Facebook has no problem quickly launching products to try to disrupt a growing market, even if it’s not a sure thing they’ll succeed. (Just look at Poke, the company’s challenge to Snapchat.) And between the company’s launch of hashtags last week to improve the real-time nature of the news feed (even if I think hashtags are better saved for ironic conversation), and the addition of new tabs for following people on the new News Feed, Facebook clearly has ambitions to be more of a resource for news. (After all, brands and advertisers love the real-time nature of constantly updated live events and news.)

But as a hardcore Google Reader user, I have no interest in using an RSS reader replacement from Facebook, and there are several reasons why it seems like an ill-suited product for the social platform.

The appeal of Google Reader was that it was a reliable tool for importing and consuming news — one that wasn’t influenced by trends. When I subscribe to a feed, I want to read everything in that feed. With Twitter and Facebook at my disposal, I don’t need another site to see articles that my friends are sharing. I rely on my RSS feeds for work to catch every item of technology news flowing across the internet every day — I need to see everything, not just what’s popular, to do my job. And I follow probably 20-30 blogs about topics like fashion or cooking, where the writers post infrequently but where want to read every one of their posts.

So why wouldn’t I look to Facebook to re-create this experience? Probably because I don’t want my RSS reader to be social — I have Twitter and the existing Facebook for social news. I don’t want all my friends to know that I read fashion blogs on a daily basis. I don’t want the news I read to influence the ads I see on Facebook, or the stories that show up in my news feed. As the Washington Post’s auto-sharing from its social reader experiment showed, people don’t want everyone to know what they’re reading.

Of course, we don’t know if Facebook is launching an RSS reader at all, let alone what it would look like. The company did not have any comment on the matter when we asked. But social sharing is embedded in Facebook’s DNA, so it’s a reasonable assumption that any RSS reader put out by Facebook would have serious social attributes, with a heavy emphasis on sharing.

Sure, there’s room for social news on Facebook. On my account, I “like” a lot of news outlets, as well as journalists and celebrities and business figures. In fact, a quick glance at my news feed would show mostly news stories, and very few posts from my friends. It’s a great way to see what’s popular right now in the news, or to catch an older story I might have missed on Twitter. But social news is a distinctly different experience from what people knew and loved about Google Reader — and that’s a distinction that a company like Digg seems to understand.

As I wrote previously, Digg’s new RSS news reader will likely incorporate some social features but will also serve as a separate product from the popular stories posted on Digg.com. And while Google Reader used to have much-beloved social features, these were complements, not a replacement, for the feeds themselves.

Would it make perfect sense for Facebook to create a dedicated spot on its site for news? Sure. But that likely wouldn’t keep me from searching for my next RSS relationship.

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Microsoft followed Facebook and said it would provide similar information, but Google declined to lump all requests together, saying that such a move would be a “step back” for users.

As we reported earlier this week, Facebook, along with Microsoft and Google, had been pushing for the right to reveal more about its participation in the government’s PRISM program, which involves snooping on users of many of the big internet services. The public requests by these companies were clearly an effort to push back against allegations that some of them essentially opened their doors to government spying.

In its press release, Facebook reported that from June to December of 2012, the government made between 9,000 and 10,000 requests involving user data, and these requests were connected to between 18,000 and 19,000 accounts — clearly a small percentage of the 1 billion active users on the network. The Wall Street Journal reports that Facebook complied “at least partially” with 79 percent of the requests in that time.

After Facebook released its numbers on Friday night, Microsoft released similar statistics. ”For the six months ended December 31, 2012, Microsoft received  between 6,000 and 7,000 criminal and national security warrants, subpoenas and orders affecting between 31,000 and 32,000 consumer accounts from U.S. governmental entities,” the company said in its release, available on its website.

Right now, Facebook is just releasing information on the number of requests for a range of time, not a breakdown of the different types of requests. AllThingsD reported earlier that Google was pushing for the ability to disclose even more about those requests, rather than lumping them all into one range, as Facebook and Microsoft have done. Google currently reports information related to National Security Letters as part of its transparency report, breaking out government request by type.

A Google spokesperson provided us with a statment on the company’s decision not to provide a lump range for government requests, saying such a move would be a “step back” for users.

“We have always believed that it’s important to differentiate between different types of government requests. We already publish criminal requests separately from National Security Letters. Lumping the two categories together would be a step back for users. Our request to the government is clear: to be able to publish aggregate numbers of national security requests, including FISA disclosures, separately.”

From the Facebook press release, which can be found in its entirety on the company’s site, the company explains the agreement it reached regarding requests:

Since this story was first reported, we’ve been in discussions with U.S. national security authorities urging them to allow more transparency and flexibility around national security-related orders we are required to comply with. We’re pleased that as a result of our discussions, we can now include in a transparency report all U.S. national security-related requests (including FISA as well as National Security Letters) – which until now no company has been permitted to do. As of today, the government will only authorize us to communicate about these numbers in aggregate, and as a range. This is progress, but we’re continuing to push for even more transparency, so that our users around the world can understand how infrequently we are asked to provide user data on national security grounds.

For the six months ending December 31, 2012, the total number of user-data requests Facebook received from any and all government entities in the U.S. (including local, state, and federal, and including criminal and national security-related requests) – was between 9,000 and 10,000. These requests run the gamut – from things like a local sheriff trying to find a missing child, to a federal marshal tracking a fugitive, to a police department investigating an assault, to a national security official investigating a terrorist threat. The total number of Facebook user accounts for which data was requested pursuant to the entirety of those 9-10 thousand requests was between 18,000 and 19,000 accounts.

This post was continually updated as the story developed.

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The Yahoo work is actually pretty important. Among the features Hadoop users have been demanding from the platform is a transition from batch-processing-only mode into something that can actually deal with data in real time. The reason for the demand is quite simple: Although being able to analyze or transform data minutes to hours after it’s generated is helpful for certain analytic tasks, it’s not too helpful if you want an application to be able to act on data as it hits the system.

A service like Twitter is a prime example of where Storm can be valuable. Twitter uses Storm to handle tweets so users’ Timelines are up to date and do things like real-time analytics and spotting emerging trends. In fact, it was Twitter that open sourced Storm in 2011 after buying Storm creator Backtype in order to get access to the technology and its developers.

Among web companies, Storm has become quite popular as a stream-processing complement to Hadoop since then. And now Yahoo has made possible a much tighter integration between the two — even to the point that Storm can borrow cycles from batch-processing nodes if it needs some extra juice. That’s a valuable feature — just last week I heard Twitter engineer Krishna Gade bemoan Storm’s auto-scaling limitations during a talk at Facebook’s Analytics @ Web Scale event.

Krishna Gade talking Storm at the Facebook event.

The Storm-on-Hadoop work is among the first of many promised improvements to come thanks to YARN, a major update to the Apache Hadoop 2.0 code that lets Hadoop clusters run multiple processing frameworks simultaneously. Twitter has been using the open source Mesos resource manager to achieve the same general capabilities, but Gade’s colleague Dmitriy Ryaboy said during the same talk that the company plans to begin using YARN for some big data workloads when it upgrades to Hadoop 2.0. He expects — probably correctly — much more community effort will go toward continuously improving its capabilities and building applications for YARN.

Facebook’s Wormhole project isn’t open source (as far as I can tell), but its lessons are still valuable (and LinkedIn has open sourced a similar technologies named Kafka and Databus). It’s what’s called a publish-subscribe system, which is essentially a concise way of saying that it manages communications between applications that publish information (e.g., updates to a database) and subscribe to the information their fellow applications are publishing. At Facebook, for example, Wormhole sends changes to Facebook’s master user database to Graph Search so that search results are as up to date as possible, or to its Hadoop environment so analytics jobs have the newest data.

Of course, like all things Facebook (its new Presto interactive query engine comes to mind), Wormhole is built to scale. Latency is in the low milliseconds and, blog post author Laurent Demailly notes

“Wormhole processes over 1 trillion messages every day (significantly more than 10 million messages every second). Like any system at Facebook’s scale, Wormhole is engineered to deal with failure of individual components, integrate with monitoring systems, perform automatic remediation, enable capacity planning, automate provisioning and adapt to sudden changes in usage pattern.”

Although they were developed within separate companies, there’s actually a tie that binds Yahoo’s Storm-in-Hadoop work and Facebook’s Wormhole. As web companies grow from their initial applications into sprawling business composed of numerous applications and services, so too do their infrastructures. To address the differing needs of their various systems at the data level, the companies have begun breaking them down by their latency requirements (i.e., real-time, near real-time and batch, however they choose to word them) and then building tools such as Storm and Wormhole to manage to flow of data between the systems.

We’ve previously explained in some detail how LinkedIn and Netflix have built their data architectures around these principles, and we’ll hear a lot more about how they and other web companies are tackling this situation at Structure next week. Among the speakers are senior engineers and technology executives from Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Box, Netflix and Amazon.

Update: This post was updated at 1:46 p.m. to clarify that Twitter is not eliminating Mesos for all its workloads. 

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user agsandrew.

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If you haven’t heard of stickers, don’t be surprised when you start seeing them pop up pretty much every time you open up your Facebook page. Originating in South Korea and catching like wildfire throughout the cuteness-addicted Pacific Rim, stickers are emoji on steroids that convey much more than a smiley face ever would — making them a popular way to communicate with friends for teens and twenty-somethings everywhere.

The rise of the sticker is meteoric, gaining a notable American home in March with the introduction of Path 3.0  and skipping over to mobile versions of Facebook Messenger roughly a month later. Stickers have been so sticky that although Facebook is not yet providing it, a handful of websites have already hacked a way to bring stickers onto desktop versions of the platform to send giant smiley faces to friends without reaching for the phone.

It’s only natural that Americans would rapidly fall in love with stickers  – captured perfectly today by the Wall Street Journal — because we can’t get enough of the cute stuff. And where we see gleeful little characters that tell our loved ones that we’re sick, working, or even eating tacos, social networks are seeing dollar signs.

Path has already put a premium sticker model in place, pushing new ways to communicate with friends via fluffy animal for $1.99. It seems like a small in-app purchase for cuteness, but the company’s ever-expanding bevvy of stickers (including a forthcoming pack with indie design website Threadless) will set up a thriving market that could tempt users into purchasing trendy stickers and collectors and feed their urge for more.

Facebook hasn’t released any premium packs yet — odds are it will happen after the system is fully enabled on all forms of the social network — but it has the potential to provide the network with a new source of cash based on users’ emotional quibbles.

Come on, who can say no to a cat in a party hat?

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The data center is sited in Luleå on the northern Swedish coast, and it went live on Wednesday. As with Google’s new Finnish data center, Facebook is counting on the northern European environment to help cut cooling costs – not by way of seawater cooling, this time, but using good old cold air. The remaining excess heat is used to keep the associated offices warm.

According to a post on Wednesday, water is nonetheless providing hydroelectric energy for the operation. This accounts for all of the data center’s electricity needs, and the post states that “the supply is also so reliable that we have been able to reduce the number of backup generators required at the site by more than 70 percent.”

The Luleå facility is almost entirely based on Facebook’s Open Compute Project designs, which also help on the energy efficiency front by doing away with extraneous materials. The company reckons the data center averages 1.07 on the power usage efficiency (PUE) scale.

Having a data center in Europe is a very good idea when it comes to meeting European data protection laws (which are probably about to get tougher). The only reason Facebook can legally process EU citizens’ personal data in the U.S. is its membership of the U.S-EU Safe Harbor program — after Edward Snowden’s leak, that arrangement now looks shaky to say the least.

It’s hard to say what the fallout from the scandal will be just yet, but processing those citizens’ data within EU borders may help Facebook stay on the right side of the law.

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For now, the companies are prohibited from releasing such information.

It’s clearly a PR offensive on behalf of the web and software giants, hoping to distance themselves from revelations that the three companies and others have participated in the FBI and National Security Agency’s PRISM program first reported last week.

It’s still unclear just how the program gained access to external data and what participating companies have done to enable this sort of access. But regardless of that, the perception of complicity is something Google and the rest must fight. Whether or not the federal government complies with requests for more transparency almost doesn’t matter. The companies need to at least look like they want to shed light on their involvement and the extent of the data mining. And the letters achieve that goal.

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user ARTSILENSE.

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One of the most tangible signs of this apathy (if that’s what it is) came from a Pew study that was released Tuesday of people’s attitudes towards the monitoring of their activity by the government. As described by my colleague Barb Darrow, over half of the Americans surveyed believed that the NSA’s behavior was “an acceptable price to pay to stop terrorism.” And almost half of those who participated agreed the NSA should be able to “monitor everyone’s email and other online activities if officials say this might prevent future terrorist attacks.”

A collective shrug of the shoulders

I confess that the Pew survey didn’t surprise me at all. Within hours of the Guardian and Post stories, there were responses flying through my Twitter stream and on other social platforms that amounted to a collective shrug of the shoulders: We knew this was happening, at least in general terms, most said — so why make such a big deal out of it? After all, the Patriot Act has been around since shortly after September 11 of 2001, and it authorizes a fairly wide variety of surveillance under certain conditions (although even the author of that Act says the NSA’s recent behavior over-reaches what was intended).

Another possible cause of the somewhat apathetic response is that so little is known about what the NSA is doing exactly. The initial reports said that the spy agency was provided with “direct access” to the servers of companies like Google, Facebook and Yahoo and could get whatever data it wanted — but then the qualifications started, and pretty soon it wasn’t clear what exactly “direct access” meant, or what kinds of data the NSA was permitted to get.

One thing PRISM makes clear is that all of those tin-foil hat wearing people knew what they were talking about.—
James Kendrick (@jkendrick) June 11, 2013

After some follow-up reporting from the Post, the New York Times and the Guardian, it appeared that the term “direct access” could refer to a system set up by the tech companies in question that would essentially automate official requests under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, providing a kind of secure area or “lock-box” to which only the NSA would have the keys. In other words, something that amounts to direct access by another name.

So one popular response boils down to: “Well, this is all legal and above-board then, so who cares?” — even though others pointed out that the court that approves the FISA orders is secret and has reportedly approved 99.9 percent of all requests made to it (according to other reports, the NSA and others can surveill wide ranges of data for weeks before they even need to get a court order, and other kinds of data such as chats may not even require an order).

Don't be distracted. The big story isn't Edward Snowden nor intelligence leaks. It's government's disregard for privacy and civil liberties.—
Robert Reich (@RBReich) June 11, 2013

We’re used to being snooped on

Part of the problem could be that, while leaker Edward Snowden’s dramatic revelations have gotten a lot of attention, there have been plenty of previous reports about similar activity over the past decade and very few of those have prompted much outrage at all. Former AT&T employee Mark Klein provided some pretty damning evidence in 2007 about how the NSA had set up a “secret room” filled with equipment that the spy agency could use to duplicate whatever data it wanted (using prisms, coincidentally enough) and that story eventually died.

Have views about personal privacy changed so dramatically? And if they have, are Google and Facebook and other “cloud” services part of the problem — or at least part of the reason — for those changes? It’s possible that we’ve become so used to the idea that our online lives are an open book, whether we like it or not, that there’s no longer any point in fighting it. If Google and Facebook are tracking all of our data and metadata in order to serve us ads, what difference does it make whether the National Security Agency is also doing it?

David Sirota at Salon makes a persuasive case for why the NSA’s actions aren’t even remotely the same as what Google and Facebook do — primarily because one is at least notionally voluntary. But that may not make a big difference to many users once the heat of the recent headlines has dissipated.

@mathewi I think it's that our networks already keep everyone informed by the second. We're all being "spied" on by Facebook, Twitter, et al—
Jack Narcotta (@JackN_TBR) June 11, 2013

What is there to be done?

The other complicating aspect is that, even if we were to get outraged about the NSA surveillance, it’s not clear what anyone could do about it. As more than one person has pointed out, it’s difficult to have the kind of “open debate” that President Obama said he wants to have about privacy and security when all of the actions of the NSA and PRISM are classified top secret, as are the court orders they use, and the secret court that produces them. Google isn’t even allowed to say that it gets FISA orders, although it is now trying to get approval to at least mention them.

There are some efforts aimed at pushing the debate forward, including a project called StopWatching.us, which is backed by a coalition of companies and entities — including the open-source Mozilla project and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. But all it plans to do is send a letter to Congress asking for changes to the Patriot Act and FISA (which some members of Congress are also asking for). There’s no real chance of a “Stop SOPA” type of movement because Google and Yahoo and Facebook are all involved in what is being protested about.

And the final death knell for broader interest in such matters is that the news cycle inevitably moves on. The NSA story is complicated, information about it is fragmented and contradictory, and most of the answers are top-secret and therefore unlikely to ever be confirmed. Not a great recipe for something that’s going to hold the attention of the average reader.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Thomas Leuthard

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This is the second billion dollar exit where Facebook lost out. In case of Tumblr, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg offered around $500 million to David Karp, but Marissa Mayer charmed Karp and, of course, more than doubled the money she was willing to pay for Tumblr. It was rumored that Facebook were in the running to buy Waze, but couldn’t pull the trigger.

Actually, selling to Google (or anyone else) was actually the only outcome for this company — even though it had tens of millions of people using the software in dozens of countries worldwide, it would have been pretty hard for them to turn social commuting into a real business. Google, on the other hand, can simply layer this on its maps and try and use the data to drive more real world transactions.

As I pointed out in a post about the new Google Maps, Google will ultimately create more natural advertising formats for maps-driven interfaces and Waze helps them towards that objective. That said, it is a great exhale for Waze’s investors, who were facing the prospect of building a real business — a much harder proposition than most in Silicon Valley understand or are willing to admit.

The big winners in this deal are investors that include Magma Ventures, Blue Run Ventures and Vertex Ventures, who were earliest backers of the company. Sources say they each made well north of $100 million from the deal. The surprise (and ironic) winner might be Microsoft, which is rumored to have invested in the company as a strategic investor.

The company had raised $12 million in its Series A funding in early 2008 and was valued at around $20 million at that time. It snagged another $25 million Series B funding in November 2010 and was valued at just under $100 million after that round of funding. The company received cash from Qualcomm Ventures and Microsoft in addition to other internal investors.

Horizon Ventures and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers were the last money into the company, but they too have made a nice chunk of change on this deal. In October 2011, the company received another $30 million in funding from Horizon Ventures and Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers at a pretty hefty valuation – around $250 million, according to sources.

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