Data Mining: Text Mining, Visualization and Social Media

First Day with Windows Phone 7

I've now had a Windows Phone 7 device (Samsung Focus/At&T) for 24 hours and thought I'd share some of my thoughts. Note that this is replacing my iPhone 3G.

I've been looking forward to using the new phone for a while now. Certainly, working in Bing Mobile has brought me pretty close to plenty of the excitement around the new product, but Microsoft's generous offer of a free phone pretty much sealed the deal. The first hurdle was getting the device. The AT&T store was sold out and it had to be ordered and delivered. Once in my hands I was immediately frustrated by AT&T's activation mechanics. I had to take three different paths before finally getting the thing up and running. However, that frustration quickly dissolved as I started setting up and playing with the new phone.

When using a piece of technology that takes a completely new approach to an existing problem, one has to bear in mind that things that seem initially awkward are really just reminders of how one has become trained to use the previous stuff - it is a relative measure of difference, not an absolute measure of design. The biggest difference between the Windows Phone 7 UI and the iPhone is that, from an engineering perspective, it is closer to an object oriented metaphor. The tiles that one can place on the home screen are really references to objects of a variety of types. I can place a location resulting from a local search right on the home surface for easy reference. I can place a person on the home screen for quick calling and email. Each of these differently typed objects is associated with different types of actions (one can ask for directions to a location, or for the contact information for a person). Getting this is key to getting the most out of the Windows Phone 7 experience. Personally, I think this metaphor can go even further, with a more comprehensive exposure to the various types of objects.

The first app that I loaded was OneBusAway - a must for any serious public transport commuter in the Seattle area. Initially, I was disappointed with this version of the application. I think it is going to take some time getting used to, but I'd like to see some improvements. Note that, as I mentioned earlier, this is also a reminder that my first experience with the iPhone version of this app was also confusing and it took time to figure out the sweet spot in its interactions to get what I wanted out of it.

Next up I started playing with the browser. All in all I found it to be pretty snappy and a reasonably rounded implementation. Surprisingly, the dynamics of the mobile version of techmeme didn't work. Hitting the 'more' and 'new' tabs don't appear to load any additional content. I'm not sure if this is a bug or a limitation in the javascript (note that with javascript, optimization for the peculiarities of non-standard browser - i.e. all browsers - can impact the use of other browsers, so this may be an issue that techmeme can fix independently of any issues present in the phone browser).

I've played with most of the functionality offered by the phone and have really learned to enjoy the experience. The calendar is great - I much prefer it to the iPhone version from a design point of view; opening Microsoft Office documents is a very smooth experience; the Facebook integration can clearly drive more use of the social networking sites features, and I really liked the idea of linking profiles across different contexts.

However, the biggest surprise to me was the Zune functionality. This really impressed me. I found the experience of playing music on the device quite delightful and the desktop Zune product is also a very well designed and engaging system. I was also very happy with the way in which the phone integrates data with the cloud, including pictures and OneNote documents.

There is one feature that I wish existed - a simple way to transfer my contacts from the iPhone to the Windows Phone. I've read various summaries on how to do this - it is possible - but it should be far easier.

Real Time Street View on Mobile Applications

What do the following recent innovations point to?

• Augmented reality mobile applications
• Street View semantic overlays
• Crowd sourced traffic data

Combining augmented reality with crowd sourcing we could see real time imagery on street view.

Mobile Cultures

Traveling in Japan one gets an immediate impression of the impact that mobile devices is having here. One would be hard pushed on a train to not see someone doing something online. In addition, a number of developments (initially centered on continuing automation of ticketing on the rail networks) have led to deeper integration of pay-by-cell phone mechanisms.

It is tempting to look at Japan (and Tokyo in particular) as a vision of the future for other countries or cities. For example, cell phones in Japan are getting larger (while the rest of the world is still in, or recovering from a smaller is better approach) - this is a trend we can expect to see in the US soon (thanks in part to the iPhone). However, there are more fundamental aspects of a society that cannot be disentangled from their attitudes and integration of technology. Two come to mind in the context of mobile devices in Tokyo.

Firstly, Tokyo is all about public transport. Trains run at minute intervals and are packed. Public transport is prime info-snacking space.

Secondly, population density in Tokyo results, obviously, in small accommodations. One consequence of this is that people, and young people in particular, spend a lot of time outside their place of residence, thus providing many user needs for mobile devices and information services.

The point I want to make is that these two factors, I believe, lead to increased use of mobile devices and, importantly, they won't be replicated in most US cities.

Consumer Facing Analytics for User Generated Media

Aggregating and analysing user generated media (blogs, boards, usenet, etc.) posts on products is what Intelliseek, BuzzMetrics, etc. do for a living. This level of analysis is not currently available in consumer facing products other than search (blog search, board search, usenet search) and some specialised search applications (trend search and the simple sentiment search of OpinMind). The content universes for enterprise products in this space include generally blogs, message boards and usenet and can extend to review sites and other genres.

On the other hand, there are social content hosting sites, such as riffs.com and amazon, which support research on products via aggregating content only found on their site - what we might call captured content search. These are useful to a degree. However in order to get a fuller picture - one might say a more accurate picture - of what people think about products, or any topic for that matter, a solution is required which is capable of spanning multiple content types.

When considering user generated media, we are forced to consider the boundary between this type of content and professional content. A boundary which has blurred considerably in the last year and will continue to do so. In other words, there is a problem in deciding when to include opinion from the professional end of the spectrum and how. For example, how does one weigh a movie review from a blog, a movie review from rotten tomatoes, and one from, say, Mr. Ebert? An additional issue when providing consumer facing interfaces for this type of data is capturing the product being researched and finding those posts that refer to it. The captured content, especially in sites like amazon, may well have the advantage of a complete taxonomy of products which can be searched against rather than the content of the reviews. In other cases, the user requires assistance in accurately retrieving results for all variations of expressions used to refer to the product.

In this context, it is interesting to note two developments. First is Google's review search, which Kevin pointed to. This appears to aggregate reviews from a number of sources (and types of sources) for movies. It also provides access (in a faceted search type of interface) to positive, negative and neutral reviews (based on segmentation via numeric review scores). Not only that, but it provides common phrases mined from the reviews. This is pretty cool, and brings features found in standard enterprise offerings to the consumer. Note that BlogPulse has had consumer facing features based on similar features for over a year - for example blog bites, which both extract common terms and find snippets which contain terms with significant relationships.

I'll post a deeper dive on Google's review stuff later.

The second new consumer facing user generated media interface is reported by Smart Mobs, and TechCrunch and appears to be a service which will allow users to use their phones to input bar code data on a product and access user generated commentary drawn from blogs.

Is 2006 going to be the year of consumer facing analytical tools over the user generated media space? And how will the enterprise players in this space respond?

Technorati Feature Roll Out

I just spotted Steve Rubel (profile) testing out Technorati's mobile search on my blog access log (link to search). This is the second new feature that Technorati has rolled out in the last couple of days, together with language filters on search results.

Seconds after the search pops up here, I see Steve's post.

Here's the link to Niall Kennedy's post about m.technorati.com.