context competition

Not everyone ‘likes’ the implication foreseen for the Facebook Like button.  Adina Levin’s writes concisely about social context, its benefits, the activitystream standard and competitive forces in the market of context services.   The current paradigm for FB news feeds is to author once and send to all (from F8 a FB solution to this is to introduce Dashboards from different application or likes).  Whereas Adina holds up an activitystream vision for users context to be given the “‘capability to create more refined – and contexually relevant – posting choices and reading filters”.  She makes the case that the ‘like’ button holds to a different social context vision one where “Facebook is your one and only source of context”.

The opensourcers at FB point to their adoption of RDFa and the flexibility this provides, especially when connected to the FB API, including freer access to all openGrapth data types.  Adina makes a call for FB to adopt the Activitystreams standard and to complete on a level playing field with others wishing to specialize in offering such services.  How can you compete?, offer websites an activitystream based services where the users get a better context experience and then let those users spread the word.

Frequency V Context scoring

What is more important: The absolute frequency a brand is talked about online or the context surrounding those conversations?

The Scotch Whisky 100 has some classic examples, Tobermory stands out as one. The volume of conversations authored for Tobermory are significanlty less than the top 10 brands in the Index. However, for the range of words chosen to be positively scored against the community, it scores high. mepath has selected a weighting between the frequency and context for the Scotch Whisky 100.

However, customers of the mepath marketplace have the opportunity to view the analysis and set the scoring rules base upon what they deem to be important. This process can also be repeated by segmenting the sources of conversations e.g. whisky forums, social networks with a younger outlook or even a geographic location.