How To Make It as a
First-Time Entrepreneur in NYC

At tonight’s New York Tech Meetup, I will be talking about performing data analysis based on Twitter’s revolutionary data set.  As part of my preparation work, I noticed that a number of interesting location-based services could arise from Twitter’s data set if twitter allowed each tweet to be associated with a specific latitude and longitude.

You are probably thinking that Twitter already lets you specify a location.  You are right, but that location is just a default location assigned to each user on registration.  What I am suggesting is allowing twitter users to submit updates that have a specific latitude and longitude associated with each update.  A third-party client on a iPhone can easily do this by querying the iPhone’s GPS system.

Why would this be helpful?

Here’s a quick example:

During the Atlanta gas crisis, users on twitter started using the #atlgas tag to identify gas stations that weren’t empty.  The logical next step would have been to create a map of these tweets.  But, since the locations were being written in the tweet, it was a serious challenge to accurately parse the messages and auto-create a map.  If each of the tweets accepted lat/longs, it would have become a trivial exercise to produce an extremely helpful map.

Obviously Twitter has a lot on its plate but I continue to believe that it needs to do a better job of making its existing data set more useful to non-Twitter users.  Adding more meta-information to each tweet would certainly help those third-party developers build more interesting applications.

As if there weren’t enough signs the economy is hurting, Google Insights shows us that number of searches for “mcdonalds jobs” is alarmingly accelerating.

In fact, November 9th, the last data point recorded represents the highest number of searches google has seen for “mcdonalds jobs” in the last 5 years (which is as far as the data goes).

Which states are doing this search the most (Ohio, Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan and Florida)?  I guess the auto-industry’s bailout isn’t coming quickly enough.

Facebook members used to think pretty positively about Republican Vice Presidential Nominee, Sarah Palin.  However, over the last few weeks, they have started thinking 50% more negatively.  How do I know?  Facebook started previewing the next generation of it’s obscure Lexicon service.

Essentially, the service combs through wall posts by Facebook members and performs aggregate analysis on the data similar to Google Trends.  One of the more interesting analysis Facebook performs is “sentiment” tracking.  Whenever a certain term is used in a wall post, it identifies whether the term was positive or negative.

The preview version only allows you to review a small set of topics though, fortunately, Sarah Palin is one of them.  On August 29th, wall posts mentioning Sarah Palin were 80% positive or 20% negative.  Now, wall posts are 30% negative, a 50% increase in negativity.

Overheard in NYC

Foreigner (walking by):  “Wow, I didn’t realize how bad the American economy was…”

Photo of Magnolia Bakery line by gsanjose

Allen Stern, from CenterNetworks, wrote an excellent blog post about how the selection process for the NY Tech Meetup doesn’t seem fair.  Well, how about we let the NY Tech Meetup Community decide who gets to demo?

As a quick solution, I have put the companies that have requested to demo below.  NY Tech Meetup Members can vote through the comment section of this blog for the demos they would like to see.  Please identify yourself so that I can confirm you are a member of the NY Tech Meetup.  I’ll update the vote counts as the comments come in.

Update:  Some of you have requested to vote but offline, that works.  Just email me at vin at yipit dot com

If you would like to be included in this blog, email me at vin at yipit dot com and I’ll update the blog post to reflect your demo.

If we get enough participation, can the NY Tech Meetup really ignore us?

The companies requesting to demo are:

SaneBull | 2 Votes
Presenter:  Felix
SaneBull is an AJAX-powered financial platform which provides live stock market quotes, live news, financial widgets and more.  We have recently overhauled our entire website with a new look and dozens of new features. We’d love to showcase these new features to the Tech Meetup audience.

FreshmanFund | 2 Votes
Presenter: Jeff Frese
A registry for college savings that helps parents save for college even during tough economic times such as these.

RTP | 2 Votes
Presenter:  Dario Meyer
RTP (Right Time & Place) is a location based platform for all GPS enabled cell phones that allows users to obtain and share real estate listings, social events/activities and sales/promotion. My idea is unique due to the fact that it offers the user more features than what is out in the market, most LBS programs remind me of a yellow book with a GPS attached to it.

TurnTo | 3 Votes
Presenter:  George Eberstadt
TurnTo enables visitors to e-commerce sites to see what friends have bought there. This makes it easy for shoppers to get advice they can really trust — without ever leaving the site they are shopping on. TurnTo brings together social networks and e-commerce in a new way that’s better for users and better for businesses.  In a word, it’s what Beacon should have been.

HabitatMap | 1 Vote
Presenter:  Michael Heimbinder
HabitatMap, a Brooklyn based environmental health justice non-profit, builds online tools to support grassroots organizing for livable cities and healthy communities. Below, I’ve included links to a few of the collaborative maps we’ve put together with our partners in the last few months. HabitatMap is a wiki so feel free to contribute to an existing marker or add your own.

Sosauce | 2 Votes
Presenter:  Jamie Lin
We’d love to demo Sosauce at the coming (November) meetup. Our demo’s focus will be on Sosauce Mesa, the leading web-based 3D virtual world. Mesa is the only web VW that runs in all browsers and on both Macs and PCs. We’d like to take the opportunity to unveil several awesome new features as well as announce the grand opening of a new virtual tourist destination — Ross Island. For the first time, people will get to explore this mysterious Antarctic island, which is off limits to the general public in real life. A video introduction to Sosauce Mesa can be found here.

Wee Web | 1 Vote
Presenter:  Matt Meeker
Wee Web is a service for new & expecting parents to easily share photos, videos, and quick twitter-style updates about their newborns with close family & friends in a private environment.

I’m sorry, but my “normal” friends don’t get Twitter. They got Facebook, they got YouTube.  But, when I show them Twitter, they have no idea why anyone would use it.  The few of them who are social enough to broadcast short messages like to do so privately and to their friends (i.e., Facebook status updates).  So, is Twitter done?  Not at all— it’s just getting started.  Twitter doesn’t need to worry about getting everyone to start broadcasting messages, they need to focus on making their amazing data useful to everyone else. That’s what YouTube did.  YouTube succeeded not because it got everyone to contribute videos but because it took the videos of the few and made it useful to everyone else.

A few weeks back I created a graph, based on Twitter data, that helped people determine what time they should try to eat lunch at Shake Shack.  Really simple exercise but I got emails out of nowhere from friends that have never even heard of Twitter saying they were forwarded the chart and how useful it was.

What I did learn from my experience is that making twitter data useful is difficult. It’s not structured or organized and it’s hard to imagine how Twitter will ever get it’s users to structure the data themselves (hash signs will only go so far).  In other words, Twitter needs to do it themselves or someone needs to do it for them.  Twitter is headed in the right direction, the purchase of Summize to provide a Twitter search engine was fantastic and the new Election ‘08 page is interesting but not incredibly useful.  There’s way more to be done.

In terms of practical advice for the Twitter folks, I recommend they talk to the really smart guys over at Pluribo. They are using cutting-edge artificial intelligence to summarize Amazon product reviews.  Perhaps Twitter could encourage them to focus their time on the tweets fire-hose.  Imagine typing a phrase (like the recent debate or a movie) on Twitter’s search engine and getting a summarized view of thousands of people’s thoughts — pretty interesting.

Based on an analysis of movie review data for 26 movies currently in theaters, early movie reviews are 25% more likely to be positive than later movie reviews.  All movie critics see the same movie, so they shouldn’t be giving different opinions based on when they see them.  That means something smells rotten in movie review land.

The analysis shows that 78% of these “early movie reviews” were positive while total movie reviews were just 62% positive.  I based my analysis on movie review data from 26 movies off of RottenTomatoes.  I defined early as a movie review published at least a week before the movie was released.  The difference may not seem large but it’s the difference between Batman Begins and Hulk or the Royal Tenenbaums and Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2.

Why are early reviews coming out positive?  There’s a classic conflict of interest:

• Early movie reviews get many more readers which means more money for their sites / publications
• Movie studios and their PR agencies, who want positive reviews, decide which critics review the movie first
• If a critic dishes out a negative review, they are probably much less likely to get picked next time around

I hope I’m wrong, but the data is troubling.  RottenTomatoes and MetaCritic should both perform this analysis on their full data set.  They will be able to confirm my findings and potentially identify specific movie critics that may be giving biased opinions.

H.G. Welles’ War of the Worlds was broadcast over radio in 1938.  Disguised as a regular broadcast, it caused a panic amongst its listeners who thought the events were real.

I’m pretty sure if it had been broadcast through Twitter, it would have gone something like this (read from the bottom up):

Digg’s Kevin Rose, Twitter’s second most popular user with 64,572 followers, follows only 104 Twitter accounts.  It made me wonder:  who’s influencing one of Twitter’s most influential users?

While looking through his list, I noted forward-thinking technologists, in-the-know tech journalists and the Cobra Commander (awesome).  But, I also picked up on another pattern:

Top Row:  vikkichowney, adholden, Poshy, iphonegirl
Middle Row:  MelKirk, kevinrose, Aubs
Bottom Row:  leahculver, ericased, arielwaldman, AllieOops

Well-played, sir.

Based on a random sampling analysis of twitter accounts I conducted, 6 out of 10 twitter followers aren’t actually following you.  That would imply that Barack Obama, who has the most twitter followers at 80K, really only has 30K “real” followers.

I decided to take a closer look at the top three twitter tech-heavyweight (figuratively speaking) bloggers based on Twitterholic’s top 100: Mahalo’s Jason Calacanis (#7, 34K followers), Scobleizer’s Robert Scoble (#8, 34K followers), and TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington (#13 at 25K followers).  Even though Calacanis has a slight edge on Scoble, looking at their “real” followers was a completely different story.  Robert Scoble has significantly more “real” twitter followers (13.6K) than Arrington (8.6K) and Calacanis (7.5K).  On average, they were reaching 68% less twitter accounts than their follower counts indicated.  This isn’t a comment about them, they are fantastic.  It’s a comment about how twitter follower numbers are misleading.

Twitter users are pretty proud of their follower counts and they put it on their blogs next to their RSS reader counts.  I’m pretty proud of my twitter account and I only have 57 followers.  Twitterholic even puts up a leader-board of the top 100.  But, the not-surprising truth is that like RSS reader counts, not that many people are actually reading what you are tweeting.

As Twitter continues its impressive expansion and twitter accounts start to become businesses, it will be important to have a more accurate view of the reach of specific twitter accounts.

Several services are making progress on this front (Twitter Grader, Twitterholic) but there’s a lot more to do.

Note:  For the purposes of this sampling, I defined a “real follower” as someone who follows less than 300 twitter accounts and is active as measured by having a status update submitted in the last 3 days.  It’s definitely not a perfect definition but I hope it was good enough for the purposes of this demonstration.