Pivot, from Microsoft Live Labs makes it easier to interact with massive amounts of data in ways that are powerful, informative, and fun. The Pivot team tried to step back and design an interaction model that accommodates the complexity and scale of information rather than the traditional structure of the Web. As a data junkie myself I think it is very cool.

The tool was released to the public earlier this month in conjunction with a demonstration given at the TED conference in Long Beach, CA.

For some other cool Data Visualizations, check out Digg’s Swarm

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The inclusion of Real Time content (from Twitter and Facebook) in the search results of Google (GOOG), Bing (MSFT) and Yahoo (YHOO), all of whom have jumped into integrating real-time data into search results have been talked about with great fanfare. I posted about what the impact of the inclusion of Real Time search will mean to many marketers and advertisers. The marketing firm OneUpWeb just concluded an interesting “eye-tracking” survey/study .pdf, that explores the effectiveness of the recent efforts.

The study entitled, “Search Gone Wild” looks at how a small group of users–split up into to groups called “consumers” and “foragers”–reacted to the Google real-time search results. Here is just one of the heat-maps included in the study:

As it turned out, the results did not live up to the hype around putting real-time search in engines:

• The consumer group averaged 9 seconds to the first fixation on real-time results, where as the information foragers took a full 14 seconds.
• The consumer group had 10% fewer clicks on the real-time results than the information foragers.
• In-attentional blindness is a phenomenon found to afflict the task-drive consumers—they don’t see what they aren’t looking for.
• 25% of the participants were familiar with the real-time component prior to the study.
• 55% of the participants could easily find the real-time results.
• Only a quarter of the consumers cared for the real-time results compared to 47% of the information foragers.
• The majority of the participants surveyed were indifferent to the real-time results.

To get the full report/pdf please click here.

You can also look at a study that I published last week that illustrated the phenomenon called banner blindness.

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Banner blindness is a phenomenon in web usability where visitors on a website ignore banner-like information. There have been numerous studies done on this behavior, most notably, a study conducted in 2007 by Nielsen Norman Group. The study concluded Users almost never look at anything that looks like a banner display advertisement, whether or not it’s actually an ad. Banner blindness is exacerbated in Social Media, where banners get an average of 1-2 seconds of exposure before the user moves on to the next page.

The following heatmaps, from the 2007 study, show three examples that cover a range of user engagement with the content: quick scanning, partial reading, and thorough reading. Scanning is more common than reading, but users will sometimes dig into an article if they really care about it.

The areas where users looked the most are colored red; the yellow areas indicate fewer views, followed by the least-viewed blue areas. Gray areas didn’t attract any fixations. Green boxes were drawn on top of the images after the study to highlight the advertisements.

At all levels of user engagement, the finding is the same regarding banners, almost no fixations within advertisements. If users are looking for a quick fact, they want to get done and aren’t diverted by banners; and if users are engrossed in a story, they’re not going to look away from the content.

36% of the people studied did glance at the ads on the pages they visited — not a bad hit rate. The average time a person spent looking at an ad, though, was brief — one-third of a second. This study was conducted in ‘07 before the rise of Social Media and it’s very high page refresh rate (and conversely low time spent on page.) The study goes on to say that even when a fixation within a banner was recorded, users typically didn’t engage with the advertisement. Often, users didn’t even see the advertiser’s logo or name, even when they glanced at one or two design elements elsewhere inside an ad.

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• Eyetracking: Why We Watch Some Web Ads and Not Others (time.com)

Banner and Display ads haven’t proven successful in Social Media. In my opinion I don’t think that banners will ever succeed under current media buying standards.

Here is the reason:

The average page view on Facebook is only exposed for about a second, on MySpace the average is two. For content sites like ESPN or CNN the average time that a user spends viewing a page jumps to over 10 seconds. This means that, a maximum the average that an advertising banner can be displayed is a second or two, which doesn’t leave much time to make an impression (or even be seen) by a user. Banners don’t work in Social Media because they are not seen.

This rapid page view pattern seems to be specific to social media platforms, according to data from Google’s Ad Planner. Honestly I don’t think that this totally accurate, but I did want to share it for directional purposes.

I compared Facebook & MySpace (Both Social,) Yahoo & MSN (Both Portal,) CNN & ESPN (Both Content) and Break.com (Video) and here are the results:

Note: Google’s Ad Planner does not include data on their own properties Google.com or YouTube.com which I wanted to include. Here are the individual breakdowns of each of the sites profiled, if anyone wants to double check my methodology.

Update: Break.com just announced this morning their Interactive Engagement Suite (Source MediaPost.) The new “videostitial” format is a full-page, 15-second, HD-quality welcome video with audio capabilities. “Page engage” ads are expandable ad units featuring multiple videos displayed in full page, which users can choose from once the ad has expanded. An example of going beyond the the Page View.

Facebook:

MySpace:

Yahoo:

MSN:

CNN:

ESPN:

Break.com

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Twitter users average 23 Tweets per Month. I arrived at this figure by mashing-up some other publicly available data:

First, (from GigaOm) Twitter recently revealed that it has grown to the point where it is receiving and distributing 50 million tweets a day, or about 600 every second.

Second, (from TechCrunch & ComScore) According to worldwide comScore figures released on Feb 16th, Twitter’s own site attracted 73.5 million unique individuals in January, up 8 percent from December, 2009 (when it had 65.2 million visitors). Its annual growth rate is still a phenomenal 1,105 percent. A year ago, Twitter.com attracted only an estimated 6 million visitors. (Please note: ComScore only estimates activity on Twitter’s own site. Usage across other desktop, Web, and mobile apps may be twice as large as on Twitter itself.)

Third, (from my Head) the math: 50 million tweets per day x 30.4 average days in the month / 65.2 million users = 23.3 tweets per user per month.

My math should only be used directionally (the methodology of merging two data sources together is fraught with criticism – but in a space where it is very hard to estimate the true audience of a real time application like twitter I thought this would provide some interesting insight.)

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There is something that Google Buzz has that Twitter doesn’t. Better identification of the users. Buzz participants will have a greater chance of finding who the actual identity of the person behind an account is versus a bogus profile. This is because Google Buzz is “tied” in with Google Profiles, which allows for the capture of identifiable meta-data about a person. Check out my Google Profile to see an example of the type of information that Google collects.

There are now nearly 75 million people around the world who visited Twitter in the last month. In the US 75% of internet users between 18 and 24 who have access to the internet use social networking sites. And over the past four years, across all adult age-groups, their use has quadrupled.

Unfortunately, by and large, their Twitter profiles tell us little about people’s real-life personalities. This leads to confusion about who the real people are behind the accounts. (Although what they post in their Status Updates are the windows to their Soul)

Google, in my opinion, has taken some of the micro-blogging or “status updating” tactics of Twitter (which have proved hugely popular) and mashed them up with the “identity” meta data, that Twitter largely ignores. While Google Buzz is not without it problems (see below) but fueled by it’s identification data it will become a platform that will allow for:

• Authentic conversations between Authentic People
  
• Limiting Spam (a problem that has plagued Twitter)
• The ability to extend new REAL people connections beyond the network

I do think that this will be a “real” advantage for Google Buzz moving forward. Now Google, please go and work on the User Interface issues (as Allen Stern over at Center Networks pointed out so elegantly last night) and the Privacy Issues (documented by Robin Wauters over at TechCrunch.)

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TinEye is a reverse image search engine. You can submit an image to TinEye to find out where it came from, how it is being used, if modified versions of the image exist, or to find higher resolution versions. Check out this video:

TinEye is the first image search engine to use image identification technology rather than keywords, metadata or watermarks.

TinEye is from Idée Inc. The Toronto based firm develops advanced image identification and visual search software.

Last week TechCrunch posted some data that stated Facebook Drives 44 Percent Of Social Sharing On The Web. I didn’t think that this was the only way to look at Social Sharing data. I wanted to see if the people on Twitter shared as much, or more, than Facebook users. So I did a data mash-up, combining the Gigya statistics that had been the basis of TechCrunch post, with Compete’s unique U.S. users for Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, and MySpace (the four sharing platforms compared in the TechCrunch post). What I discovered is that Web users are 4x more likely to share content on Twitter then on Facebook. Web users are about 7x more likely to share content on Twitter then on Yahoo or MySpace.

THE DATA REVEALS:

EXAMPLES IN REAL LIFE:

I wanted to see if this behavior statistics held up in the real world, so I looked at some examples:

Here are the shares on the TechCrunch post that started my research:

Facebook shares = 362, Twitter shares = 1,349 or 3.7x bigger than Facebook

What about mainstream stories? Would the statistic hold true on a non-tech story?
Here is a story on Huffington Post about last nights US victory over Team Canada in Olympic Hockey.

Facebook shares = 86, Twitter shares = 279 or 3.2x bigger than Facebook

Update: Some people have said the the Huffington Post audience is too tech savvy for a true real life example and that the results would skew towards Twitter – so I looked at this example from Time.com, “Starting Over: Can Obama Revive His Agenda?”

Facebook shares = 3, Twitter shares = 86 or 28.7x bigger than Facebook – this is an extreme example, but most follow the 4x more shares on Twitter than Facebook; a few more examples here, here, and here.

The big lesson, especially if you are a content creator is to allow users to easily share content on social platforms, putting heavy emphasis on Twitter and Facebook.

As always, please let me know if you think that I have incorrectly mashed-up the data.

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This video was sent to me yesterday Chris Mycek of IMC2, who was my guest on the Cliqology Outloud podcast. The digital Wired Magazine Demo is a great illustration of how media consumption is changing based on the devices that we use to access our content.

The digital version of Wired was a collaboration between Wired and Adobe. Wired Digital will be available on your brand new $500+

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Why are brand marketers uncomfortable with Social Media? Ad Agency IMC2 has made an investment in social media to generate results that would help a brand marketer say, “I can see the possibilities of this Social Media thing.” The path towards effective social media practices and plans will go against the immediate, campaign-centric business model of agencies and brands. How will all this play out and what will be the effect on Campaigns, Clients, Agencies and the work that they do?

Join us as we speak with Chris Mycek, SVP Marketing & Development for IMC2 and learn about how brands can tap agency expertise on Social Media.

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