Tuesday, June 19, 2012

On Facebook? So Are Your Future In-Laws


Bangalore: You would expect Spoorthi Gadde, 25, of Bangalore, who has a master’s degree from a top-notch engineering school, to be out and about on social networks — more so since she is single, tech-savvy and employed by a leading outsourcing company.

Ms. Gadde is indeed on social networks like Facebook, but she has never posted a status update. She sparingly uploads photos and seldom clicks on the “like” button. She does not list “favorite” books, movies or restaurants impetuously. If she did update her status, it might say, “Waiting for an arranged marriage.” There lies the reason for her restraint.

When social networks intersect with India’s hoary arranged marriage system, what you get is a generation of jumpy social networkers.

Ms. Gadde and thousands of eligible, young middle-class Indians are chary for a good reason: Social networks in particular, and the Web in general, have become the new snooping grounds for arranged marriages, marriages that are typically orchestrated by parents or older relatives.

Poking about on social networks is now the preliminary investigation tool, used on behalf of every client consulting for an arranged marriage, said Puneet Kumar, the Bangalore-based director of Globe Detective Agency. “It tells you so much about a person, their friends and their lifestyle,” Mr. Kumar said.

Ms. Gadde is all too aware of the scrutiny. “On the Web, you don’t know who is watching,” said the bespectacled, pleasant-mannered woman.

As her parents, who live in the smaller, more conventional Vijayawada city, hunt for a suitable mate for her, Ms. Gadde tempers her social networking activity. Frequent and impulsive status updates, she thinks, could be misconstrued as some character flaw. “People so casually say ‘I’m feeling low today,’ or ‘I bought an expensive dress,’ or ‘I was partying till 4 a.m.,’ but all this could reflect on one’s personality,” she said.

She looks for “respectable” photos to post, like one of herself holding a teddy bear, which she currently has in her meager gallery.

Her single friends too strive to create a good impression for the benefit of potential partners, their parents and relatives.

Half a billion Indians are 25 or under, and their usage of social networks is booming. In fact, by 2015 India is expected to have more Facebook usersthan any other country including the United States.

Just like everything else in urban India, there is a dichotomy, said Ashok Lalla, a Mumbai-based digital marketer who refers to social networking as young India’s “Five-to-Nine” preoccupation.

Many urban teenagers and 20-somethings display “inadvertent” social networking behavior, said Mr. Lalla, author of “The Future of Digital for Brands.” “They go with the flow, unthinkingly copying their friends, and exhibiting an unguarded, sometimes inappropriate side to themselves.”

At the same time, many others suffer from social networking anxiety.

Erring on the side of caution is Murugesh, 29, a Bangalore-based software engineer who did not want his last name revealed.

Mr. Murugesh, the protagonist in his family’s bride hunt, is ultra-careful on social networks. “For example, if I post a picture holding a beer glass, traditional-minded people will immediately conclude ‘this guy is a drunk.’”

He posts tame pictures like the one where he is posing in front of the Statue of Liberty while on a work trip to New York. He refrains from using popular acronyms like “WTF.”

“Trivial things on your social networking page can get magnified,” he said.

Another cagey social networks user is Mahesh K.S., who goes by only a first name, as is common in southern India. Mr. Mahesh, 24 and single, logs in at least once daily to catch up with friends.

But the only personal details on his profile page are generic mentions of his engineering education and his programming job. The photos on his page are outdated ones from his college days.

His friends load only “decent” photos on the Web because “they could be posing for future in-laws,” he said.

On the professional front, Ms. Gadde and her peers are global professionals, interacting with overseas customers, meeting tough deadlines and traveling overseas for work. On the personal plane, they are rooted in their families’ Indian-ness.

Ms. Gadde, for instance, wakes up to an unfailing morning routine of a bath, puja (the Indian prayer ritual) and then breakfast. Her family frowns on Western dressing.

An occasional social drinker, Mr. Murugesh said his parents, retired government employees who live close to the smaller city of Coimbatore, would bar him from entering the house if they ever discovered that he drinks.

Interestingly, Ms. Gadde does not hesitate to turn the tables on nosy relatives and prying prospective mates. As her parents tally horoscopes and consult the family astrologer while zeroing in on potential partners, she fans out on the Web to ferret out details on the men.

Mr. Murugesh too said he has wised up to several tricks that marriageable-age girls employ.

One family sent him a photo of their daughter dressed conservatively in a sari. When he checked out her social networking profile, the girl was wearing a short skirt, leading his parents to immediately turn down the match. Another prospective bride sent a dated picture to his family, but her Facebook page revealed she was much older.

Mr. Murugesh openly admits that he is judgmental. He rejected a proposal from a family after he found out the girl proclaimed her relationship status as “it’s complicated.”

He also looks at the numbers and types of friends prospective brides have. “Less than a 100 signals an introvert, but over 500 friends, mostly male, is bad news,” he said.

Saritha Rai sometimes feels she is the only person living in Bangalore who was actually raised here. There’s never a dull moment in her mercurial metropolis. Reach her on Twitter @SarithaRai.

-NyTimes

How Depressed People Surf the Web


IN what way do you spend your time online? Do you check your e-mail compulsively? Watch lots of videos? Switch frequently among multiple Internet applications — from games to file downloads to chat rooms?

We believe that your pattern of Internet use says something about you. Specifically, our research suggests it can offer clues to your mental well-being.

In a study to be published in a forthcoming issue of IEEE Technology and Society Magazine, we and our colleagues found that students who showed signs of depression tended to use the Internet differently from those who showed no symptoms of depression.

In February of last year, we recruited 216 undergraduate volunteers at Missouri University of Science and Technology. First, we had the participants fill out a version of a questionnaire called theCenter for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale, which is widely used for measuring depression levels in the general population. The survey revealed that 30 percent of the participants met the criteria for depressive symptoms. (This was in line with national estimates that 10 to 40 percent of college students at some point experience such symptoms.)

Next, we had the university’s information technology department provide us with campus Internet usage data for our participants for February. This didn’t mean snooping on what the students were looking at or whom they were e-mailing; it merely meant monitoringhow they were using the Internet — information about traffic flow that the university customarily collects for troubleshooting network connections and such.

Finally, we conducted a statistical analysis of the depression scores and the Internet usage data.

There were two major findings. First, we identified several features of Internet usage that correlated with depression. In other words, we found a trend: in general, the more a participant’s score on the survey indicated depression, the more his or her Internet usage included these (rather technical-sounding) features — for instance, “p2p packets,” which indicate high levels of sharing files (like movies and music).

Our second major discovery was that there were patterns of Internet usage that were statistically high among participants with depressive symptoms compared with those without symptoms. That is, we found indicators: styles of Internet behavior that were signs of depressive people. For example, participants with depressive symptoms tended to engage in very high e-mail usage. This perhaps was to be expected: research by the psychologists Janet Morahan-Martin and Phyllis Schumacher has shown that frequent checking of e-mail may relate to high levels of anxiety, which itself correlates with depressive symptoms.

Another example: the Internet usage of depressive people tended to exhibit high “flow duration entropy” — which often occurs when there is frequent switching among Internet applications like e-mail, chat rooms and games. This may indicate difficulty concentrating. This finding, too, is consistent with the psychological literature: according to the National Institute of Mental Health, difficulty concentrating is also a sign of depressive symptoms among students.

OTHER characteristic features of “depressive” Internet behavior included increased amounts of video watching, gaming and chatting.

Earlier studies have looked into the relationship between Internet usage and depression, but ours is thought to be the first to use actual Internet data, collected anonymously and unobtrusively, rather than student-completed surveys about Internet usage, which are less reliable.

What are the practical applications of this research? We hope to use our findings to develop a software application that could be installed on home computers and mobile devices. It would monitor your Internet usage and alert you when your usage patterns might signal symptoms of depression. This would not replace the function of mental health professionals, but it could be a cost-effective way to prompt people to seek medical help early. It might also be a tool for parents to monitor the mood-related Internet usage patterns of their children.

Such software could also be used at universities, perhaps installed on campus networks to notify counselors of students whose Internet usage patterns are indicative of depressive behavior. (This proposal, of course, raises privacy concerns that would have to be addressed.)

Mental health groups have recommended screening in multiple settings as a critical component of preventing mental health problems in young people. We believe that monitoring Internet usage could be part of the solution.

Sriram Chellappan is an assistant professor of computer science at Missouri University of Science and Technology. Raghavendra Kotikalapudi is a software development engineer.

-NyTimes

Monday, June 11, 2012

Airtime, a new video chat service


Airtime, a new video chat service which connects strangers, promises an unwelcome return to the 'Wild Wild West' days of the early web, writes Emma Barnett.

Airtime is the brainchild of Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning - the duo who created Napster.
Airtime, in case you haven’t heard of it yet, is a new video chat service that allows friends, and crucially strangers, to talk - created by Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning, the duo behind Napster.

After a cringe-worthy launch party for the service’s debut in New York, at which Airtime failed to work several times in front of a celebrity-studded crowd, it still isn’t clear why these well-known technology entrepreneurs think there’s a market for this product.

Here’s a description of Airtime’s raison raison d'etre: “Airtime shows users a list of contacts based on their Facebook friends at launch, but the focus of the service is a large "talk to someone" button which, when pressed, connects them to someone new in a video chat box.

“Participants are matched with preference given to whether they are nearby, share interests and are friends of friends - although any, or all, of these categories can be deselected before taking part.

“Users can see what they share in common to help spark conversations and choose whether to reveal their name.”

It’s being described as an upmarket ‘Chatroulette’ with filters – a similar-sounding service which enjoyed a brief spell of popularity a couple of years ago - until the site became overrun with unsavoury types.

Parker, an early investor in Facebook and now a big backer of Spotify, has insisted Airtime has a place because it will help bring “serendipity” back to the web.

He thinks that people in the Facebook generation are not able to meet somebody new online because their social experiences are now so restricted to their own networks.

Parker and Fanning say that Airtime will help brings back the ‘Wild Wild West’ feeling of the early web – where anybody could meet anybody.

But I don’t know anyone who wants a return to the faceless chatrooms that we did away with in nineties and early noughties. Most people I speak to only want to talk to their friends, not strangers, both online and off. They don’t have a desire to waste time talking to strangers. It’s the equivalent of picking up the phone and calling a random phone number.

And the people who do want to meet someone new are usually after a date – for which there are a variety of well-established dating sites.

The social rules online are pretty similar to the rules we like to observe offline. We already have one highly successful digital network which allows us to interact with strangers based on our interests and it’s called Twitter.

Equally, we also already have a popular video chat network which allows us to talk to whoever we would like (but usually it’s just family and friends) and that one’s called Skype.

In the profoundly social chapter of the web’s development that we currently find ourselves in, Airtime is a step backwards, not forwards.

By Emma Barnett - Telegraph

Monday, June 4, 2012

Women more likely to be addicted to Facebook, researchers claim

Women are more likely to become addicted to Facebook, according to researchers who designed a chart of symptoms signalling whether someone has an unhealthy devotion to social networking.

Psychologists from the University of Bergen in Norway studied 423 students for signs of addictive behaviour in the way they used and felt about Facebook.

They found that some participants showed clear signs of "Facebook addiction" similar to those exhibited by people addicted to drugs, alcohol and other chemical substances.

Younger people were more likely to become dependant on Facebook than older people and women were at greater risk than men, the researchers said.

People who suffered from anxiety or social insecurity were heavier users of the website, most likely because they found it easier to use the technology than to communicate with people in person, they added.

The study also found that extroverted people were more likely to be addicted to Facebook, while people who were well organised and ambitious were less at risk, using the website primarily for work or networking purposes.

The findings were measured using the "Bergen Facebook Addiction Scale", a new list of six criteria for each of which a person is given a score from one ("very rarely") to five ("very often").

Categories include feeling an urge to use Facebook an increasing amount, trying and failing to limit your use of the website, and feeling unsettled if you are denied access to your account.

Scoring "often" or "very often" on at least four of the criteria suggests you may be addicted to Facebook, according to the study published in the Psychological Reports journal.

By Nick Collins 
-Telegraph

Facebook launches its own app store

By Emma Barnett

Facebook has created its own ‘App Centre’, in which it will showcase the best apps across the web, all mobile platforms and on the social network.

The App Centre will be rolled out over the coming weeks and aims to display the finest Ios, Android, mobile and web apps.

Facebook’s ambition is to help people discover “the best apps” which their friends enjoy using.

The social network, which now has more than 900 million members, will also sell its own apps through the store. The move is being seen as a shrewd one by technology analysts because the App Centre will allow the social network to showcase the best apps, based on its extensive social data, which allow users to login using their Facebook details via Connect.

And it will also encourage more developers to create bespoke paid-for apps for Facebook.com. All developers who create paid-for apps solely created for Facebook, will have to share 30 per cent of the price with the social network.

However, when promoting popular apps such as Spotify or Pinterest, Facebook’s App Centre will simply list which stores they are available through – without taking a cut of the price.

“For the over 900 million people that use Facebook, the App Center will become the new, central place to find great apps like Draw Something, Pinterest, Spotify, Battle Pirates, Viddy, and Bubble Witch Saga,” explained Facebook engineer Aaron Brady on the company blog.

“Everything has an app detail page, which helps people see what makes an app unique and lets them install it before going to an app.

“Success through the App Centre is tied to the quality of an app. We use a variety of signals, such as user ratings and engagement, to determine if an app is listed in the App Centre. To help you [developers] monitor user feedback, we are also introducing a new app ratings metric in Insights to report how users rate your app over time.

“Well-designed apps that people enjoy will be prominently displayed. Apps that receive poor user ratings or don’t meet the quality guidelines won't be listed.”

Each app will have a star rating, based on Facebook’s social graph, like Apple’s App Store.

The news comes just ahead of Facebook's highly anticipated initial public offering.

-Telegraph