Michael Bernstein, Adam Marcus, David Karger, Rob MillerMIT CSAIL

MIT HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION

Enhancing Directed Content Sharing on the Web

Information Overload

You want more information.

Aggregate

Filter

Facet

Recommend

Friendsourced content sharing

Related to your research

Related to your research

Friendsourced content sharingis inhibited.

Our goal is to encourage friendsourced content sharingby making it easier and less inhibited.

http://feedme.csail.mit.edu

1. Recommend recipients to reduce the time and effort for sharing

2. Surface activity via awareness indicators

3. Learn personalized models passively

• Introduction• Related Work• Understanding Sharing• Supporting Sharing• Implementation• Evaluation• Discussion• Conclusion

Related work• Mediating our information access

– Information mediators [Ehrlich and Cash 94]– Contact brokers [Paepcke 96]– Technological gatekeepers [Allen 77]

• Information is shared via e-mail [Erdelez and Rioux 00] to educate and form rapport [Marshall and Bly 04]

• Recommender systems focus on discovery [Resnick et al 94, Joachims et al 97]

• Expertise recommenders focus on information needs [McDonald 00]

• The FeedMe namesake [Burke 09, Sen 06]

What drives social sharing?

Two surveys (N=40 / N=100) on Amazon Mechanical TurkVetted for cheatersPaid $0.20 / $0.05

IntroUnderstandingSupportingEvaluationDiscussionFe

edM

e

E-mail is still dominant

E-mail

Talkin

g in p

erson

Socia

l netw

ork sit

es

Instan

t Mess

age

Twitte

r

Blogg

ing pl

atform

s

News a

ggreg

ators

Socia

l boo

kmark

ing

Stumble

Upon

RSS/Fe

ed Rea

der

010203040

Which tools do you use regularly to share web content?

Recipients want more

When asked to agree/disagree with:“I would be interested in receiving more relevant links.”

Median = 6

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

1. Sharers are those who seek out large volumes of web content

2. Sharers are especially social individuals

Hypotheses

What explains interest in sharing?Sharing

“I often tell people I know about my favorite web sites to follow. “

Seeking“I often seek out entertaining posts, jokes, comics and videos using the Internet. “

Bridging social capital“I come in contact with new people all the time.”

Bonding social capital“There is someone I can turn to for advice about making very important decisions.”

[Ellison et al. 2007]

4 scales of 10 questions each

β p-valuefactorSeeking .74 .001

Bridging Social Capital

.22 .05Bonding Social

Capital.01 .33 Adj. R2 = 0.56

<<

1. Sharers seek out large amounts of web content

2. Sharers are especially social individuals

Hypotheses

IntroUnderstandingSupportingEvaluationDiscussionFe

edM

e

Can we give active content seekers the means to share more?

RecommendationsAnnotate each post with friends who might be interested in the content

Recommendations

msbernst@mit.edu rcm@mit.edu1 FeedMe today 0 FeedMes today

karger@mit.edu5 FeedMes today

Type a name…

Add an optional comment… Now

Later

Lifehacker: Share with friends using MIT’s FeedMe

Awareness indicators

rcm@mit.edu0 FeedMes today

Address concerns about volume:“How much are we sending them?”

Give an indication of whether it’s old news“Oh, somebody already sent it to them?”

rcm@mit.edu5 FeedMes today

rcm@mit.eduSeen it already

Digests: managing volumeShare without overwhelming the inbox

Now Later

One-click thanksLow-effort recipient feedback

Implementation

rcm@mit.edu

Building models without recipient involvement

MIT HCIResearch

Computer Science

Education

MIT HCIResearch rcm@mit.edu

Computer Science

Educationrcm@mit.edu

FeedMe Profile

Recommendation details

design: 184tweet: 170web: 79

twitter: 48social: 43friendfeed:

32blog: 25

developer: 23

sports: 200baseball: 150

sox: 132lacrosse: 89workout: 41muscle: 30hiking: 23vitamin: 22

joe@sixpack.com:

rcm@mit.edu:twitter: 38tweet: 30social: 27post: 23

conversation: 19answers: 10blog: 3google: 1

What impact does FeedMe haveon friendsourced sharing?

Two-week study for $3060 Google Reader users (46 male) recruited through blogsUsed Google Reader daily for two weeks with FeedMe installedViewed 84,667 posts; shared 713

IntroUnderstandingSupportingEvaluationDiscussionFe

edM

e

2x2 Study design• Recommendations (within-subjects)

• Awareness and feedback (between-subjects)

vs. vs. vs.

vs.

Do shared posts benefit recipients? • Surveyed 64 recipients, who reported

on 160 shared posts• 80.4% of posts contained novel

content• Appreciative of having received the

post

1 2 3 4 5 6 70

1020304050

Post Ratings

Are the recommendations worthwhile?

Speed, Keyboard-Free

Visual Clutter

Do overload indicators help?rcm@mit.edu

5 FeedMes today rcm@mit.eduSaw it already

We asked: “What killer feature would get you to use FeedMe more?”

We measured: unprompted responses regarding social inhibition

14 of 28 without awareness+feedback features asked for them 3 of 30 with awareness+feedback features asked for them

One-click thanks

30.9% of shares received a thanks

Discussion

Mixed-initiative social recommender systemsE-mail as a delivery mechanism

IntroUnderstandingSupportingEvaluationDiscussionFe

edM

e

Mixed-initiative social recommenders• Humans filter recommendations

for their friends• Small marginal cost:

sharers have already read the article

AI Friend Recipient

Mixed-initiative social recommenders• Sharers appreciate recommendations• High error tolerance

• Applications to other AI-hard problems

[Bernstein et al. UIST ‘09]

Low-priority Queue

E-mail as a delivery mechanism“I'm pretty conservative about invading people's email space.”

“I feel that articles that I read are more like ambient information.”

Summary of contributions• Formative understanding of the

process behind link sharing• Leveraging social link sharing

to power a content recommender• Users as lightweight

recommendation verification for others

http://feedme.csail.mit.edu

http://bit.ly/CHIProgram2010

Study designW

ithin

-sub

ject

s

Between-subjects

38

39

FeedMe Not Installed: 93.8%

FeedMe Installed: 6.2%

Post Recipients

Bootstrapped Learning

30.9% One-click Thanks

Topic relevance drives enjoyment

Questionable content quality

It's awkward

I sent too much already

Too much effort

Might have seen it already

Unsure of relevancy

0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14

What is the biggest concern you have when sharing?

Topic relevance drives enjoyment“Those who know my politics usually send me very pointed articles – no junk.”

“I could care less about a cat boxing.”

Seekingx 10

Sharing x 10

Bridgingx 10Bondingx 10

Verify scale agreementnormality assumptionshomoscedascicityfactor loading

Multiple regression on sharing index

12

34

56

7Sharing

1 2 3 4 5 6 7Seeking

β p-valuefactor

Seeking .74 < .001Bridging Social

Capital.22 < .05

Bonding Social Capital

.01 .33

Adj. R2 = 0.56

Hypotheses1. Sharers seek out large amounts

of web content2. Sharers are especially social

individuals

Hypotheses1. Sharers seek out large amounts

of web content2. Sharers are especially social

individuals

FeedMe’s target usersSharers: firehose• Purposely consume volumes of

content• Use aggregators like Google Reader

Recipients: drip• Won’t use a new tool, but read e-mail

Learn from intersection of recommendations

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