Comments on: Shirky on Social Networks and Filesharing

By: Stan James

Stan James — Sun, 10 Jul 2005 00:07:37 +0000

In Outfoxed, I attempt to address this issue by tagging informers, but I agree that this is an area of concern for all trust networks.

But I would also say that this is not a fatal flaw, especially in systems like Outfoxed which just presents the advice of your friends. You may occasionally get some advice that you don’t agree with, but that’s a small price to pay for getting good advice when you do.

By: Filesharing Review

Filesharing Review — Wed, 22 Jun 2005 11:29:13 +0000

Shirky on Social Networks and Filesharing

[Source: GoldSounds] quoted: Shirky goes on to describe a new kind of system, one that is slowly evolving today, based on “trust networks”. Users invite each other to join networks of trust, smaller and even less centralised than the curren…

By: Dr Doom

Dr Doom — Wed, 22 Jun 2005 08:13:09 +0000

Heh heh heh! His name is “Shirky”.

Music industry, if you’re listening, I want some money — I mean I really do.

By: daniel

daniel — Wed, 22 Jun 2005 05:37:22 +0000

Oh, and if anyone from the music industry is listening, I would like to point out that since the advent of p2p I have bought more CDs than ever before, and more importantly seen more gigs. And if you're a music industry lawyer, then I never downloaded anything illegally. Bah!

By: daniel

daniel — Wed, 22 Jun 2005 05:20:37 +0000

It’s true that peer-to-peer, on whatever scale it ends up clustering, vastly favours the top 10% of the most popular files.

One thing that P2P networks should be remarkably good at that they aren’t yet doing is determining the relationships between files depending on how often a particular node requests, say, songs by particular artists, and which files exist on that node. If you assume that the node belongs to an individual, then you can approximate their tastes by enumerating the list of available files and doing Amazon-style statistical analysis.

This gives you the whole “people who liked X also liked Y” thing. Which people clearly really dig, because it’s one of the cornerstones of Amazon.com’s business model.

P2P networks currently operate on searches, but as a happy Acquisition user I can wholeheartedly say that I now also operate 50% of the time on browsing.

If I find a node has a track by a band that I like, I can click a button and browse every file hosted on that node. More often than not, it turns out that they have a whole heap of stuff I like, and also a whole heap of stuff I’d never heard of that I discover that I like.

This is directly analogous to the trust-taste directed graph. The P2P client tracks which nodes supplied me with stuff that I like, and assumes that there’ll be more stuff that I like in the same place, particularly where said stuff has a strong statistical correlation vis-a-vis location across the whole network.

By: travis

travis — Wed, 22 Jun 2005 05:09:32 +0000

The big looser in all of this is indipendant music.
If RIAA forces users into smaller sharing communities then although they’re not really stopping the availability of their own top50 chart musics, they are making it a lot harder to get their compeditors offerings.

Your points on adding taste heuristics to trust heuristics is good, but most of these p2p networks operate on searches rather than browsing so you’re really only going to get what you search for, so the only time taste becomes important is in guessing how likely that user is to have what you want… I don’t know where I’m going with that… bah, back to the salt mines