Monthly Archives: January 2014

Facebook tomorrow!

There comes a time in each of our lives when we wonder ourselves either from curiosity or from perspective  what is going to be the next big thing, and because this is a blog dedicated to science we are gonna restrict to this area.

Of course we can’t know what is going to be the technology of tomorrow but we are going to tell you what is not going to be: Facebook!  According to Princeton’s engineers facebook it’s very likely to reach to an end in the next few years. They used for the research an epidemiological model, very similar to Gaussian bell but more complex in the way of describing the transmission of communicable disease through individuals. According to the model chosen, called SIR the total number of population equals the sum of Susceptible plus Infected plus Recovered persons. They chose this pattern because is relevant for phenomena with relative short life span, and after that they applied in the case of MySpace and they noticed that it fit almost perfectly.

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We can easily see in this graph that the decline of facebook has already begun but it’s not as near as expected. Actually we can be sure that we will not exterminate it from our lives sooner than 2018 but also, internet can be a very unpredictable place and no one can exactly determine how it’s going to end.

Also we advise you not to take for granted this study because, as we found out, it was conducted by researchers based in the school’s department of mechanical and aerospace engineering. Not saying that they are not professionals but nevertheless not experts in such social studies.

 

What are you looking at?

When you open a new website, what do you first look at? Do you think is the same thing that i look at, or any other person? You may be tempted to say no, that we are different persons with different interest so we don’t look at the same things but science research tends to disagree with that affirmation.

Recently, more and more companies that study visitors behavior on web sites appeared, and one of them, EyeQuant, also affiliated with Google has just published the results of a study in which 46 subjects were requested to browse over 200 sites. The result came as a surprise, in the benefit of the company because it turns out what people are really interested in. First of all against the popular belief people aren’t that interested in faces or large font writings but rather in small sets of text and instruments that are available on the first page.

Also another interesting idea came out from the analysis of sites that were offering something free. Although economically it’s almost impossible to beat something free, it seems like people are not that interested in big adverts of free stuff.

So, in conclusion here is some important information that you shouldn’t skip if you plan on launching your own internet company. We’re not saying that otherwise you will fail but it’s always better to know your customers a little bit better than they know themselves!

The New Mobile Optimized Web Miner!

We all have to accept the fact that society is changing, and that we have to change too if we want to stay on top of any situation. Nowadays each one of us has a cellphone and many own a smartphone.

Because of the rush that we live in, we always have to be up to date with latest news and to be able to search, browse, compare and analyze websites right on the spot. But what do you do when a site fails to load on a mobile device, or has a very unfriendly look because of the desktop version unable to fit on a mobile screen. Well, i know for sure that lots of you will simply exit that website and search for an alternative mobile friendly solution.

It’s strange to see that companies fail to adapt to society and have their websites optimized for a better experience of the users. As facts, in 2013 the number of mobile devices connected to the internet exceeded the ones of the classic computers, and also, at any instance 30 percent of all internet traffic is generated from a smartphone or a tablet, and this numbers are only going to grow in 2014.

It’s easy to see the pros and cons of a mobile browsing experience and mostly the cons relate to the websites that don’t give useful information in the best way so that it can be received well. A bad mobile experience can even lead to damaging a company’s brand, not mentioning all the loses in the e-commerce branch that can survey for a retailer.

Starting a month ago TheWebMiner has implemented a mobile aware of the site for a better experience of the visitors and hopefully of the future partners. We hope that you will enjoy reading the latest posts of our blog on the go and that it will be much easier for you to find web scraping information for your company!

How website look on tablet

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How website look on smartphone

TheWebMiner is a cloud data mining company - Google Chrome_2014-01-12_18-45-43

 

Guesstimation

Today’s post is about something we’ve been wanting to write for some time. Although it is not related to web scraping it has to do with taking a decision without needing to use a very large number of resources, having proven its efficiency in a number of cases.

Guesstimation, a concept first used in the early 30’s (not quite new as we can see) means exactly the two purposes of the two words of which is made. On the one hand we have the word Guess, denoting a not very accurate way of determining things and on the other the word Estimation, which is the process of finding an approximation which value is used for finding out a series of factors. Altogether, the word regards an estimate made without using adequate or complete information, or, more strongly, as an estimate arrived at by guesswork or conjecture.

Guesstimations in general are a very interesting subject because of the factors that led to the result. Some examples of such rather amusing results given by Sarah Croke and Robin Blume-Kohout from the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics and Robert McNees from Loyola University in Chicago. When asked how much memory would a person need to store a lifetime of events the answer was simply calculated at 1 exobyte on the assumption that the human eye works just as a video camera recording everything that happens around us.

Funny or not, guesstimations began step by step to be a part of our life through rough conclusions based on economy and used by the marketers.