How Friends Influence Gadget Adoption

How Friends Influence Gadget Adoption

  1:09:00 AM    Science Lover

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Buying habits revealed via social networks could predict whether a product takes off or not.

Gadget Adoption

When your friend shows up with the latest "must-have" product, it's more likely you'll buy the same product. By exploiting this phenomenon—and harnessing the information available through online social networks—marketers hope to better target products to would-be buyers.

In work presented this week at the Interdisciplinary Workshop on Information and Decision in Social Networks, researchers from the Norwegian telecom provider Telenor showed how important friend connections can be to the adoption of a product. Watching how adoption spreads within social networks could help predict whether a new product will become a viral smash, they say. The researchers looked at patterns of adoption for Apple's iPhone and iPad, as well as for the far-less-successful Doro mobile handset.

"Social networks matter when purchase decisions are made," says Pål Sundsøy, a project manager in the advanced analytics and business intelligence group at Telenor. In particular, he says, people have a higher chance of adopting a product that their friends have bought. Likewise, when people abandon a product—for example, by switching between cell-phone networks—they are more likely to jump ship if their friends do so first.

To measure the social characteristics of product adoption, the researchers made use of anonymized data from Telenor's network. That data revealed how users communicate and what mobile devices they use.

Most strikingly, the researchers found what Sundsøy termed a "tribe of Apple." People who used Apple products tended to be connected to each other. After the launch of the iPhone, a heavily connected cluster of users formed relatively quickly. That central cluster grew larger over time. For the iPad, the researchers observed a similar structure forming even faster (their graphs tracked iPad adoption by the month, instead of the quarterly measures they used for the iPhone). They found that social connections predicted whether users were likely to own Apple products. iPhone users had twice as many connections—meaning they had communicated with one another by voice, text message, or email—than would be expected by chance. The researchers also studied the much less successful Doro. The handset is marketed as a device designed primarily for phone calls rather than data-related activities. Doro users tended to be connected to few other Doro users, and there was no central cluster. Sundsøy argues that this structure suggests that the device will likely never gain momentum.

But social connections aren't everything. In another talk given at the same workshop, Nicholas Christakis, a Harvard University social scientist and expert on networks, said that the qualities of whatever is spreading through a network matters a great deal. For example, some germs are more contagious than others, and will spread faster through a network. Similarly, he said, some ideas are "stickier" than others, and take hold better. So product adoption will also spread according to the quality of the product, and not just the number of friends who already own it.

Even taking variations in product quality into account, however, it will still be useful to look at patterns of adoption in social networks, the Telenor researchers say.

"The social variables have high predictive power," says Sundsøy. "Those who communicate together tend to adopt together." According to his group's work, one key factor is the size of the connected cluster that forms around a product. If a large, heavily connected group begins to form, he says, there's a good chance that a product will take off.

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Spammers Turn to Social Networks : They get results by exploiting a social network's trusting environment

Spammers Turn to Social Networks : They get results by exploiting a social network's trusting environment

  5:49:00 PM    Science Lover

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As users have flocked to social networks, so, inevitably, have spammers. And according to a recent experiment, users are much more receptive to spam sent via a social network than over e-mail.

A group led by George Petre at BitDefender, an antivirus software company based in Bucharest, Romania, performed an experiment to test the effectiveness of spamming techniques geared toward a social networking site. They found it surprisingly easy to entice Facebook users to "friend" people they didn't know; they also found that many users were willing to click on links without knowing who sent them or where they led.

Fake friends: This screenshot shows real
users who befriended a bogus Facebook
user created by George Petre and colleagues.
Credit: BitDefender

Speaking last week at the MIT Spam Conference in Cambridge, MA, Petre described how spammers exploit social networks via messaging systems by enticing users to click on links, and by gathering personal information to target mail-outs.

Most social networks have internal messaging systems for communication between members. Petre's group examined that of Facebook, which boasts 5 percent of the world's population as its users. While Facebook has an antispam engine, the group found that it was better at filtering out phishing e-mails than preventing spam messages from getting through.

The group started by creating fake profiles to trick users into friending them. They created three profiles, one containing almost no information about the user, one with some information, and one with detailed information. They used those profiles to join popular groups and began sending out friend requests.

Within 24 hours, 85 users had accepted a request from the first profile, 108 from the second, and 111 from the third. Petre says that acceptances began to accelerate, since more than 50 percent of the time, users would accept the request if they shared a "mutual friend" with the fake profile. In some cases, he says, users would send a message asking for more information about how they knew this supposed new friend. The researchers didn't respond to these requests, but in many cases, Petre says, users accepted the request anyway.

The researchers then posted a link without any explanation to the fake profiles' walls, using a URL shortener to obscure where the link went. Almost 25 percent of the profiles' "friends" visited the link, Petre says.

To send messages to large numbers of people, Petre says, spammers often trick users into joining groups and befriending fake profiles. For example, in the aftermath of the Haitian earthquake, fraudsters started a group on Facebook that claimed the social networking company would donate money to relief efforts for each user who joined. The group collected nearly two million members in the five days before Facebook discovered the activity and suspended the group. While active, Petre says, the group was used to send spam messages to the group's members.

Spammers can also blast messages to users who have accepted friend requests from them. Petre found that scammers use social games to make contacts with legitimate users. In many of these games, such as Farmville, users get ahead by having friends on the network who play the same game. As a result, there are lots of groups on Facebook devoted to helping users connect with others players. This provides a way for spammers to find users to connect with.

Once connected, spammers can also do more than just send spam messages. They can gather data on users, and those users' contacts, to create more targeted fraudulent messages. Scammers also post links to profiles that aim to entice users to view advertising or visit compromised phishing or malware websites. While spammers could, in theory, use scripts to harvest e-mail addresses from other users' profiles, Facebook has implemented several protections that make this difficult to do without getting caught and suspended.

"Social networking spam may be more dangerous than regular old spam because it creates a trust factor not available through blindly sending out mass e-mail," says Garth Bruen, creator of software called Knujon, which classifies and tracks spam. By mining social networks, he says, criminals can get access to personal details such as where a person lives, where they go out to drink, or what movies they like. "It is very good intel for establishing trust with strangers," he says. Though Bruen notes that working within a social network costs spammers more resources than traditional methods, he believes the payout could be much bigger.

Kathy Liszka, a professor of computer science at the University of Akron and the chair of the MIT Spam Conference, says that fighting spam is no longer just about mathematics and statistics. Spam and malware companies today are actively recruiting people with backgrounds in psychology, she says, and Petre's work shows that social networks provide fertile ground for spammers to try more sophisticated forms of manipulation. Liszka says, "If we don't get up on the psychology aspect, we're going to start losing ground again."

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5 deadliest hacking subject lines

5 deadliest hacking subject lines

  9:10:00 AM    Science Lover

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Given the surfeit of new threats – ‘Hacking’, it would not be a bad idea for most of the Internet surfers to reconsider their online habits. With the Net being increasingly used by a large number of people for various bill payments, banking, investments, ticket bookings and reservations, e-commerce, social networking, communication and much more, it is time people paid heed to the threat of dangers lurking around at every step, and form a counter strategy.

It is critical to know these lurking threats so that you don't fall prey to scamsters and fraudsters and compromise your security and monies. Here is a list of some of the common tricks played by scammers.

`You have not paid for the item you recently won on eBay. Please click here to pay.’

Many consumers visit auction sites to find gifts or personal buying. But such shoppers must be aware of scammers who use auction sites to find their preys. A very common trick according to CSO, are mails notifying the users that he has 'not paid for the item you recently won on the site. Please click here to pay.' These emails impersonate complaints from the popular auction sites for non-payment of winning bids. People using online auction sites often bid days before a purchase is complete. So, it is not difficult for a person to believe that he has forgotten about a bid he made a week before.

Experts believe that such phising mails play on a person's concerns about the negative impact this may have on their auction site score. Like in case of eBay, people generally spend years building eBay feedback score or `reputation,' hence the chances are that they will quickly react to such emails. Many consumers visit auction sites to find gifts or personal buying. But such shoppers must be aware of scammers who use auction sites to find their preys. A very common trick according to CSO, are mails notifying the users that he has 'not paid for the item you recently won on the site. Please click here to pay.' These emails impersonate complaints from the popular auction sites for non-payment of winning bids. People using online auction sites often bid days before a purchase is complete. So, it is not difficult for a person to believe that he has forgotten about a bid he made a week before.

Experts believe that such phising mails play on a person's concerns about the negative impact this may have on their auction site score. Like in case of eBay, people generally spend years building eBay feedback score or `reputation,' hence the chances are that they will quickly react to such emails.

`You've been let go. Click here to register for severance pay.'

Scammers are finding novel ways to cash on the present downturn. This trick comes from the same. The mounting number of layoffs has made employees anxious about their jobs. This is what fraudsters are exploiting on.

The message appears to have come from HR dept (cons employer's email ID) and often says: You have been let go due to a layoff. If you wish to register for severance please register here.' Little surprisingly, the message carries a malicious link.

`This mail is Shivram from tech services. Your PC is infected.’

This is another common trick that scammers play. To cause maximum damage, such mails usually coincide with a related event. This means during the time of a widespread malware attack or a virus spread (say during the recent Downadup worm attack).

In such messages, hackers paint a destructive image of the damage that the worm attack can cause to the user. The aim is to exploit and cash on people's fear and uncomfort with technology.
`Someone has a secret crush on you! Click on this link to find who it is!’

This is one of the oldest tricks. But still seems to be working. The message seems to come from a dating or a social networking site and asks the reader to click on a link or download an application.

Sadly, in ninety percent of such cases, after clicking on the link, you not only don't find your secret admirer, -- you also download malicious software that you can't even detect. Of course, it's designed to steal personal and financial information. Stay away from such "secret admirers".

`Did you see this video of you? Check out this link!’

This is another popular scam. Security experts are seeing an increase in such spam, especially on Twitter, the popular microbloging site.

A recent spam campaign on Twitter read: "Did you see this video of you?" Thinking it to be from a friend many users ended up clicking on it and landed up at a fake Twitter site. Once there, unsuspecting users entered passwords, which then ended up in the hands of hackers.

(Courtesy: Indiatimes.Infotech)

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