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DARPA Probes Social Graph

This past Saturday DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, lofted 10 weather balloons around the United States and challenged internet sleuths to find them.

Participants were given nine days to pinpoint the locations of the 10 balloons in the DARPA Network Challenge, but a team put together by MIT did it in about nine hours. The $40,000 put up as prize money by DARPA drew 4,000 balloon hunters. The challenge was issued to mark the 40th anniversary of the internet ( see Arpanet Turns 40 ) and as a way of benchmarking the utility of social networks in society.

“It’s a huge game-theory simulation,” Norman Whitaker, of DARPA’s Transformational Convergence Technology Office, told the Washington Post.

Some participants set up websites and Facebook groups, like John Cannell, which collected the usual noise. Twitter yielded similar results.

MIT’s innovation was to put a bounty on verified information. MIT’s team set up an elaborate information-gathering pyramid. Each balloon was allotted $4,000. The first person to spot one would be awarded $2,000, while the people who referred them to the team would get smaller amounts based on where they fell on the info chain. Any leftover money, after payment to spotters and their friends, will be donated to charity, the Washington Post reported.

It seems that, while information wants to be free, free information is worth about what you pay for it.

Social Networks Lead Zeitgeist

Google released its annual tally of search terms for 2009 yesterday. Although “michael jackson” was the fastest rising global search term on the Google Zeitgeist list, it’s more telling that the other top five terms were all social networks. Slots two through five were occupied by “facebook”, “tuenti”, “twitter” and “sanalika”. Tuenti is a Spanish version of Facebook and Sanalika is a Turkish virtual world similar to Second Life.

Under the category Around the Home, Google listed the top How-To queries. These requests for instruction don’t change much from year to year, so it was no surprise that “how-to kiss” topped the list again this year. Here’s the whole list:

1. how to kiss
2. how to draw
3. how to knit
4. how to crochet
5. how to flirt
6. how to meditate
7. how to hack
8. how to sing
9. how to dance
10. how to fight

Google Trends provides more information about the popularity of this query over time. Apparently, curiosity about the osculatory arts remained constant until the middle of 2008 when “how to kiss” queries took off, as the chart below shows. Is there a correlation between recession and kissing? Well, they say the best things in life are free.

Growth of "how to kiss" query over time