We’re getting real time social gossip from SocialMention.com
At Nostradamical.com we’ve started using the SocialMention.com API to pull in realtime blog posts, news, videos and comments against each one of our predictions in our prediction market. This makes it easier for our users to gauge the latest web opinions on predictions like, ‘Will Chris Brown do jail time before his 21st birthday?’, ‘Will California legalize marijuana with bill AB 390?’ and ‘Will Facebook acquire Twitter in 2009?‘.
SocialMention.com is a real time search engine that searches blogs, microblogs, news, videos, comments, etc and pulls items back giving your search terms a ’social rank’. It’s a great tool.
Got an opinion on current world events, news and gossip? Think you know what’s going to happen next? Publish a prediction at Nostradamical.com and compete to climb The Pyramid. It’s easy, fun and a great way to express your opinions.
Alternatively, browse our current predictions and make a forecast.
Get ahead of the curve: 8 useful social search tools
At Nostradamical.com we’re all about predictions - predictions on future events, world affairs and hot topics on the public’s mind. So naturally we’re interested in the whole social search and ‘real time search’ debate.
We’ve listed out some real time & social search resources currently available that give users the ability to monitor what’s on mind of internet users the world over. The debate continues over Twitter’s overall dominance of real time search.
One Riot
Firstly our fav is One Riot - currently in Alpha. What’s cool about One Riot is that without even searching you can get the hot topics of the day right off the front page. And they are actual topics, not random keywords. Nice work guys. Check out their blog for more discussion on the week’s hot topics.
SamePoint
SamePoint.com is a social search engine that categorises Social Mentions, Discussion Points, Bookmarks, Wikis, Network,s B2B Networks, Groups, Life Casting, MicroBlogs, Reviews, Podcasts, Documents, Video, Images, News and Web. It has a Google Trends-like page that lists current trends.
SocialMention
SocialMention.com has a nice clean interface and presents social search results across a variety of sources from blogs to social networking data. You can get RSS feeds on your results. For example you can track our own mentions right here. Again, they have a nice trends page here.
Facebook Lexicon
Facebook’s own tool - Lexicon - is quite interesting to use but actually lacks the visual interest and punch of something like SocialMention.com. It feels like more of an experiment than a useful tool.
Twitter - Twist
Twist, the app from Flaptor indexes current trends from Twitter and allows users to monitor ‘keyword frequency’ inside the Twitter cloud. It’s interesting to compare the frequency of words like ‘twitter’ against ‘facebook’. However a look at the top 10 most popular terms yields some bizarre entries like ’sunday’ and ‘monday’. Given I am checking this on a Monday morning I guess Twitters are tweeting about their weekend activities and being back at work on a Monday. But, this is not really giving us an insight into ‘hot topics’, but rather ‘hot words’.
Google Trends
Google Trends, as you would expect is a heavyweight offering from Google with plenty of drill down functionality. You can compare search trends my topic, location, etc which gives detailed insights into specific terms and related words. My favourite page is the ‘hot trends’ page which gives a list of hot terms for the day. If you don’t know where to start this is a good place.
Twingly
Twingly has a nice microblog search function similar to SocialMention but with more limited functionality.
Delver
Worth mentioning also is Delver which is a social search page based more around your own network. Great for keeping in touch with hot trends in your immediate social universe.
Between these tools you can get a real feel for what’s out there. However the real ‘real time’ search market is yet to be fully harnessed with clear trending information and meaningful insights. Let’s keeping watching this space.
If you recommend more tools please let us know!
How our Prediction Engine works…and can you improve it?
Now that we are finally in beta and are inviting people into check out our site and make suggestions for improvement we are starting to share what’s happening ‘behind the scenes’ in an effort to improve our ‘Prediction Engine’.
So below is a snapshot from our guide which explains how it works. What can we do to improve the Prediction Engine? To sign up for an invitation go right here. Post your suggestions folks…
- First things first….What is it?
- Predictions & Forecasts
- Browsing & Finding Predictions
- Creating your own prediction
- Forecasting a prediction
- The Nostradamical Prediction Engine
- Confirming and settling predictions
- Vision, Potential and Influence
- Categories & Tagging
- Lists, Lists…Prediction lists
First things first….What is it?
Nostradamical is…
- A social web application based around the collective prediction of future
events. It is based on the concept that ‘many heads are better than
one’ (also known as collective intelligence, collective reasoning, group
wisdom, etc) - A platform for social networking, allowing people to come together through
shared interests and opinions - A source of predictive information on future events across various categories
from sporting events, to celebrity gossip, to world affairs. - An application that will eventually integrate with your favourite web
applications such as Facebook, My Space, and Bebo, allowing for example, members
to show their ‘current predictions’ on other sites
Essentially Nostradamical is a fun approach to a serious topic: The ability
of ‘the crowd’ to predict events with better overall success than
‘the individual’.
Oh, and one other thing…we are new, growing and constantly trying to improve
our product so we really value your feedback and opinions on how we can improve!
Predictions & Forecasts
Nostradamical is based around the prediction of future world events. Once signed up for your
free account you can create a new prediction, for example, “China will win
more than 10 gold medals in the Olympics”.
Once your prediction is published and live to the world, other members can create
forecasts against it. A forecast of greater than 50% means that
the prediction is likely, and a forecast of less than 50% means it is
unlikely (in their opinion).
The Nostradamical Prediction Engine takes into account various factors to produce
a ‘group probability’ which represents the prediction’s current likelihood. Like
share prices, the group probability moves and up down as time passes based on
members’ latest predictions.
The ‘current group probability’ of a prediction is calculated from
all the individual predications members have made. The more individual forecasts
made against a prediction, the more reliable the prediction becomes (in theory).
So, essentially one prediction can have many individual forecasts against it
influencing the overall likelihood. This is called ‘the group probability’.
Browsing & Finding Predictions
You can search for a specific prediction from the top search box on each page or
browse predictions in a number of different ways. You can for example browse for
‘entertainment’ related predictions, or predictions that are ‘most likely’ based on their
number of predictions and current group probability.
Creating your own prediction
Once logged in to Nostradamical you can create a new prediction from the top menu.
As the prediction ‘owner’ you can give it an initial starting ‘likelihood’ (probability).
Any prediction ending within a 3 month horizon can be created. We have purposefully
restricted this as waiting to see if the world will end in the year 2199 for
example, might be quite boring.
An prediction must also have a confirmed outcome that can be verified as true of
false. For example, predicting the next presidential election candidate would
have a clear result, but predicting that July will be rainy is difficult to
confirm with a simple ‘true’ or ‘false’ result.
Lastly, you can add a picture to your prediction, making it more appealing to visitors. Pictures show up in prediction listings.
Forecasting a prediction
From the prediction’s main page any member make a forecast for its likelhood using the prediction slider. Your input is added to the prediction and the
Nostradamical Prediction Engine calculates the new ‘group probability’.
You can revise your forecast for a prediction at any time but your
old forecast is automatically superseded by your new one. The closer to an
prediction’s ‘end time’ you make a prediction, the less you are
rewarded if successful. So if you want to win the big points, make predictions
early on and stick to them!
The Nostradamical Prediction Engine
The Nostradamical Prediction Engine takes into account several factors when
trying to calculate the group probability of a predictions. We are still fine tuning
these as we want to get the best model available. If you have suggestions for
improvement please send us some feedback.
The influencing factors are:
- The number of existing predictions. The more predictions that exist already,
the less ‘power’ your individual prediction has to influence the
group probability. - The time left before the prediction ends. To stop member’s making wild
predictions minutes before an prediction closes a prediction’s ‘power’
reduces as the prediction draws to a close. - The member’s status. A member who was been successful in the past
has more power to influence the group probability than a member who has just
started with no proven track record.
Confirming and settling predictions
When the prediction reaches its end date, the prediction owner will be notified that
they need to confirm the final outcome of their prediction to update all the members
that made predictions against it.
Members that forecast correctly are rewarded with ‘vision’ and move
up in status, becoming increasingly ‘nostradamical’. A ‘correct’
prediction could mean that you forecasted the prediction as ‘correctly true’
(>=50%) or ‘correctly false’ (<50%).
Importantly, if the group was correct overall in their prediction each member
is rewarded with a group bonus, even if their individual prediction was wrong.
Power to the people!
Vision, Potential and Influence
Each prediction you make gains you ‘potential’. This is like a
bet and states the amount of ‘vision’ you will gain if your prediction
turns out to be correct. Factors that influence the potential from a prediction are:
- How far into the future the prediction ends. The further ahead you make a prediction,
the more potential you gain. So make a last minute forecast against an prediction
won’t gain you much vision. - Your confidence in your prediction. Simply put, a confident positive prediction
say for90% or confident negative prediction for 10% gets you more ‘Potential’
than sitting on the fence around the 50% mark. So, make a confident prediction
and stick to it. - The number of existing predictions. If you are one of the first to make
a forecast you stand to gain more ‘Vision’ than if there are already many
forecasts against an prediction. The idea here is to stop members ‘following
the crowd’ with their opinion of an prediction. So again, get in early to
get the big points!
The prediction owner can forecast the likelihood of their own prediction but they do not
gain any extra ‘Vision’ if the prediction is later correct. This
is to stop people creating their own (potentially silly) predictions and gaining
from them directly (e.g. I predict I will wake up tomorrow)!
The more ‘nostradamical’ a user becomes, the more power they have
to influence the ‘current probability’ of a prediction,
based on their previous success rates.
Conversely, ‘Newbies’ or members with low status do not carry much
‘weight’ with their individual predictions until they achieve more
success.
Members with high status rise to the top of the ‘Nostradamical Pyramid’,
achieving recognition for their sharp skills, judgement and luck. The Pyramid
contains seven levels of status from ‘Newbie’ all the way up to
‘Oracle’. Take a look at The Pyramid here.
Categories & Tagging
Every prediction is classified into a category (e.g. Entertainment, Sport, Finance,
Current Affairs, etc) and can be tagged with keywords
The most popular predictions (based on number of predictions and views) are ranked
in each category, making it easy for you to find predictions on your favourite topics.
Members’ own successes are tracked by category, ensuring a successful
member in the Finance category for example, doesn’t have the same influence
over the Sport category
Lists, Lists…Prediction lists
Even if you have not created any predictions yourself you can group others together into
common themes or topics by using Prediction Lists. A Prediction List groups
individual predictions together on one page at one address. For example, “Brad’s
Oscar Predictions” could be my list that contains individual predictions from
other members, ‘Best Director’, ‘Best Movie’, etc. Give
it a try!
