Another Monday and I check the logs of the program I generated a few weeks ago to automate the collection of Click-Throughs on Pigsback. I have five new points. Great that works out to around 0.004p to spend in Marks & Spencer! It’s still money for the proverbial old rope I hear you say. Well let’s take a look to see if you can possibly make any money on Pigsback purely on Click-Throughs and how long it takes to get a £10 Marks & Spencer voucher.

When an account is created you get a leg up the ladder with a few points for free.

50 points for registration
25 points for email newsletters
25 points for providing you interests for tailored marketing

Ok we have 100 points before we start. This is going to be easy.

To work out how generous the pig is to new customers I created ten accounts. On average within the first two weeks the pig gave 50 extra points via the feature offer Click-Throughs. He seems to like new accounts but wouldn’t we all!

After the initial honeymoon the pig seems conspicuous by his absence. Since creating these accounts I have only seen one Click-Through for each account for 5 points on Mondays. Geewiz, this is going to take a while. The pig sure likes his routine!

For a £10 M & S voucher we need 1150 points. From our study we have 150 points in the first two weeks. That leaves another 1000 via the Click-Through offers. With an average of 5 points per week that means we need only another 200 weeks. In total approximately four years!

This study may be lacking in scientific credibility but does prove that to make even a really modest amount of money from Pigsback is going to take a serious amount of time and dedication. My automated Click-Through program helps as it eliminates the daily grind of checking the site but still four years!

To extract any meaningful cash reward the only option is to enter all the competitions and make all web purchases via the sites referral links. On the other hand why not register and reward yourself by taking the pen and highlighter after the first two weeks. And then move onto something more rewarding.

In my opinion email is the world’s most anti-social form of communication. Today people refuse to communicate via the spoken word in preference for email, much in the same way that people prefer to text instead of call. In fact the cost of a text is extortionate only 160 characters for an average global price of 0.11 USD and maintains a near 90% profit margin for the operator. Despite enabling almost instantaneous global communication, email appears not to have made the world a more close-knit community, according to a study conducted by Columbia University.

Duncan Watts and colleagues at Columbia University in New York conducted a massive email experiment to test the theory of "six degrees of separation", i.e. that everyone in the world can be linked through just six social ties.

More than 60,000 people from 166 different countries took part in the experiment. Participants were assigned one of 18 target people. They were asked to contact that person by sending email to people they already knew and considered potentially "closer" to the target. The targets were chosen at random and included a professor from America, an Australian policeman and a veterinarian from Norway.

The researchers found that in most cases it took between five and seven emails to contact the target. Watts says this shows that email has not fundamentally changed the way social ties are created.

"In this experiment, the internet is simply the tool we use to transmit messages," Watts told New Scientist, in an email. "Compared with offline interactions like work, school, family, and community, I don't see email as being a particularly compelling medium for generating social ties."

Virtual friends

In the email study, participants were also asked to send a message to the researchers to explain who they chose to forward their message, and why. This revealed which types of social bond were most likely to help a message reach its target.

The researchers did see some internet-only relationships in the experiment, but these accounted for only six per cent overall. By far the most successful bonds were found to be work-related ones. And messages were also more likely to reach their target if they were forwarded to someone of the same sex. The researchers were surprised to discover that message chains did not rely on a few highly connected individuals, so-called "hubs". Previous research by Watts and fellow Cornell mathematician Steven Strogatz had suggested that such "hubs" were important to all social chains.

Last night I was keeping up to date with the forums on the Martin Lewis Money Saving site. By the way check-out the free £5 from M & S. Anyway I stumbled across an article regarding a web site called PigsBack. The forums seem to have loads of piggy posts regarding simple gifts for clicks. So what is this happy little pig all about.

What are PiggyPoints?

PiggyPoints are the rewards currency on Pigsback.com.

How do I earn PiggyPoints?

As a member you earn PiggyPoints for interacting with the site. Some of the ways you earn PiggyPoints include winning a competition, entering a quiz, viewing a featured offer, shopping with one of our many partners, completing a survey or registering with a partner site or newsletter.

Interested by the click-through (CT) for points part of the site I quickly created myself an accounts and started playing. The forums seem to suggest that people check the site each day looking for the link with the piggy point icon in the hope of collecting a few extra points and then in turn converting these to vouchers.

An idea, what about if I develop a small program to automatically enter the site and follow any click-through. This would mean that I never miss a single point. I have written the program and have it running on my PC. I now collect all points offered with zero effort - great.

If time permits I might expand the program to enter all the competitions, you never know I might win something.

It seems the debate continues. I have researched two recent articles that seem to contradict each other but are both useful information in their own way. The first a study by Microsoft of instant messaging. They studied the addresses of 30bn instant messages sent during a single month in 2006. The size of the study seems impressive, analysing half the worlds instant messenger traffic. The results seem to confirm that Stanley Milgram was also on the right track, with an average chain length of 6.6 and 78% of the pairs connected in seven links or less. Check out the news article on the BBC.

The other article is from Spanish mobile phone operator O2. The study was not on such a grand scale as that of Microsoft with Jeff Rodrigues conducting interviews and concluding that we are generally part of three main networks, family, friendship and work. He goes on to say that outside of these we are, on average, part of five main shared ‘interest’ networks based on a range of personal interests from hobbies, sport, music and the neighbourhood we live in, to religion, sexuality and politics. It is the growth of these shared interest networks and the influence of technology on them that has led to the reduction in the number of degrees of separation. Have a read, what do you think ?

To me the study from Microsoft seems to have more credibility than anything I have seen before purely due to scale. But how did they get all this data, I suppose when you sign up your allowing them to do whatever they like with your data ! Interesting...

Commercially an opportunity must exist to provide some form of Business Intelligence product to analyse this type of chain data. Information in this form must be of interest to all sorts of organisations throughout the world. I have some ideas but later.

This is not my usual type of posting but as today seems to be a day that might go down in history how can I resist commenting. The world has been all about vast gains and people obsessed with making money over the last few years, the bubble has eventually burst. But who should worry? Well over the long term all will return to normal so no need to panic. Things in my experience have always been cyclic, 'what comes around goes around'.

But if you are one of those lucky individuals with wealth beyond the average man you might like to move your savings into the only two safe places left in the UK, National Savings and Northern Rock. Both these institutions are guaranteed by the government so you should be able to sleep happy with no lumpy mattress.

By the way I have also spotted a very interesting article from O2 on the web claiming that 3 degrees is all it takes, lets see - not so sure my self.

Being a programmer you would expect me to kick off with one of the best tool kits available for any developer involved in Social Networks. This kit is so cool and free as the terms of license are BSD (Berkeley Standard Distribution). Take a look for yourself at Prefuse. The example to the right is taken from the prefuse gallery which is also a great project to research if you have time.

I have been using the prefuse visualization framework and you can certainly do some exciting stuff in a short space of time. The framework is for the Java programming language. It significantly simplifies the processes of representing large amounts of connected data into a visual representation.

If prefuse doesn't seem right for your application needs, there are a number of other toolkits with their own strengths of weaknesses, many of them designed to address different application needs (e.g., 3D visualization, graph analysis algorithms, etc). Here are a few other toolkits / applications that might be relevant:

Piccolo - A Java toolkit for structured 2D graphics using a scenegraph abstraction.
Processing - A graphics library and IDE serving as an artist's digital sketchbook.
The Visualization Toolkit (VTK) - A 3D graphics and visualization toolkit.
JUNG - A Java graph processing and visualization library.
The InfoVis Toolkit - A Java toolkit supporting a number of visualization techniques.
Improvise - An application for end-user authoring of interactive visualizations.

How many times have you said that the world is a small place ? On my travels around the world it is amazing to find people that come from the same area and know the same people as yourself. In fact on a trip to Australia I managed to meet the sister of my home towns hardware store owner - spooky.

I have worked for several software companies over the years and have always been interested on the interactions of people and communities. I have worked on many aspects of Social Networking and Data Mining so will be using this blog to share my thoughts and ideas on how the world is evolving and what techniques people are using to create vast amount of valuable personal information that is accessible to anybody with access to the Internet.

But what about the name of this blog - Six Degrees to Enlightenment. Take a look at the following and lets start blogging !