WHY IT MATTERS: Digital Transformation

With the explosive growth of online activity and social media around the world, the massive amount of real-time data created directly by populations of interest has become an increasingly attractive and fruitful source for analysis. Despite the limitation that social media users in the United States are not a random sample of the US population [7], there is a wealth of information in these data sets and uneven sampling can often be accommodated.

Indeed, online activity is now considered by many to be a promising data source for detecting health conditions [8, 9] and gathering public health information [10, 11], and within the last decade, researchers have constructed a range of public-health instruments with varying degrees of success.

Fine-tuning these algorithms is key to improving large-scale analysis of social media, whether the goal is to measure the caloric content of a tweet or to find the next developing news story. These technologies represent new ways of finding and understanding the conversations we're having as a country -- chatter that is increasingly moving online.

These third party login tools promise more traffic, more subscribers, more members, more customers and more sales — and those promises have come true: as some have noted, up to 80% of web users choose Facebook Connect or another social authentication option when it’s available (as opposed to signing up for a site with their email address), and Facebook itself has claimed that social authentication increases registration by 30-200%. (...) But is that promise worth the price of losing direct access to your customers’ contact information and profiling information — or for that matter, direct access to customers themselves?

“During the 100 days before the relationship starts, we observe a slow but steady increase in the number of timeline posts shared between the future couple.”

It's hard to imagine, just twelve years ago, that the media would have been reduced to Facebook, degenerated into what we have today.