Collabio: A Game for Annotating People within Social Networks

Authors:
Michael Bernstein, Desney Tan, Greg Smith, Mary Czerwinski, Eric Horvitz
(MIT CSAIL and Microsoft Research)

Summary:
Collaborative Biography (or Collabio) is a social tagging game that is currently available on Facebook. It is a way to generate accurate information about individuals in a motivated way. Collabio differs from other tagging applications and projects in two main ways. First, Collabio is categorized as a "tagging for you" tool. This means that the taggers themselves do not directly benefit from the tags, and instead tag in hopes that whomever they tag will do so in return. Second, Collabio differs from other Facebook tagging apps in the sense that it is more concerned with the richness of tags over the entertainment value the application itself provides. Though it is a game, it is structured in such a way that inaccurate tags are given little or no point values, thus encouraging accuracy and motivating users to get more points.







Collabio has three main interfaces - Tag!, My Tags, and Leaderboard. Tag! allows users to (not surprisingly) tag their friends. An initial set of tags is generated from information pulled off of the person's profile. As these tags are confirmed by users or new tags are added, the tag cloud grows. Points are awarded for guessing tags, with the most popular tags giving the most points. An example is shown in the figure above, which I straight up cut from the article. My Tags allows users to manage the tags that people have made for them (duh). So if you don't like the fact that everyone tagged you as alcoholic, skank, or bed-wetter, you can easily delete your little annoying facts. Finally, Leaderboard serves as a motivator for users to try and get their names to the top by tagging everyone they can.

So just how useful are the tags to the researchers? As it turns out, they beat simply performing a web search or scanning someone's Facebook profile. Through surveys and rating tests (which are not reproduced here for all our sakes) Collabio was found to produce unique and accurate tags for people that could not be generated elsewhere. Therefore, Collabio is a step forward in information extraction in a social setting via user interaction.

Discussion:
Collabio seems like a pretty fun game to play on Facebook, but otherwise it currently lacks purpose outside the realm of research. I installed it myself and the first person it brought up to rate (my friend Don) was previously only rated by the Collabio Bot. The first word the Bot tagged him with was "awesome", which I find to be true but not very helpful! After piecing it together, the initial four tags generated by the Collabio Bot where "awesome Collabio Facebook tag"... very funny, guys. Combine this with the fact that I got AJAX errors half the time I was trying to guess stuff and I'm not exactly sure how this application ever got people to use it in the first place! Maybe it would work better if other friends used it, but for now it will sit next to FarmTown as another unused Facebook App.