Collabio: A Game for Annotating People within Social Networks

Comments:
Daniel

Summary:
Collabio is a new social networking game implemented on Facebook that attempts to gather tag data for individuals. The paper describes the efforts exerted to create the game and the subsequent results. In creating the game, the developers understood that, to be a success, the game would have to motivate people to provide tagging data, and to somehow ensure the accuracy of the data provided.  They met their first challenge by creating a point system based on the rankings provided by a user.  For example a user would receive one point for guessing a tag on him or herself and then receive further points for each person that tagged that user under his or her guessed tag.

The game itself is somewhat unique in that before a tag appears in the users tag cloud the user has to guess what that tag is.  A user when first logging into the game would guess a few basic tags such as, nice, friendly, student, and then wait for others to tag him or her.  If someone tags the user something other than their guessed tag it will appear blanked out on the users cloud until he or she correctly guesses the tag.  This approach is interesting because it encourages a back and forth interaction between the user and his or her cloud.

Discussion:
This paper was interesting in the novel approach taken by the developers.  It seems that they were able to create a game with a good amount of entertainment while leveraging that need for approval that all humans in some way posses. The really interesting part, however, is that when humans were presented with the tags and some fake tags, simply by looking at the users profile, they were able to pick which tags applied and which were fake with an 86% success rate.

The main failure I saw in this work was the lack of acceptance.  The paper boasted that 3,800 people had been tagged but in the world of the internet and social networking that is such a small number it barely even matters.  If I were in charge of the project I would most likely begin to publicize the game more.  It seems like it would be fun to play and even a one time user, tagging a couple friends, can increase greatly increase the data set.