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Dec 27
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Heavy Facebook Users may have Weighty Amygdalas

By | facebook, news | No Comments

The size of your amygdala might indicate how large and complex your social network is. Amygdala volume has been connected to social network and behavior in past research, as scientists have found that nonhuman primate species with larger social groups tend to have greater amygdala volumes. Kevin Bickart and his coauthors took the next logical step and examined how amygdala volume varies in humans with different social networks. Their results appear in a recent issue of Nature Neuroscience.

The researchers measured two social network factors in 58 adults. First, they calculated the size of a participant’s network, which is simply the total number of people that are in regular contact with the participant. Second, they measured the network’s complexity, based on how many different groups a participant’s contacts can be divided into. The authors then examined how well those two factors correlated with the size of a participant’s amygdala and hippocampus. The hippocampus served as a negative control, as it should not vary based on social networks.

Linear regression revealed a positive correlation in amygdala size with both social network size and complexity. This effect showed no lateralization, meaning both left and right amygdala volumes followed this relationship. In addition, the effect is relatively specific, as other social factors like life satisfaction and perceived social support failed to correlate with amygdala volume.

Social network size and complexity did not significantly correspond with the size of the hippocampus or other subcortical areas. The authors did find that three regions in the cerebral cortex of the brain (caudal inferior temporal sulcus, caudal superior frontal gyrus, and subgenual anterior cingulate cortex) might correlate with social networks. They propose that those regions might have evolved along with amygdala to deal with the complexities of growing social circles.

This is one of the first publications that demonstrates a relationship between amygdala volume and social networks in humans. It would be fascinating to determine if a cause and effect relationship can be established. Are certain people born with larger amygdala and therefore create bigger social networks, or does the amygdala grow as we gain more friends and foes?

Dec 20
0

Foursquare Revamped to Include Photos and Comments

By | Apps, Droid, iPhone | No Comments

Earlier Monday, Foursquare revamped its service with the addition of photos and comments.

The new features may seem like belated additives that merely keep Foursquare on par with its location-based competitors, but this update is replete with service-wide improvements that drive home the social utility and post-checkin possibility of the platform.

The new features can be instantly experienced via the updated iPhone app and the web, and support for Android and BlackBerry is coming soon.  If you’ve already downloaded the update, let us know what you think in the comments.

First Impressions

The best word to describe today’s improvements is social. Photos are social, comments are social and now the entire Foursquare experience, by extension, is exponentially more social in nature.

Photos and comments have been adroitly molded into the Foursquare experience. The new checkin screen includes an empty photo box that politely begs the user to share a photo, and each checkin displays camera and comment box icons to denote social activity happening around a place or picture. The net effect is an app experience that is noticeably more compelling and engrossing than before.

Other words that come to mind are context and depth. Prior to today, CEO and co-founder Dennis Crowley would speak of Foursquare as a service that seeks to reinvent what happens after the checkin. It’s a nice sentiment that, in theory, sets Foursquare apart from the rest, but the startup wasn’t really delivering features that made the what’s next? aspect of the service tangible.

The addition of photos and comments are a big step in that direction. Now, after you check in, you can continue to add photos to further document your experience. Plus, you can leverage the comments to better facilitate meet ups or solicit feedback and advice from friends on a particular locale.

Photos associated with checkins are nice, but photos added to tips and venues are also quite significant. Tips, especially, come to life with photos and we’re curious to see what happens as Foursquare partners and users add color to recommendations through their photos.

Nice Touches

The new iPhone app and the website are littered with subtle design enhancements. The first time you fire up the app, for instance, you’ll notice a nicely stylized loading screen.

There’s also a cute mayor crown that appears in the lower righthand corner of the app anytime it takes a few seconds to process an action. After you check in to a venue, you’ll see a redesigned checkin page that more clearly denotes the venue mayor and the points you earned for the checkin.

Push notifications alerting you to comments on photos make for a richer, more engaging mobile experience.

On the web, your history page now highlights checkins with attached photos and comments using the same camera and comment icons as the iPhone app. Venue pages and tips are also decked out with uploaded photos on the web.

Best of all, though, is the immediate symbiosis between your Instagram, Picplz and Foodspotting photos and your Foursquare activity. If you’re actively using one of those mobile photo sharing apps, then you’ve probably noticed that the photos associated with checkins from the past few days have already been pulled into your Foursquare timeline.

Room for Improvement

Foursquare concedes that photos and comments were pushed out quickly to users in time for the holidays. Certain features including the ability to export photos to Facebook and Flickr and an easier way to track comments and access your collection of photos are still in the works.

We’d also like to see Foursquare build ways to allow users to simultaneously attach a photo to a checkin, tip and place. Right now, these are all separate actions and that feels unnecessary and a bit counterintuitive if the startup designs to get users to enhance the venue and tip experience with their photos.

Noticeably unavailable is the now ubiquitous “Like” option popularized by Facebook and present in most mobile photo sharing services. It’s not as if the app needs a “Like” button, or suffers because it lacks one, but it does seem relevant to note its absence.

Crowley agrees that something of this variety is missing and says that Foursquare will consider adding a way to favorite tips, checkins and photos. “There’s a lot of things we still need to build into photos, but it’s useful for us to see how people are using it, listen to feedback from users and then evolve the product from there,” he says.