Have you ever wondered what drives social networks?

We ponder what drives social networks often here. One of the core themes we've discovered is music even though it's not an intuitive feature.

FunAdvice doesn't have much in the way of Music...however, the reason we added the Music category was that of all the interests entered by real users, Music was at the top of the list. I like Snoop Dogg myself, how about you?


Speaking of Snoop Dogg, we have some interesting search results for Snoop:
Search results for snoop dogg


However, when I looked at Yedda to compare & even entered "snoop dogg" as my interest for their semantic clustering technology...nobody's interested in snoop there. You can't even search for "snoop dogg" and Google search only finds 3 pages (2 of which the content on the Yedda page is from their Omgili integration).

Interesting stuff. So, being curious, I decided to see what's related to Eminem on Yedda (another favorite of mine):


What do you know - eminem is related to aids...very strange. If all we did (and we don't claim much in the way of semantic clustering techology, even though we do have an autocategorization tool that we've trained with machine learning on the various tokens in our site)...if all we did was extract the most common words next to "eminem" in the site, and match those to the category, we'd get:

eminem, music, lyric, lyrics...very related, and very good.

Where does this aids bit come from? Hardly intuitive. And strange, given their technology has "semantics" but the site doesn't have content even related to music.

Still, if you know something we don't about eminem & aids, please let me know.

Back to the point: music to a certain degree drives social networks - myspace, hi5, bebo, etc, all have huge music components. Last.fm, pandora, mog, are all based around music. Ilike.com is also based around music. People love music.