Social media presents a new chance to answer old questions from the social sciences. Recently, we've seen a lot of great work in this area. At some point, though, most academics find themselves asking, "Where do I get data?" In this talk, I'll present my best attempt at overcoming this problem: 1) build something people want to use; 2) put it on the web; 3) as a side effect, answer the questions you care about. Usually this means building something that is both informed by and will inform theory. I'll start the talk by demoing my dissertation project, We Meddle, a Twitter app that computes tie strength between you and the people you follow. Next, I'll discuss Link Different, a site to discover how many of your Twitter followers have already seen the link you're about to post. The talk will conclude with a demo of a new site called courteous.ly, designed to show people an abstract view of your current email load.

Eric Gilbert is an Assistant Professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech. He recently joined the faculty after finishing a Ph.D. in Computer Science at Illinois. His new research group, focused on building and studying social media, is called comp.social (http://comp.social.gatech.edu). While at Illinois, Dr. Gilbert held the Google Fellowship in Social Computing. He likes Atlanta and really likes coffee.