We just rolled out a new feature: behavioral and demographic groups. Based on demographic information users have submitted (or are going to submit, right?), we've placed those users into demographic groups based on age, gender, location, and profession. Based on how they interact with the site, we've placed users into behavioral groups. Are they an optimist or a pessimist? How often do they vote? How long have they been a member? Groups are available from the user profile pages for now, but it's a safe bet that they'll start showing up in other places once we've collected enough data.
Each of these "subcrowds" will operate on principals identical to the whole crowd, and any datapoint (i.e. top stock or most favorited) that can be pulled from the whole crowd can also be pulled from an individual subcrowd. The end result is two-fold. The most obvious result is that there will be a lot more data to explore. Just as important, though, is the fact that users now have a reason to have an identity. With a full profile (whether you mark the data as publicly viewable or not), a single vote now counts as a vote for both the whole crowd and each of the many behavioral and demographic subcrowds.
You'll probably never see a list of most accurate users on our site, but there's no reason why you wouldn't see a list of most accurate subcrowds. I believe certain subcrowds will be more adept at predicting certain stocks, but the only way to know that for sure is to keep an eye on the data. I've been watching these for awhile now, and some interesting trends have already come and gone.
- Users under 30 disliked Starbucks more than any other stock.
- At one time, our female users were most likely to favorite Adobe (though that got bumped by Apple last time it was Piqq of the Day).
- Our Southerners really love Campbell's Soup (it's been the highest rated for a few weeks now).
- Not surprisingly, users from the Midwest like Ford almost an entire point higher than the whole crowd.
- At one time, users who'd listed their profession as "Business & Finance" didn't have a positive outlook on a single stock (now they're single-up on Apple).
As you can see already, the extra data is pretty fun to poke through! We'll keep an eye out for cool trends and keep you up to date with things we spot in this space.
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