Twitter: 500 million accounts, billions of tweets, and less than one percent use their location
Twitter day. That’s how the past 24 hours can be characterized, and analysis of Twitter accounts and tweets by Semiocast only underscores it.
Semiocast's study reveals that the social network has 500 million accounts with 140 million of them in the U.S. alone in the first half of 2012.
Making a bad joke on Twitter shouldn’t be a criminal offense
I like to make jokes. In fact so deep is my love of comedy I’ve co-authored a couple of non-fiction humor books. I can see the funny side in most things, but I’m also able to self-censor. That is, if I think up a joke that someone may find genuinely offensive or upsetting, I will choose very carefully whether or not to say it or post it. I’ve learned over the years to think before speaking, although that doesn’t mean I’ll always do it.
Twitter is full of would-be comedians posting jokes and irreverent observations. Sometimes they’ll score a hit, other times a miss. When a joke occurs, they’ll rush to post it in an effort to impress their peers, and score retweets. The speed that Twitter operates at means people often don’t think before they post. When someone tweets something in bad taste, followers will pick up on it, and the sheer weight of disapproval will frequently lead to the removal of the offending missive and a swift apology.
Twitter was wrong to suspend Guy Adams' account
Will you be next?
If you missed the controversy, read colleague Ed Oswald's "NBC pressures Twitter to shutter account of journalist critical of Olympics coverage", then come back for my reasons why Twitter cocked up. Royally. His headline says it all, if you'd like to keep reading here. For a service often praised for supporting free speech, Twitter suppresses Guy Adams', presumably to protect a media giant and business partner. The suspension should matter to anyone using cloud services or supporting online free speech.
Olympics fans asked not to tweet during events
London 2012 has been described as the first true “social media games”, with sports fans tweeting, texting and sending photos and videos live from events. But on Sunday it became clear that all this activity placed a strain on the networks when a deluge of messages sent by fans lining the streets to watch the men’s cycling road race prevented TV commentators from telling how far ahead the leaders were.
The problem, apparently with one so-far unidentified provider, stopped data from the cyclists’ GPS satellite navigation system getting through to the studios, leading to confusion. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) was forced to ask enthusiastic tweeters to limit the sending of non-vital messages -- at least until more network capacity could be arranged.
Google+ and 'ghost town' are a contradiction
After the release of the most recent comScore Media Metrix data, any assertion that Google+ is a "ghost town" can be promptly dismissed. Not only is Google's new social network more popular than ever, its number of unique visitors topped more than 110 million each month, and the data doesn’t even take into account tablet or mobile phone usage.
The comScore data reveals that the number of monthly U.S. Google+ unique visitors increased from 15.229 million in November 2011 to 27.732 million in June 2012. Over a seven-month period, the social network has seen an increase of 82 percent on the number of unique visitors. To put it into perspective, 27.732 million is 12.53 percent of the total U.S. unique visitors.
LinkedIn and Facebook join forces with Microsoft Office in the cloud
One of the new features of Office 2010 (yep that’s 2010) was the Outlook Social Connector. This addon brought with it the ability to display social network information within Outlook itself. It took a little while for developers to get on board but last time I checked you could download "providers" to integrate Facebook, LinkedIn, Windows Live and Xing data.
Well, Office 2013 is now with us, and the social connector has been improved further. You no longer need to download a specific "provider" for Facebook or LinkedIn. Simply sign in with your existing credentials and Outlook 2013 will pull through the relevant data.
Facebook ends quarter in the negative, but made $6.8 billion in cash from IPO
Popular social network Facebook posted its second quarter financial results on Thursday afternoon, revealing a net loss of income for the site at the end of its first quarter as a publicly traded company, but also revealed the huge amount of cash earned from its initial public offering.
Facebook showed a net loss of $157 million, a significant decline against its total income last year, which was $240 million, but this came after a hugely improved revenue flow.
Tomahawk makes music more social
If you are a music fan, you’ll undoubtedly have an extensive collection of MP3s and other music files on your hard drive. It is also likely that you listen to music on Spotify and Sound Cloud, and perhaps watch the occasional music video on YouTube. Tomahawk is a music player that enables you to access all of this and more in one handy application but there is a social focus to the player that opens up some interesting options.
Software that broadcasts information about the music you are listening to is nothing new, but this is a feature that you will find in Tomahawk. The program will scour your hard drives for music files and create a library for you. As you listen to your collection, Tomahawk enables you to view artist information and discover related artists that you may be interested in. This is all well and good, but it is the social aspect of Tomahawk that is especially interesting.
Olympic tweets to power a daily light show on the London Eye
EDF Energy, the official electricity supplier of the London 2012 Olympics, will be using tweets sent during the games to gage the “Energy of the Nation”.
The power company will scour the raw Twitter feed looking for content, hash tags and links that relate to the Olympics (and which originate from within the United Kingdom), which it will then analyze using an algorithm designed by Professor Mike Thelwall, from the University of Wolverhampton, and Sosolimited a team of linguistic and data visualization experts from MIT. This algorithm will extract positive and negative words, phrases and emoticons from the tweets and generate an hourly percentage showing how positive (or otherwise) British people are feeling about the games.
Twitter fights for its users
Twitter will appeal the ruling of a New York Criminal Court, which ordered the social network to turn over the tweets of Malcolm Harris. He is an Occupy Wall Street protester charged along with several hundred others for allegedly marching onto the Brooklyn Bridge roadway on Oct. 1, 2011. The ruling came last month, after a series of legal back-and-forth actions.
Today, Twitter legal counsel Ben Lee declares that Twitter will fight back: "We're appealing the Harris decision. It doesn't strike the right balance between the rights of users and the interests of law enforcement". The case, and more significantly, the appeal is a loaded gun, pitting free speech against the state's right to prosecute and searing emotions about Occupy's crusade against the so-called 1 percent, whom some will accuse the ruling benefits. Twitter does the right thing, by protecting its users. But considering the statements Judge Matthew Sciarrino made in his ruling, do they have a chance to win the appeal?
Google+ wins me over
“Bigger is always better” is an expression we’ve become accustomed to over the years and while counter-intuitive it best describes everything that’s wrong with Facebook. The most popular social networking website is the best example of size losing over quality. Are we really satisfied with our Internet alter-ego living in the largest environment or the better one?
The American Customer Satisfaction Index has revealed rather interesting user satisfaction results on Facebook and Google+. Satisfaction is the word of the day and Facebook users don’t really get it, which is curious because there are more than 900 million of them. The satisfaction index rating decreased from 66 in 2011 to 61 in 2012. That's out of 100 points. Surely CEO Mark Zuckerberg should be concerned. Why? The sun shines brighter on Google+, which ranks 78 its first time on the index, equal to Wikipedia.
People don’t like Facebook, They like their Friends
Crowd funding: How to limit the risk of getting ripped off
The Kickstarter website has moved crowd funding into mainstream media. There is virtually no news site, newspaper or TV network left out there that has not reported on recent funding success stories. You may have heard about Double Fine Adventure's million Dollar ride that got the ball rolling for some serious game funding on the site, or Pebble, the e-paper watch for iPhone and Android that managed to rake in more than $10 million.
People who pledge a certain amount of money often get something in return. In the case of Double Fine it is a copy of the adventure game that the developers want to produce with the money, and for Pebble, it is one of those iconic watches. Pledges can be retracted for as long as the funding has not ended. Afterwards, the money is only transferred if the funding has reached the desired goal. If that is not the case, backers are not charged a single dime. It gets fuzzy when a project has crossed the funding goal and reached the end of the funding stage. Once the money has been transferred, there is not really any transparency as to what happens with the money from that moment on forward.
Manage all your social networks in one place with AVG MultiMi
Social networks are great tools, but there are now so many of them it can be something of a nightmarish task keeping on top of all of them. Using the likes of Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn should be fun and rewarding, but if you use more than three or four networks things can quickly spiral out of control and become unmanageable. AVG MultiMi has now left beta and enables you to manage all of your social networking needs from one place.
With support for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr, YouTube and countless email services, whatever your online life includes, there’s a high chance that it’s supported by MultiMi. If you have used the beta version, you’ll notice that there has been something of an interface overhaul but there are also a range of new options. There is now support for Google Reader although there is also a built in RSS reader, and if you are a Read It Later user who has migrated to Pocket, there’s support for this service too.
If there was a Yahoo Group called LIBOR...
LIBOR, the London InterBank Offered Rate, has been in the news lately as heads begin to roll in London and soon New York now that it’s clear LIBOR was manipulated by big banks, affecting the value of hundreds of trillions worth of financial instruments. This is a complex topic and it will be awhile -- perhaps years -- before it is clear how or even if you and I were damaged by these shenanigans, but everyone seems to agree that it can’t be allowed to happen again. But how? To make this happen I think we need a new understanding of what “transparency” means in financial transactions in the 21st century.
Transparency is supposed to mean that all parties in a financial transaction share the same information so nobody is blindsided. In practical terms transparency has usually meant something less: 1) that all parties can have the same information if they are willing to do the work to find it, and; 2) that all parties are held legally responsible as though they had the appropriate information. These latter statements mean generally that true transparency isn’t viewed as practical so all parties are on their honor to act transparently.
Got iPad? Get Google+
In May, Google+ debuted for iPhone in Apple's app store, soon followed by an app for Android. Two weeks ago, at the I/O developer conference, Google updated the Android app again, with a lighter tone design similar to the actual Google Plus web pages as well as design support for tablet UI. The wait is over, Apple tablet users. Google+ for iPad is now available in the iTunes App Store.
The app includes a boatload of new features across the board, such as the above mentioned support for tablets, with rotation orientation. It now supports the use of 'pinch' gesture to expand posts to add comments. You can also use the 'two fingers to drag' gesture to drag posts in your stream to reshare. Enabled now is the ability to attach instant upload photos to any post you make.
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