Twitter recently expanded its new Lists service to users network-wide and in doing so, injected a sense of excitement, confusion, and also utility. Lists represent a significant milestone for Twitter as it transcends asynchronous conversations and and broadcast messages into a form of intelligence gathering, education, entertainment, and news. Twitter Lists are also stirring controversy as many believe that it sets the foundation for a new level of establishing a metric for influence. Whereas prominence was measured by the number…
The Competition for Your Social Graph
This is the unabridged version of my current contribution to TechCrunch, “In The Fight Between Facebook And Twitter, Which One’s The Mac And Which One’s The PC?“ Source Facebook is much more than a social network. Twitter is much more than an information network or serendipity engine. Each represent a dashboard for your attention, a foundation for conversations and collaboration, and a matrix for your social graph and contextual relationships. In other words, Facebook and Twitter essentially represent the entrée…
The Future of the Social Web
Source: Shutterstock Prior to leaving Forrester to join Altimeter Group, Jeremiah Owyang, along with Josh Bernoff, Cynthia N. Pflaum, and Emily Bowen, published a report that attempted to bring the future of the Social Web into focus. If we viewed the content of his research as a social object, the conversations that would transpire could in fact expedite the development and implementation of the most valuable predictions and observations contained within. The first part of the report observes the state…
Social Media Accounts for 18% of Information Search Market
Source: Shutterstock As consumers, I think you’ll agree, prior to making any decision purchase, most of the time, our journey begins with a combination of online search and real world conversations with friends, family and peers. As the Web matures, a greater volume of our attention and focus continues to shift from other mediums to the Web for not only purchase considerations but also for content discovery. It’s how we learn. It’s how we stay connected. Nielsen released a new…
Deleted Tweets Finally Deleted from Twitter Search
Over the years, Twitter search was plagued by an unbelievable flaw. Deleted tweets remained in Twitter’s search index and thus, would appear in the search results regardless of the conscious act of manually removing the tweets from your personal stream. Believe it or not, this problem remained constant much to the dismay of many power users. To my pleasant surprise, Twitter has finally rectified this problem and has officially removed deleted tweets from its index. Now that Google and Bing…
Teens Adopting Twitter
Source: Shutterstock As recently as August 2009, blogs and media outlets reported that teens are just not taking to the Twitterverse, instead opting for text messaging, social networks such as Facebook and Myspace, and other communications tools such as IM. The reasons for not using Twitter ranged from privacy concerns to the devices they used to communicate. Nielsen published a report that surveyed over 250,000 US Internet users to confirm everyone’s suspicions. Teens were among the smallest demographic using Twitter…
The Science of Retweets on Twitter
Source: Young Go Getter Over the years, I’ve had the opportunity to work with “Viral Marketing Scientist” Dan Zarrella on special projects related to Twitter. His focus on social science and psychology as it relates to new media and online interaction and behavior is in line with my philosophy and approach to understanding and documenting socialized media. Zarrella recently debuted TweetPsych, a sophisticated system that uses two linguistic analysis algorithms (RID and LIWC) to build a psychological profile of a…
The Second Life of Second Life
Source Recently, I wrote about a study written by virtual worlds consultancy kzero.co.uk, which reported that membership of virtual worlds grew by 39% in the second quarter of 2009 to an estimated 579 million. Today, I received an update from the Linden Lab and it appears that Second Life is experiencing a second life of its own. This story begins with an impressive milestone: Second Life Residents have transacted the equivalent of more than $1 billion with each other while…
Putting the Public Back in Public Relations: Crooked Monkey Style
Guest Post by Dr. Mark Drapeau – read his blog, follow him on Twitter I hadn’t heard of the popular t-shirt company Crooked Monkey until I was invited to an exclusive party they recently held. You see, even though they get great press from actors wearing their shirts in movies and magazines talking about their fashion styles, Crooked Monkey is based in Washington, DC not widely known as the fashion capital of the country. And they wanted to do some…
Twitter Celebrity Hotlist: August 2009
Source The power to analyze behavior and sentiment on Twitter and translate it into trends and direction is limited only by our powers of observation and imagination. As you may or may not know, I have assumed the role of data analyst at PeopleBrowsr, in addition to the other ventures I’m running or advising. Recently, I published The State of the Airline Industry on Twitter, the first in an ongoing series of Twitter-centric reports. Soon, I will roll out additional…
