While the title invites a predicted round of wordplay, I will spare you the attempts at low hanging witticisms. During this past summer, I was in the throes of promoting my current book and writing my next title (which I won’t officially announce until January 2010.) As I was deep in the zero hour, I was approached by Clay Bridges Publishing to discuss my level of interest in writing the foreword for a new book on Social Media. Even though it…
Guess How Many Tweets Fly Across Twitter Each Day
Source 1 million, 5 million, 10 million…? If you guessed 10 million, you weren’t even half right. According to new data from Pingdom, Twitter users are averaging 27.3 million tweets per day with an annual run rate of 10 billion tweets. Just last month, Caroline McCarthy of CNET reported that the 5 billionth tweet posted. Pingdom’s report highlights the pattern of tweets, which appear to spike during waking hours in the U.S. However, it’s important to note here that Comscore…
Hollywood’s Next Production: Gagging Social Media
Source I carefully considered this topic before sharing my views. In doing so, my perception might have altered since the news of Hollywood studios banning film stars from using Twitter initially broke. It’s not a secret that Hollywood has a long history of controlling what is said in the media. Like in almost every industry it touches, Twitter has completely disrupted the chain of command, democratizing influence and shifting the power of publicity, control and reach of information from executives…
Do Twitter’s Trending Topics Signify What’s Important to You?
Source On Twitter, trending topics offer a glimpse into the behavior and common interests of everyday users – as governed by time and attention. Prevailing themes represent the culmination of popular focal points that unveil characteristics of varying groups of users that transform and scale with events and trends. The question is, do trending topics symbolize the topics that are relevant to you? If trending topics collectively represent the state of conversations on Twitter, then perhaps “the wisdom of the…
RT @Twitter: New Retweet Feature Goes Live
Source: Twitter This is breaking news at the moment, therefore this post will update as new information trickles in. Twitter is making good on its recent promise to introduce new features to bring users back to Twitter.com. Similar to the way that it rolled out Lists, Twitter is incrementally releasing its new Retweet feature initially previewed in August 2009. As described by @Biz, co-founder of Twitter: Retweet is a button that makes forwarding a particularly interesting tweet to all your…
Twitter Releases New Widget for Lists
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…
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…
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…
