Last week, Twitter reached a milestone by hosting its 10 billionth tweet! Unfortunately, the world will never know what the tweet said, since the account holder keeps her account on the down low - as in, private. I'm very curious to see what this person was tweeting about, just like I was super excited to learn what the 10 billionth song download was on iTunes. Like Facebook, some people only want to let their closest friends in on their thoughts and info, but tell me - do you keep your Twitter account private?
The latest from @ConanOBrien, Conan O'Brien's two-week old Twitter account:
If I had a show, I'd tweet about which Oscar winner is coming on tonight. Instead, here's my favorite frozen vegetable: Peas!
And in response, @ConansSquirrel, a Twitter account inspired by Conan's first Tweet, had this to say:
Weird. I seem to find a lot of peas wrapped in napkins in the trash. Give peas a chance!
It's good to see some pro-peas support. Would you agree that the little green pellets are the best of the frozen vegetables? Do you want to eat more of them knowing that Conan does?
Drake By The Numbers
click on image to enlarge
First, let's look at the conversation volume around Drake on Twitter. Beginning to buzz in the middle of 2009, Drake has remained at the center of the hip-hop conversation, hovering around 5,000 Tweets per day for the second half of 2009. He has edged out hip-hop heavyweight and current label mate Lil' Wayne with buzz and recently benefited from a post-Grammy bump of over 60,000 Tweets in one day.
A Close Look At The Data -
A glimpse at the real-time Trendrr dashboard suggests Drake's top geographic markets include New York, Atlanta, Toronto, Las Vegas and London. The demographic data suggests Drake's audience is skewed towards women, with 57% of the conversation deriving from females and 43% of the conversation deriving from males.
click on image to enlarge
The Trendrr data sets reveal two findings. The first is that Drake has been an item of popular and trending conversation on Twitter, increasing rapidly since his Grammy performance. Second, listening behavior for Drake is increasing in frequency and volatility, consistent with the increase in conversation. Together, the data shows appearances at seminal media events such as the Grammy’s pay dividends in social media and reap rewards for the artists in terms of consumption, further proving the interconnection between television and social media.
Drake has developed a budding musical career without the release of a full-length album and initially without the backing of a major label. He has already affiliated himself with hip-hop's most popular stars and is making money from concerts and brand endorsements.
This brings us to a final question worth considering:
Well that didn't take very long. In just under four years time, Twitter bolted past 10 billion tweets, serving up its 10 billionth message last week. So what did the milestone message say and who posted it? Nobody knows, as it belongs to a protected user.
Visible or not, the message underscores the continuing popularity of the microblogging service, which doesn't appear to be losing any steam (sorry Google Buzz). According to Mashable.com, Twitter posted its one billionth tweet back in November 2008, and five billion tweets only four months ago.
As it stands now, Twitter says its service pumps out about 50 million messages every day, up from 2.5 million about a year ago, the Wall Street Journal reports.
Cast your minds back to 2008. As well as the traditional settings of TV, radio and print, the race for the White House saw a new battleground: that of social media. The presidential campaign of Barack Obama used Twitter, YouTube and Facebook to good effect, alongside a massive online push for fundraising. Fifteen months on, Twitter is still being used, but this time as a tool for spreading the President's message. But, post election, does it work?
The White House's press secretary, Robert Gibbs, is a voracious tweeter. With 33,000 followers (his deputy, Bill Burton, boasts 6,000) he uses those 140 characters for anything from the US's prowess in the Winter Olympics, announcing Obama's first press conference, to posting links to articles that reflect government policy. But, given that someone like Ashton Kutcher can boast over four and a half million followers on his Twitter account--POTUS has, at the time of writing, 3,384,285 followers--just how useful can Twitter be to a government in power?
We all know that the birds do it (but let's not forget about the bees and the educated fleas), and even the US state departments have twitter feeds. Susan Rice, Obama's ambassador to the UN has got an account--although maybe her somewhat Lilliputian 1,496 followers can be put down to the fact that she's only been tweeting since January. But maybe it's more than that. Only last week the Environmental Protection Agency started tweeting, and Lisa P. Jackson has already got one call wrong: she thought Avatar would win Best Picture at last night's Oscars. Oops.
I have a little theory about why social media works so well in an election campaign. It's because it's war, chaps. Every four years the country gets enthused about who's going to be roller-skating down the corridors of power next (but let's not forget the age-old adage of not voting governments in, but voting them out) and a clever campaign (Obama enlisted the services of Chris Hughes, who'd lent a hand to classmate Mark Zuckerberg when he was starting up Facebook) and red goes mano-a-mano with blue.
Once a new administration is in, however, the hubbub dies down--and the figures support that. People just want the powers that be to roll up their sleeves and get on with the job of improving people's lives. If you think that just 60,000 people watched Obama speak on the subject of healthcare to Congress, with 20,000 of them staying behind to quiz officials about the speech, that's not what I'd call interaction with the public on a grand scale. Director of New Media at the White House, Macon Phillips, claimed that it gave the administration "a taste of what questions the actual public had in raw form, rather than simply the questions cable news and Beltway pundits have." Which begs the question: just how many non-journos and policy wonks were watching?
[Via Breitbart]
Filed under: Utilities, Freeware, Social Software, Web
Twilk is a simple site that looks at either your Twitter follower list and/or the list of accounts that you follow, and creates a tiled background image that is then applied to your profile page. The people whose accounts you refer to most often via @ replies, re-tweets, or mentions will show up in the first two columns going down the page.
Although Twilk is primarily a free service, they also offer a paid subscription that will automatically update your background daily.
The idea of Twilk is clever, but it doesn't make for the most visually appealing profile page. It would be nice if Twilk offered to add a screen, or to slightly darken the images uniformly, so that the resulting background didn't look so chaotic. However, if you're looking for a way to pay homage to the folks that you follow (or those that follow you), Twilk isn't a bad way to go.
Twilk uses your followers' icons to make a Twitter background for you originally appeared on Download Squad on Mon, 08 Mar 2010 08:10:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
Filed under: Utilities, Freeware, Social Software, Web
Twilk is a simple site that looks at either your Twitter follower list and/or the list of accounts that you follow, and creates a tiled background image that is then applied to your profile page. The people whose accounts you refer to most often via @ replies, re-tweets, or mentions will show up in the first two columns going down the page.
Although Twilk is primarily a free service, they also offer a paid subscription that will automatically update your background daily.
The idea of Twilk is clever, but it doesn't make for the most visually appealing profile page. It would be nice if Twilk offered to add a screen, or to slightly darken the images uniformly, so that the resulting background didn't look so chaotic. However, if you're looking for a way to pay homage to the folks that you follow (or those that follow you), Twilk isn't a bad way to go.
Twilk uses your followers' icons to make a Twitter background for you originally appeared on Download Squad on Mon, 08 Mar 2010 08:10:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
Packrati.us is a simple service that follows your Twitter feed and then extracts links from tweets and adds them to your delicious.com bookmarks. Optionally, it will bookmark URLs in @replies to you. Packrati.us will even add a delicious tag identifying the sender if you like.
Post from Twitdom - Twitter Applications Database - Packrati.us
[Tower of Babel. From Logoi.com]
A while back, my friend David Feng tweeted in Chinese that he was tweeting while riding under Beijing in a subway car.
I used Google Translate to see if I could figure out what he said. It came out something like “I’m using my digits on myself with a bird in the Beijing belly,” and he and I had a good laugh
I remembered that this morning I saw a few tweets with my name in them. Two were in Chinese and one in Arabic. I used Google Translate to try to read in English what was written in these two languages that I don’t speak.
The results were downright goofy and I have not a clue what had been written about me. I complained about it on Twitter and immediately a few people jumped to the defense of Google Translate and the Tweetdeck translation plug in. Mike Chelan, argued that these plug ins are “a decent start.”
He’s right. They are a decent start. In some cases, particularly the Romance languages of French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese, as well as German, the reults are pretty good. You can almost always get the gist of what was said, even if you often lose certain nuances, such as irony, sarcasm and humor.
But in other cases, Asian and Middle Eastern languages, the translations make very often make no sense whatsoever.
In fact, the problem is that computers don’t have any common sense. They have no feel for emotional or poetic flourishes. They trample on slang and metaphors and it is extremely difficult, it would seem to me, to be able to break these barriers, without having humans intervene in translation.
And humans are just not a very economic solution to the shortcomings of machine translation. I think it will remain a major challenge to get beyond the “decent start” we have made.
To me, this is an extremely important issue in social media. Translation is one of the great unresolved barriers.
Ultimately, my dream is for me to be able to post words in my own natural language, with the slang I use and the humor I sometimes try to infuse. Then you can read it in whatever your language is. You can respond using your language and I will then see it in my own.
This universal translation could allow people everywhere to talk with people everywhere. That direct human-to-human mode of conversation would not only be good for business and education, it wouyld also be good for world peace, or so it seems to me.
My hope is that somehow we can get beyond a “decent start,” as Mike called it.
The Oscars are currently on TV. I’m not watching it – sorry Channel Nine – but I am flicking between the streaming webpage, tweets and other bits an bobs of sites.
When I speak and write on the COI of Social Media – the Cost of Inaction – one cost is cultural relevancy. If you are no longer relevant to a whole generation or two, what will happen?
I mean imagine if the Academy had refused to allow the Oscars to be televised? Betcha there was a fight about putting the night of nights on the box way back when.
The 1st Academy Awards ceremony was held Thursday, May 16, 1929, at the Hotel Roosevelt in Hollywood to honor outstanding film achievements of 1927 and 1928. It was hosted by actor Douglas Fairbanks and director William C. deMille. The 82nd Academy Awards, honoring the best in film for 2009, was held on Sunday, March 7, 2010, at the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood, with actors Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin hosting the ceremony.[2]
Not only would they have become increasingly irrelevant, what about all the $$$ they would’ve missed out on?
The television network: ABC makes millions by selling advertising during the show for $10 thousand per second. Expensive stars, who would never otherwise appear on television, will work for free. The show itself is relatively cheap to produce compared to a movie or mini-series.
So what’s the problem? That money, that cultural history is under threat:
Given the ancient demographic that runs, nominates, votes and otherwise controls the Academy Awards, it’s always a bit of a shock when someone under 40 gets a nomination:
One of the frequent criticisms of the Academy Awards is that its aging membership does not reflect popular demographic trends. In fact, there is a full generation gap between the ages of average members of AMPAS and the ages of active filmmakers. There are two or more generations between the ages of average members and average filmgoers. Some voting members are octogenarians who haven’t been to a theater in years.
At least two major stars (Henry Fonda and James Garner) admitted publicly that they let their wives fill out their ballots for them, prompting AMPAS to tighten up its voting procedures. (from Media Awareness Network, California)
Uh Oh.
The Academy Awards (now The Oscars) expanded the number of Best Picture nominees from 5 to 10 this year in hopes of reviving the show’s declining TV ratings. That still may have an effect in future years, but I’d attribute any increase in this year’s ratings to the force of nature that has been Avatar.
The Academy Awards is still one of the biggest ratings events in television, and its ratings held up far better than most long running events until the turn of the 21st century. But a variety of changes in the last 10 years seem to have taken their toll, including shifting the broadcast from Monday at 9pm to Sunday at 8:30pm in 1999. 2008’s show during the TV writers strike, at just over 32 million viewers, was the least viewed ever. Viewership did pick up a bit last year, but was still very low on an historical basis.
Considering the Academy Awards viewership peak was the last time James Cameron made a movie (Titanic, also the top grossing of all time, at the time), I’d be stunned if we didn’t see an increase in the ratings this year. Forty million average viewers would not surprise me at all, but above 45 million would. (from TVByTheNumbers)
Sounds to me, that if Avatar doesn’t win, a whole generation or two will turn off the Oscars. Figuratively and literally. And the Academy can be a bit snobbish about blockbusters winning the big awards. That could be fatal…
So if The Oscars can turn television into a paying global concern with millions of viewers around the world, can they do the same with social media?
The Oscars tweets on Twitter were hopelessly out of date when I checked. The first time, it locked up my Mac (which is normally a good, stable, sweet little machine), second time the tweets seemed to be from weeks ago. The Oscar Tweeters are:
The Oscar Insiders
Adam Shankman (adammshankman)
-Adam Shankman is a producer of the 82nd Academy Awards and an inveterate tweeter.Ben Lyons (iambenlyons)
-Ben Lyons is the Official Oscar Backstage Twitter Correspondent.Wolfgang Puck (WolfgangBuzz)
-Acclaimed chef Wolfgang Puck will be preparing the food for the Governors Ball after the ceremony.Lorrin Millette (lorrinmillette)
-Lorrin works in marketing for the Academy and is in charge of the Red Carpet bleachers at the Oscars.
When I looked, the tweets weren’t even still on their page of tweets, and some looked days old. ie. guess who is presenting the supporting actors category. Surely that’s old news now?
Anyway, apparently you can tweet in questions for the stars. I didn’t notice a lot of that. The buzz seemed to be more like people in a pub chatting about the Oscars rather than lining up to ask official questions. More social than organisational.
Of course the other side of social media is what other people say. Not using Twitter as a broadcast medium for the Academy but one for viewers and non viewers alike to talk.
richmeyer @brandingexpert You do realize that they spend over $400K for a buffet for celebrities at Oscars not to mention free goodies bag #oscars
@LesleyMag: Im hoping that the “stars” remember #Haiti tonight… so much suffering in the world right now – not up to watching Oscars
@eddiepepitone: So far the Oscars suck balls. So self-consciously unfunny it is unbelievable! We should do a benefit for these people,never mind Haiti!
@ktab note to cablevision users in new york/jersey, abc and cablevision have reached an agreement and the oscars are now showing on abc. #Oscars
The last tweet was important – the hundreds if not thousands of tweets expressing in strong terms disapproval with Cablevision and ABC refusing to come to an agreement on transmitting The Oscars were unprintable. If Twitter is good for one thing, it’s to call to account greedy and obstructive service providers. I don’t really care if it’s ABC or Cablevision that’s at fault. They can both go to their rooms. The days of leaving an audience in silent agony while companies play out manipulative board games are long gone.
Did you notice that Twitter users are also viewers of The Academy Awards? It’s the most highly rated trending topic even if a bunch of people are tweeting that they are NOT watching it and why not.
Perhaps in a world of fragmentation, the last tweet is the most relevant:
sydneyowen Okay so I’m not watching the oscars but I’m googling SJPs dress. Can anyone link me to what she’s wearing? Idk if Google is right?
jwendz @SydneyOwen Yellow Chanel Dress
So, here it is
because we’d miss the fashion, right? Riiight! 
Sometimes the best thing to do with social media, is just do your thing. And let others decide how they will consume, filter, forward, create and converse about it. Trying to push discussions into organisational lines – tweet us your questions! – might just get lost in the social buzz. And than can be a good thing…!
Academy Awards: Oscars Social Media is a post from: Laurel Papworth- Social Network Strategy
Technorati Tags: academy awards, online, social media, the oscars, Twitter
Welcome to The Next Web’s Weekly Recap. If you love all things The Next Web make sure to grab your early bird tickets to The Next Web Conference in Amsterdam (April 27, 28 & 29).
This week saw a couple of big announcements relating to the real time web including WordPress’ support for the PubSubHubbub protocol as well as Twitter’s opening of the firehose to a new group of companies. The official iPad release date was also announced as well as rumors of an upcoming Google Tablet. Some big news also came out of the US this week relating to startups and keeping their founders in the US with the proposed Startup Visa.
Real Time Web
Blogging took a big step forwarding in becoming real time this week as Wordpress announced that all 10.5 million blogs have now gone real time by supporting the PubSubHubbub protocol. Twitter, the leader in the real time web discussion, also announced this week that they would be opening up their firehose to a variety of new companies (what this means). This announcement comes at a time when Twitter reached a key milestone of 10 billion tweets.
iPad
It became official this week that the iPad will be available on April 3rd with pre-orders starting on March 12th (get the official ‘I am buying the iPad’ countdown button). If you’re trying to figure out which iPad is right for you, check out our analysis here. This week also saw Apple go after HTC and Google with a patent infringement lawsuit surrounding multitouch, a key selling point of Apple’s iPad. Rumors also surfaced this week that Google as well as Sony are working on tablets to compete with the iPad.
US Startup Visa
A very important piece of legislation was recently introduced in the United States that aims to allow entrepreneurs who are not US citizens to stay in the country if they meet certain criteria. You can support this cause by installing this widget, calling your state’s representative or sharing this video.
Quick Hits
Filed under: Web
Fiverr Asks Enterprising Users, 'What Will You Do For a Lincoln?' originally appeared on Switched on Sun, 07 Mar 2010 14:25:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
Checking out Sponsored Tweets! Brought to you by http://spn.tw/5hCB
[Direct Link]
Don’t Tweet That displays a list of humorous tweets that you would typically think twice about before tweeting! It has a selection of its “best ever” tweets as well.
Post from Twitdom - Twitter Applications Database - Don’t Tweet That
Here are just a few of the design-related tweets that crossed my laptop this week.
Darren Hoyt asks an interesting question on his blog about whether designers should “design over a period of years in a consistent, signature style” or be versatile enough to change their style with each new job.
In an excellent articel MIX discusses the future of wireframes. Just don’t call a UX professional a designer!
The Gutenberg rule points out a user behavior called reading gravity which is the western habit of reading left-to-right, top-to-bottom. Muiomuio looks at the Gutenberg diagram.
An article from 2005 (seems like a really long time ago by web standards) by Mark Boulton on the first of “Five simple steps to better typography”.
More looking into the future in an article on Smashing Magazine. The post discusses the Future Of CSS Typography.
There’s a very good read on iPad application design by Matt Gemmel. He talks about some of the interesting opportunities. “The iPad is a target for apps from the desktop, not just from smartphones.”
On the Ignore The Code website, Lukas Mathis writes about Realism In Design and makes particular mention of design of application icons.
Chris Coyier illustrates how to speed up the use of gradients in CSS3 and how different browsers handle them.
Sketching is a key step in the design process. The Design Informer asks the question “to sketch or not to sketch?” As well as being a good read, it’s also a nicely designed post.
And finally, according to the Oatmeal, here’s what happens when a web design goes to hell.
Related posts:
It seems hundreds of Twitter accounts have started to Tweet out “weight loss” product spam today. Specifically, users who have had their accounts hijacked are Tweeting the message “I lost 20 lbs in 2 weeks!” and links to diet sites. Our source counts over 200 rogue tweets so far tonight.
It’s not just new users getting caught out: famous tech pundit John C. Dvorak (@therealdvorak) got caught up in the attack, and was none too pleased.
At this point we’re unsure of the cause: access could have been gained through previous phishing schemes. However, one factor points to a likely suspect: all the Tweets are posted via “API”, meaning the spammers do not have direct access to the accounts. Rather, there’s likely some third party application that’s been compromised (or a rogue one permitted by the users) that’s pushing spam Tweets.
We’ll let you know when we learn more.
Thanks to Ike Pigott for the heads up.
Sharing: Hundreds of Twitter Accounts Hacked [WARNING] http://bit.ly/cm8SKr
- Rob DianaHundreds of Twitter Accounts Hacked [WARNING]
- (jeff)isageekHundreds of Twitter Accounts Hacked [WARNING]
- Duncan Riley
Every week we tweet a lot of interesting stuff highlighting great content that we find on the web that can be of interest to web designers.
The best way to keep track of our tweets is simply to follow us on Twitter, however, in case you missed some here’s a quick and useful compilation of the best tweets that we sent out this past week.
Note that this is only a very small selection of the links that we tweeted about, so don’t miss out.
To keep up to date with all the cool links, simply follow us @DesignerDepot
Top 10 Android Apps – http://bit.ly/bFP4xM
The next big thing by Apple: the iBoard and iMat: http://bit.ly/aG8kRI
Top 5 Web Design Debates That Cause the Most Riots http://bit.ly/bv9YBm
Life Below 600px http://j.mp/cBY33j (via @buildinternet)
iPad case with wings: http://bit.ly/c80Rf6
Vancouver! Like you’ve never seen it before: http://bit.ly/cpPAGK
Awesome photo of the Space Shuttle launch: http://bit.ly/brm7LH
Realism in UI Design http://bit.ly/5HKXHg
Web Design Criticism: http://bit.ly/bqxN9H
How Much Do Standards And Trends Dictate Your Web Design? http://bit.ly/9ASdD3
Sergey’s Brin Résumé : http://bit.ly/dtK8ea
Shrevatar (Shrek + Avatar) wallpaper: http://bit.ly/9g90Zc
How jQuery is Killing Flash + jQuery Tutorials & Plugins to Beat Up Flash Animations http://bit.ly/bz96wR
I shot the serif… http://bit.ly/pMShZ
Futuristic PACO House http://bit.ly/nDAE
10 Famous Logo Designers and their creations http://bit.ly/9T0nag
Finding your voice in the design community http://bit.ly/cDTE5x
Loch ness monster lamp – http://bit.ly/d6daoR
IE6 Laid To Rest. Pictures, Videos, And Flowers From Microsoft. http://tcrn.ch/aeKI3E
So You Call Yourself A Designer? http://bit.ly/a4MNJi
Uh-oh! Seven Steps to Deal with an Unhappy Client http://bit.ly/bbAUPI
NYC and Las Vegas from above, at night http://bit.ly/91Z8iu
Want more? No problem! Keep track of all our tweets by following us @DesignerDepot
If you find an exclusive RSS freebie on this feed or on the live WDD website, please use the following code to download it: K7Uf7O
We just came across Packrati.us, a simple bookmarking service that allows you to essentially sync your Twitter feed with your Delicious bookmarks. Once you sign up with you Twitter and Delicious accounts, Packrati will follow your Twitter feed, and whenever one of your tweets contains URLs, the site will add them to your Delicious.com bookmarks.
You can also bookmark URLs in @replies to you. In your Delicious account, the service will include any hashtags you include as tags for your bookmark and include the full text of the tweet in the bookmark comments. Here’s an example of the White House Twitter account’s tweeted URLs in Delicious, using Packrati’s tool.
Last summer, Delicious launched a deeper integration with Twitter, to allow you to also tweet your bookmarked links out. Packrati’s ability to add the URLs your Tweet out to your Delicious bookmarks is so simple, yet serves as an incredibly useful tool to store and organize the links you send out. Of course, you may not want to bookmark all of the URLs you Tweet out, so the site could make your Delicious account a bit noisy.
Works like a charm.
- Mark InterrantePackrati.us: A Dead Simple Way To Make Delicious Bookmark The Links You Tweet
- Rob DianaPackrati.us: A Dead Simple Way To Make Delicious Bookmark The Links You Tweet
- Chris BroganPackrati.us: A Dead Simple Way To Make Delicious Bookmark The Links You Tweet http://j.mp/aEuskO
- Maddie GrantPackrati.us: A Dead Simple Way To Make Delicious Bookmark The Links You Tweet
- Mike HochanadelPackrati.us: A Dead Simple Way To Make Delicious Bookmark The Links You Tweet http://bit.ly/bHwpk1
- Mike HochanadelWhat culture tweets and re-tweets did you miss this week? Let’s sum it all up below. You can follow us on Twitter here. Or become a Facebook fan here.
Culture Tweets of the Week – March 6 is a post from: Open Culture. Visit us at www.openculture.com
Related posts:
I gateway my tweets to Buzz, but then use Buzz to expand on why I found a particular link interesting. http://bit.ly/aQd2Z9
[Direct Link]
