From MIT’s Technology Review:
The tweets are a mainstay of Google’s real-time results, but Google has not previously discussed how it ranks them. A fundamental Google strategy for identifying tweet relevance is analogous to that used by Google’s PageRank technology, which helps find relevant Web pages with traditional Web search. Under PageRank, Google judges the importance of pages containing a given search keyword in part by looking at the pages’ link structure. The more pages that link to a page—and the more pages linking to the linkers—the more relevant the original page. In the case of tweets, the key is to identify “reputed followers,” says Amit Singhal, a Google Fellow, who led development of real-time search
"It was also an example of how Twitter reinforces the tendency of adults to behave like high school students, passing rude notes, spreading exaggerated rumors and obsessing endlessly — and pointlessly — about who said what mean thing about whom."
Behaving badly online. The only qualm I have reposting this quote is that high schoolers often aren’t nearly as bad as the most vitriolic adults.
From A Tweet Unleashes Vitriol on a User in Britain (NYTimes).
An intern who spent time studying the Amish paper The Budget found it’s culture already mirrored the internet:
By assembling detailed reports from around the country, Ms. Best said, the editors of The Budget “have been doing for 100 years what we have only been doing recently — looking at news on the hyperlocal scale and asking each person what is on your mind,” she said in an interview from Newport, Wales, where she is a reporter at The South Wales Argus. “They are looking at the individuals to make a bigger picture. With the Internet, the power has shifted to many hands, but they have done that for a long time.”
Many of us have noticed that Twitter has been replacing RSS in our lives. We’re ignoring the site feeds that we used to read with Google Reader and signing up to them via Twitter. Many of the top RSS feeds are channeled through Feedburner, which Google bought a few years ago. Today’s news that Twitter has hired up Feedburner’s founder means they’re looking seriously at the Twitter-as-Feed phenomenon too.
A sixteen-year-old perspective on Techcrunch:
If you look at technologies trending with teens right now, it’s Apple devices (iPhone, iPod), smart phones (Blackberry, Palm), and then social networks (Facebook and MySpace). At least that’s what I see from hanging out with 1,500 other teenagers in high school every day (I am 16 years old). But why not Twitter? Well, because Twitter is a different type of social network than Facebook. Facebook is about connecting people, and sharing information with each other. The way my friends and I see it, Facebook is a closed network. It’s a network of people and friends that you trust to be connected to, and to share information like your email address, AIM screen name, and phone number. You know who’s getting your status messages, because you either approved or added each person to your network.
Martin’s comment: From my observation, this seems to be true with blogs too and for a lot of folks in their early 20s.
The folks at Friends General Conference have a Twitter feed and designated tag for the year’s FGC Gathering of Liberal Quakers in the U.S. Being flexible, QuakerQuaker.org’s FGC Gathering coverage will be pulling from both the new official “#fgc09” tag and the “quaker.fgc” tag that many of us have been using.
For the curious, here’s a link to the 2006 post when I first suggested that Friends start tagging our FGC Gathering social media.
This gives Twitter.com features that should be included, inline images and videos and mouse-overs views of a particular contact’s latest tweets.
There goes the day.
Some of my early fav’s:
Your lips say 0 but your eyes say 1
Mind if I crash at your place tonight?
Can I take you 127.0.0.1
Even in binary code, you’re still a 10
What is that long bar at the bottom of your keyboard?
Drop that 0 and get with a 1
Roses are #FF0000, violets are #0000FF, all my base are belong to you
I have a machine that goes Ping!
Your dock or mine?
Do I have to prompt you?
Nothing ground-breaking in this article on Mashable but useful for the newcomer. The most important take-aways for designers:
My own Twitter profile has a customized background that gets its color cues from my main blog. When picking themes and designs, it’s good to have a look-and-feel that follows your other sites. Here’s a page of unique designs which shows you how you can break out of the Twitter box.
One of the best uses of a Twitter account is to help drive traffic to a Facebook Fan Page and you can do this by having your tweets point to relevant pages on your Facebook profile (videos, links, events). I use http://bit.ly for my linking because of its good analytics. Many of us continue to use Twitter for its original purpose of sharing useful tidbits with friends, but if you are using it for publicity, you should consider how your tweets can lead to ongoing relationships with your other online properties.
From Zakazukhazoo via Dirkthecow:
“Social media is just another bunch of communication channels which work the same way as talkback radio and letters to the editor do. The only difference is that everyone gets to be Rupert Murdoch and the old people aren’t invited. It’s not rocket science, it’s just the way people communicate now. If you’re interested in it and you’re adept at expressing other people’s opinions in 140 characters or less, you’re looking through a small window of opportunity here to pimp yourself out as a social media consultant. You’ve got about 8 months left to hold seminars and help newbies guide the way, but by 2010 all the road maps will have been re-written and marketing managers, PR firms and advertising agencies will be bypassing your little bridge in the woods as they travel down the newsest section of the information superhighway, on which Twitter will have been relegated to the slow lane and Facebook will be a distant speck in the rearview mirror.”
Martin’s comment: Cynical and depressing, but true of how the PR people have been gumming up Twitter lately. It needs to be about communication and real engagement.
“Many people on twitter want to add social media consulting or claims of social media expertise to their little bag of tricks. This is quite prevalent now. Indeed there seems to be a wave of people seeing social media consultancy as something they can just breeze into and use to make money from naive clients. This ruse is assisted by the fact that it is difficult to prove social media expertise, but rather easy to claim it. One obvious way to lay claim to twitter expertise is to amass a large number of friends and followers. Another is to seek high rankings in the various twitter ranking systems or on twitter leaderboards.”
Below: the Twitter account of @avenueofthearts this past Friday, all noise no signal:
“Living Beyond Breast Cancer has won supporters for one of its biggest fund-raisers with e-mail blasts, brochures, and personal calls to big donors. But that’s so yesterday. For the first time, the nonprofit based in Haverford is posting to its new Facebook page information on this year’s Yoga Unites event, which takes place Sunday. It also is tweeting on Twitter as @YU4LBBC and uploading video to YouTube. Of course, Living Beyond also blogs, and it shares photos on Flickr, including one of women saluting the sun on the steps of the Art Museum, where the annual Yoga Unites takes place. As a result, the number of teams signed up for the event has nearly tripled, the group reports. That’s the bottom-line promise of ‘social giving,’ which uses online networks to raise awareness and, ultimately, money.”
Martin’s Commentary:
For context, my recent posts on Nonprofits and Social Media
Will Facebook (all but) Replace Corporate Websites
I’m looking at the work of a potential non-profit client now. They have a fine website: recently redesigned, it has intuitive navigation, good e-commerce and a design that projects elegance. The client is staffed with some fantastically-creative people and the web team is obviously skilled. Yet despite all this, the website itself feels oddly static.
Nonprofits and Social Media
Over the last few years we’ve focused on email lists. We all have big email lists—tens of thousands of users, segmented all sorts of different ways. We send out dozens of emails a week and they end up seeming not spam. A new era is coming with social media.
Batch vs Real Time Processing and the Emerging Web Culture
Malcolm Gladwell treats us to another of his counter-intuitive x-rays of the world’s workings in this week’s New Yorker feature, “How David Beats Goliath.” His focus on the difference between batch and real time processing is a key to understanding why many nonprofit and commercial marketing professionals can use Twitter, Facebook and other real time media.
It’s not exactly a silent spring, but a change made to Twitter’s settings this afternoon has already greatly reduced the tweets its users are witness to. In what the company called a small settings update, users no longer see public replies sent by friends to people they themselves are not following. (Fragmented conversations, they are called.) This isn’t a small change at all; it’s big, and it’s bad. The new setting eliminates serendipitous social discovery.
Twitter is the next big search engine and they know it. Real time search is great. I find Twitter Search is becoming as useful as Google for a lot of the the stuff I’m looking up. If they are planning to index the pages that people link to, it would be phenomenal. They have to figure out a way to keep out the spam crap but it sounds like they have some smart people on board to work out those algorithms. Neat stuff.
