9 Real-Time Search Engines Which Go Beyond Twitter « Thoughtpick. Cardinal encourages praying by Twitter - Europe, World - The Ind. Cardinal Sean Brady was speaking yesterday in Attymass, Co Mayo, where he unveiled a status to the world-famous ‘Rosary priest’, Fr Patrick Peyton, who was born there 100 years ago. Fr Peyton was renowned for his saying: “The family that prays together, stays together.”
And Cardinal Brady — Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All-Ireland — said that the principle should now be transferred to 21st-century technologies. “In the name of Fr Peyton, I appeal to every Christian in Ireland today who sends texts, Twitters or uses e-mail to think about setting up groups of prayer between you and your friends using these modern means of communication,” said the cardinal.
“I ask young people in particular to think of sending their friends and family an occasional Twitter or text to say that you have prayed for them.” Calling for a return to the traditional practice of saying the Rosary, the cardinal said it would advance the cause of peace in the family right across this island. Middle East | Detained in Egypt, but still tweeting. Being in police custody in Egypt is not noted for being open to the public gaze, so earlier this month thousands of user of the micro-blog service Twitter were surprised to read updates, or "tweets", from police cells.
Step by step the tweets gave an insight into what it is like to be in custody in Cairo. The outspoken Egyptian blogger Wael Abbas and Palestinian journalist Laila El Haddad both shared the minute details of their experience of custody, in two separate incidents, with fellow Twitter users. In about 40 tweets, Wael Abbas managed to inform his readers of his day-long experience in a Cairo city centre police station, where he had gone to complain about an alleged assault by two men, one of them a police officer, but ended up being arrested himself.
Abbas started his day by tweeting: "fyi (for your information), i'm currently under arrest, if u did not hear from me today then i was not released". But using his mobile phone, he carried on blogging during his eight hours of custody. Mob Rule! How Users Took Over Twitter | Magazine. Illustration: Christoph Niemann Last August, the people who putatively run Twitter — the small crew that three years ago launched the world’s fastest-growing communications medium — announced a relatively minor change in the way the site functions. The tweak would have a small effect on retweeting, the convention by which Twitter users repost someone else’s informative or amusing message to their own Twitter followers. Retweets start with RT, for “retweet,” and usually cite the first author by user ID. And, importantly, retweeters often add a word or two of commentary about the repeated content.
But there was a problem: Twitter itself didn’t invent retweeting; it was created by Twitter users. In a blog post explaining the changes to retweets, the company’s second-in-command, Biz Stone, called them “a great example of Twitter teaching us what it wants to be.” The good news, he said, was that Twitter was building retweets right into the site’s architecture. Apophenia: Twitter is for friends; Facebook is everybody. I was talking with a friend of mine today who is a senior at a technology-centered high school in California. Dylan Field and his friends are by no means representative of US teens but I always love his perspective on tech practices (in part cuz Dylan works for O’Reilly and really thinks deeply about these things). Noodling around, I asked him if many of his friends from his school used Twitter and his response is priceless: As someone who has argued about the challenge of Twitter being public (to all who hold power over teens), I find this push-back to be extremely valuable.
What Dylan is pointing out is that the issue is that Facebook is public (to everyone who matters) and Twitter can be private because of the combination of tools AND the fact that it’s not broadly popular. Are Twitter Users Inactive? Depends How You Look at It. Hubspot's second State of the Twittersphere report is out, and once again, a cursory glance reveals that a lot of Twitter users aren't very active.
However, it all depends on how exactly you define "inactive;" a look from a different perspective shows that less than 10% of Twitter users aren't really using the service at all. It's been a tough month for Twitter, stats-wise. Compete and Quantcast posted their traffic stats for May, showing that Twitter's phenomenal growth has stopped or even reversed. Before that, a report from Harvard Business Review revealed that most Twitter users are passive, with 10% of all users accounting for 90% of the overall number of tweets.
Now, Hubspot's report, based on some 4.5 million Twitter accounts, pretty much confirms this. Here are some of the highlights: Sounds quite bleak, doesn't it? By this definition, only 9.06% of all Twitter users are inactive, which sounds surprisingly good. The report also shows a number of other interesting stats. Ironic But True. Many On Twitter Are Just Silent. Yesterday we heard from Harvard Business School researchers that only 10 percent of Twitter users are generating almost 90 percent of the content. Today, HubSpot, a Cambridge, Mass. -based startup, has released a study that not only backs up the findings of the HBS report, but also offers more granular information about the Twittersphere. The company crunched the data from more than 4.5 million Twitter accounts over a 9-month period to get a better sense of Twitter growth and report statistics on tweets and the Twitter user base, including user geography. The report, entitled June 2009 State of the Twittersphere, has some astounding findings.
Twitter is Not a Conversational Platform - O'Reilly Radar. Perhaps the most common reason given for joining the microsharing site Twitter is “participating in the conversation” or some version of that. I myself am guilty of using this explanation. But is Twitter truly a conversational platform? Here I argue that the underlying mechanics of Twitter more closely resemble the knowledge co-creation seen in wikis than the dynamics seen with conversational tools like instant messaging and interactions within online social networks.
Wikis are causally thought of as platforms for “collaborative” document creation. But on Wikipedia, while many people share knowledge to co-create pages, the process is not formally collaborative in the sense that contributors are not cooperating with each other ways that form group identity (to paraphrase Clay Shirky from his book Here Comes Everybody). To the contrary, passionate experts write the majority of text, and a long tail of other contributors offer relatively few, small edits. Paid Twitter Streams Are Here: Super Chirp. A new service from 83 Degrees called Super Chirp launches this evening that lets Twitter users get paid for their content stream. This is a theme we’ve touched on in the past. There is a huge market for celebrity fan pages that Super Chirp will play right into. In fact, 83 Degrees CEO Narendra Rocherolle wrote a guest post here last year called A Missed Opportunity – Britney On Twitter where he talks about the idea.
Twitter is mobile and it’s real time, two huge advantages over normal fan sites. And it’s constantly refreshed with new content. Here’s how Super Chirp works. This is a natural product for celebrities to embrace. New Twitter Research: Men Follow Men and Nobody Tweets - Convers. By Bill Heil and Mikolaj Piskorski | 2:15 PM June 1, 2009 Twitter has attracted tremendous attention from the media and celebrities, but there is much uncertainty about Twitter’s purpose. Is Twitter a communications service for friends and groups, a means of expressing yourself freely, or simply a marketing tool?
We examined the activity of a random sample of 300,000 Twitter users in May 2009 to find out how people are using the service. We then compared our findings to activity on other social networks and online content production venues. Our findings are very surprising. Of our sample (300,542 users, collected in May 2009), 80% are followed by or follow at least one user.
By comparison, only 60 to 65% of other online social networks’ members had at least one friend (when these networks were at a similar level of development). Although men and women follow a similar number of Twitter users, men have 15% more followers than women. Even more interesting is who follows whom. Twitter is Not Your Average Social Network. A study conducted by Harvard Business Review reveals that most Twitter users don't actually use the service much, or even at all. In fact, 10% of active users are responsible for over 90% of all Tweets. According to the research, conducted on a random sample of about 300,000 Twitter users in May 2009, 25% of Twitter users don't tweet at all, while 50% of users tweet less than once every 74 hours. Active users, on the other hand, tweet a lot, which makes Twitter a lot more like Wikipedia than an average social network (see graph below, courtesy of HBR).
Although this may sound strange at first, Twitter really is more like Wikipedia than, say, Facebook. Twitter is not so much about connecting with your friends, it's about broadcasting information. Although it doesn't necessarily take much creativity to create a tweet, only the most creative users actually persist in tweeting every day over a longer time period.
The Future of Twitter. Twitter Not A Big Hit Among Young Adults | Technologizer. While the 18-24 year old demographic is almost entirely on one social network or another according to a study by the Participatory Media Network – 99 percent to be exact — only a little over a fifth of this group is using Twitter. The study was released at TWTRCON ’09 in San Francisco, which if you didn’t know (and why didn’t you!) Technologizer’s own Harry McCracken was the “official Twitterer.” Of this group, 85 percent follow their friends, 54 percent follow celebrities, and 29 percent follow both family and companies. PMN says that this highlights that there is room to grow Twitter as a “marketing vehicle,” but as Caroline McCarthy at Cnet seems to argue on the flipside companies have already been using the microblogging service for marketing purposes for quite awhile. She seems to say that this isn’t the best news for these folks, and I’d tend to agree.
Regardless, Twitter seems to have quite the untapped potential customer base in this ever increasingly connected demographic. Is Iraq Ready for Twitter? New Media Enters a War Zone. Jack Dorsey, the founder and chairman of Twitter, sees no reason why Iraqis cannot join the growing chorus of global "tweets" appearing on computers and cell phones worldwide every day. "We've always been focused on making sure that the lowest common denominator, the weakest technology, still has a voice," said Dorsey, who was in Baghdad this week with a delegation of high-tech executives at the invitation of the State Department.
Cellphone-carrying Iraqis, Dorsey said, could utilize Twitter applications on their current mobiles for a range of things, even without broadband Internet connections, which are still in short supply in Iraq. "In our case that's using Twitter through SMS [text-messaging]," Dorsey added. "What we've found in Iraq is that we have 85% penetration of the mobile market here. " (Should the founders of Twitter be among the most influential people in the world? Vote for the TIME 100.) See Pictures of life returns to Iraq's streets. See TIME's Pictures of the Week. Finding Utility in the Jumble of Tweeted Thoughts. The Great Seduction: The profundity of banality. Loose Twitters sink congresscritters - Ars Technica. What is Twitter’s Vision? Mark D. Drapeau, Ph.D., is a Washington, D.C. -based biological scientist, government consultant, and frequent writer on social media and society. Perhaps overshadowed by Super Bowl chatter, the past weekend was also noteworthy for a thoughtful Wall Street Journal blog post by Chris Anderson called, The Economics of Giving it Away.
Many companies trading in bits and bytes make "products" that are built on the new economy of "free. " Yet many of these seemingly successful companies do not actually turn profits. Poster children for this phenomenon are the increasingly popular communications platform Twitter and the hundreds of clones it has inspired. What is Twitter? Just as Jeff Jarvis writes about the simplicity of Google being empowering, so it is with Twitter.
But sites like Twitter need a business plan to survive in the long term, and at the moment they don't have one, despite the numerous aforementioned discussions. 1. Finding a Vision for Twitter Cartoon courtesy of Geek & Poke. The Digital News Lifecycle: Why Breaking News on Twitter isn’t N. New social media tools, same old lesson: moderation. We can "tweet" our rants in 140 SMS-friendly characters on Twitter, make some friends while posting our resume to LinkedIn, and stay on top of every last byte of activity those friends publicize on Friendfeed and Facebook. As with all uncharted territories, these and other social media (a.k.a., web 2.0) services have attracted enthusiastic users, service evangelists, and dismissive critics. Some say Twitter and LinkedIn are the future, while others label them fads or time-sinks and question whether they are of any use whatsoever.
Thing is, they may both be right. The debate over the utility of key social media services reared its head again through some recent articles that question the amount of time we spend with them, and whether we're getting anything in return. As with television (or the rest of the Internet), the value returned from social media services can be highly dependent not only on how one uses them, but how much time is spent on them.