Twictionary / FrontPage. Evan Williams: The Challenges of a Web of Infinite Info: Tech News « Evan Williams and I have known each other for a long time.
From a struggling entrepreneur who started Blogger, to a successful founder who got liberal funding for his podcasting start-up Odeo, to the accidental launch of Twitter — to me, he has been pretty much the same person. He prefers to stay out of the limelight, leaving (most if not all the media duties) to his co-founder Biz Stone. And even in crowds he is quiet. But occasionally he speaks freely. HOW TO: Explain Twitter to Your Parents. Facebook, Twitter and The Two Branches of Social Media. The Social Analyst is a column by Mashable Co-Editor Ben Parr, where he digs into social media trends and how they are affecting companies in the space.
There's no disputing that Facebook is the poster child for social networking. It is the platform for building social connections online and keeping up to date with what's happening in your social circle. It is one of the two most important platforms in social media. The other one is Twitter. However, if you try to describe Twitter as a "social network" to anyone who works at the company, they'll quickly correct you. The Social Network: Ecosystem vs. Egosystem. InShare55.
Paper.li – read Twitter as a daily newspaper. The Mirons Daily on Twitter.
Twitter. History Creation and initial reaction Twitter's origins lie in a "daylong brainstorming session" held by board members of the podcasting company Odeo.
Dorsey, then an undergraduate student at New York University, introduced the idea of an individual using an SMS service to communicate with a small group.[15][16] The original project code name for the service was twttr, an idea that Williams later ascribed to Noah Glass,[17] inspired by Flickr and the five-character length of American SMS short codes. The developers initially considered "10958" as a short code, but later changed it to "40404" for "ease of use and memorability. ...we came across the word 'twitter', and it was just perfect.
The first Twitter prototype, developed by Dorsey and contractor Florian Weber, was used as an internal service for Odeo employees[20] and the full version was introduced publicly on July 15, 2006.[8] With Twitter, it wasn't clear what it was. Reaction at the conference was highly positive. Growth Leadership. How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live. The Story of the Fail Whale. How An Unknown Artist's Work Became a Social Media Brand Thanks To the Power of Community Twitter users are very familiar with the iconic image of the Fail Whale.
This social object has been latched onto by Twitter fans not just as a representation of Twitter's downtime, but also as a representation of the community's love for the service and their hope for its triumph over their many struggles. Despite Twitter's troubles, most of its users stayed true, watching and waiting as the team began the long process of recoding the application in order for it to scale up. As Twitter succumbed to the strain of running their under-provisioned service, the Fail Whale "over capacity" image would appear. And this image began to take on a life of its own. Fail Whale's Beginnings You probably thought that Twitter was using designs they paid for, right? Retweeting is profound - a linguistic analysis of 10 million retweets by Dan Zarrella - Max's posterous. Visualizing How a Link Spreads Through the Twitterverse. A few months ago, I did some research into visualizing how a story spreads across the Twitterverse and how that spread could be visualized.
Tools. New Twitter Research: Men Follow Men and Nobody Tweets - Conversation Starter - HarvardBusiness.org. 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. 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.
These results are stunning given what previous research has found in the context of online social networks. I Piskorski, Mikolaj Jan. From Many Tweets, One Loud Voice on the Internet. Twitter Study Reveals Interesting Results - 40% is "Pointless Babble" A while back we embarked on a study that evolved after a having a debate in the office as to how people are using and consuming Twitter.
Some felt it was their source of news and articles, others felt it was just a bunch of self-promotion with very few folks actually paying attention. But mostly, many people still perceive Twitter as just mindless babble of people telling you what they are doing minute-by-minute; as if you care they are eating a sandwich at the moment. (See our last post on Twitter: Is Anyone Paying Attention? ). So we took 2,000 tweets from the public timeline (in English and in the US) over a 2-week period from 11:00a to 5:00p (CST) and captured tweets in half-hour increments. News, Spam, Self-Promotion, Pointless Babble, Conversational and Pass-Along Value. See our entire whitepaper here . Results The results were interesting. Other Results - 11:30a and Monday’s have the most frequent tweets with Pass-Along Value. . - News seemed heavier at 2:00p and on Tuesday’s. Channeling Our Inner Celebrity Through Twitter and Social Media. InShare0 After I finish the new (unannounced) book that I’m feverishly writing, I plan to finally pursue “Internet Famous – The rise of micro celebrity and the end of privacy.”
Alexia Tsotsis (disclosure, she’s a dear friend) recently wrote an intriguing article at the LA Weekly entitled, “Is All of Hollywood the Bitch in Twitter’s Sex Tape or Just P. Diddy?” She links to a recent article written by A.J. Keen, author of the controversial book, Cult of the Amateur, in which he defends TechCrunch and Michael Arrington in the Twittergate scandal. He is a brilliant thinker and writer. However, his quote, if for a moment, opened up the mental floodgates that have held back so many psychological reflections and cycles of personal introspection over the years related to the socialization of the web and media. “To further expound on Andrew Keen’s perspective, I believe that Twitter is a media darling simply because we, the bitches, choose to tweet about our lives relentlessly.
#internetfamous. Twitter’s Communication Classification (video) Last Friday, our resident cranky fart Steven Hodson posited that Twitter wasn't, in fact, a status micro-blogging utility but in fact a communictations tool most closely resembling instant messaging.
Certainly when I'm attempting to explain Twitter to newbies, that is the easiest way to explain it, but quite a few of you Mashable readers took exception to the characterization. As of the time of this writing, the debate still rages on with the comment count in the triple digit range. From Steven's editorial: It amazes me how anyone in all seriousness can even consider the inane twaddle that permeates the Internet from services like Twitter as even coming close to blogging or micro-blogging. Has anyone really paid attention to what is being said on Twitter these days – that is if you can make it through the growing amount of spam that is occurring. On Mashable Conversations today, Sean and I try to make sense of the debate and put together what our take is on it. Never Miss an Episode!