Perry

Hewitt

Tag: twitter

  • Friday 5 — 1.3.2014

    Friday 5 — 1.3.2014

    1. pew social engagement 73% of online adults now use social networking sites, per this year-end report from Pew. And more adults are diversifying their online social networking — 42% report using more than one service. Facebook and Instagram boast particularly strong daily engagement. 63% of Facebook users using the site daily, and 40% say they log in multiple times per day.
    2. Facebook itself has released a comprehensive (and highly visual) report for partners with aggregated international and mobile data. After its early bad bet on HTML5, Facebook’s 2012 pivot to mobile has been effective: roughly a third of German, Spanish, French, and Italian mobile phone users using Facebook.
    3. Reddit released its own 2013 year-end numbers — 56 billion pageviews is impressive, and nearly 16 minutes per visit is staggering. From the top ten threads it’s clear that laughter sells and that Reddit was, for good and for ill, a go-to source in the murkiness around the Boston bombings. One question: With 21% of Canadians on Reddit, why isn’t it a nicer place?
    4. In the U.S. and frustrated with your internet service? It’s likely you’re paying more and that your internet speed is lagging behind the rest of the developed world. The impact of faster speeds on productivity, the article points out, is the “the difference between thriving and surviving.”
    5. Wondering how to make sense of all this digital, social, and mobile activity? See this roundup of 2013 digital media scholarship from John Wihbey. One article examines gender and language use on Twitter, and finds that women use higher levels of first person plural and first person singular pronouns, intensifiers, and emoticons in their speech.

    Weekend fun: Have 23 minutes to avoid your in-laws if you’re at home or avoid your work if you’re stuck in the office? Try this compilation of ridiculous/hilarious/profane Vine videos.

    Every Friday, find five, highly subjective links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally.

  • 5 lessons from Justine Sacco

    5 lessons from Justine Sacco

    Justine Sacco tweetsToo busy preparing for the holidays to have heard of l’Affaire Sacco? Buzzfeed has a useful summary of how one woman’s tweet took over the Twittersphere last weekend, and took down a career — at least temporarily. Five quick takeaways:

    1. The interplay between social and traditional media has never been greater, so what happens on Twitter is quickly served up with breakfast on Good Morning, America. 68,000 tweets referenced Justine Sacco — and about 120,000 tweets referenced #hasJustineLandedYet hashtag. All this social content fed the traditonal media on a quiet weekend, and stoked the firestorm.
    2. The reach of social media is more than matched by the speed of the spread. People are already correlating the speed of viral content with its accuracy — see, If a Story Is Viral, Truth May Be Taking a Beating. No one is claiming this was a hacked Twitter account, but people’s mean-spirited thoughts or attempts at sarcasm now quickly become their one sentence bio.
    3. There’s increased murkiness between your public presence as an individual and your employer’s reputation. This is amplified if you are ostensibly a public relations professional or business leader. Clear hate speech likely violates most terms of employment, but personal views that hit the media will be fodder for interesting employment disputes in the future.
    4. There’s a lot of pressure for brands to participate in realtime, but there’s also attendant risk. The opportunity is highlighted in this Altimeter report about Real-time Marketing: The Agility to Leverage ‘Now’. Brands can jump on — but need to have the right people at the helm to make thoughtful, quick decisions. I may be the only marketer who admits to having had a pang of terror at the famous (and brilliant!) dunk in the dark Oreo moment during the SuperBowl blackout. Tweets re Justine Sacco hashtag from sbarro (now deleted) and Gogo were a big miss, and brands need to re-evaluate who has the social media car keys on a Friday night.
    5. There’s more you can do as an individual than participate in what The Nation called a meme for jeering global flagellation. Thanks to Nick Kristof and others who weighed in with reminders for people to support the cause rather than join the fray. People supported Aid for Africa (via an inspired domain redirect from justinesacco.com!), and donated to other AIDS related charities via the modest page that Nate Matias and I put together to shift the conversation from trial by social media.
  • Friday 5 — 12.13.2013

    Friday 5 — 12.13.2013

    1. Instagram Direct lets you send your photos, videos, and messages to select recipients. While comparisons to Snapchat feature prominently in the media coverage, this feels more like a catch-up feature like its video announcement back in June. One new ephemeral capability: you can delete your photos from recipients’ phones.
    2. In another Snapchat-response move, Twitter announced you can direct message photos — along with a bunch of other enhancements designed to keep you in-app longer. Smooth new swiping action in the mobile app lets you see activity and “discover” more easily.
    3. Canadian messaging company Kik at 100 million registered users may already be bigger than Snapchat, which declines to disclose its numbers. Kik’s support for HTML5-based content provides more flexibility to download games and content in-app — a big bet on the Web as its future.
    4. Chart geeks, rejoice! In this season of best-ofs, the Wire has compiled the best 2013 charts. Big momentum behind fruit flavored candy with Jolly Rancher, Twizzler, and Starburst rising in Twitter mentions (and, allegedly, sales).
    5. Open source software is eating itself, with more projects emerging and competing with one another throughout the stack. How can an enterprise know where to place its bets? Look for a strong community supporting the project, and code activity (releases, commits/month).

    youtube trends

    Weekend fun: YouTube Trends tell me that most of the country is watching 2013 rewind, so I guess you should be, too. I mean, it would be really depressing to dwell on the fact that all this stuff from 1994 is now 20 years old.

    Every Friday, find five, highly subjective links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally.

  • Enough said

     

  • Friday 5 — 11.29.2013

    Friday 5 — 11.29.2013

    1. Shopping on your mind today? Jeremaiah Owyang posted Ten Trends for the Progressive Retailer. Not sure how far “purpose beyond profits” will go, but some very interesting ideas here about how companies will use data about customers to reward behaviors, and the impact of sharing as a business model.
    2. Betaworks, the tech studio that brought us useful services like Chartbeat and bloglovin as well as sinister time wasters like dots, is raising another 20 million. Betaworks has always supported great ideas and terrific design in nascent companies. This round may allow the studio to do more with its existing adolescent companies like bit.ly and Digg.
    3. A new report from Ovum determines “social messaging” is big and getting bigger quickly, with over 2B users by the end of 2014. These messaging apps are acquiring users, growing time in-service through expansion into games and payments, and finding paths to monetization. This growth and user behavior change have implications for both legacy “desktop-first” social networks and SMS providers.
    4. For years companies and pundits have analyzed Twitter as an input to understand public opinion and predict election results. Now the South Korean Intelligence Service is alleged to have posted more than 1.2 million tweets to sway a presidential election. Not the first instance of astroturfing, but what some are calling “a systematic and massive intervention in elections”.
    5. Testing is the least sexy word in any digital development process. You’ll pack the house for a presentation of mood boards or a design review, but your audience vanishes when the conversations turns to usability, accessibility, or load time. Here’s a practical breakdown of useful testing considerations.

    NYT On ItWeekend fun: Check out ten hilarious Twitter feeds to be thankful for. My own addition, especially in this holiday season of specious, multi-column trends pieces: The Times is On It (@NYTOnIt).

    Every Friday, find five, highly subjective links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally.

  • Friday 5 — 11.08.2013

    Friday 5 — 11.08.2013

    smartphone growth

    1. Benedict Evans says mobile is eating the world, and I am inclined to believe him. Slide 7 (above) highlights remarkable smartphone growth juxtaposed against PC flatline.
    2. The news has been all TWTR all the time this week, with a few well-timed research reports and a Storify integration adding to the IPO hype. Yesterday, Twitter users Patrick Stewart, a 9-year-old girl who sold lemonade to end child slavery, and a representative from the Boston Police Department all took the podium to ring the opening bell. Perhaps overpriced at the end of the day, the media mood couldn’t have been more different from that of the Facebook IPO back in May 2012.
    3. “I need help with …” pre-fills the search box on the public launch of Google Helpouts. The service provides free and paid real-time video assistance if you’re trying to master anything from Caribbean cooking to Adobe InDesign. As video consumption surges across myriad handheld and tablet screens, the time may be right for how-to videos.
    4. I was late to the party on The Skimm, and started reading it only this summer. Warning: once you’re addicted to the 5:59 am snappy daily email of what’s going on in the world, it’s hard to stop. This week The Skimm received $1M in funding to grow their user base.
    5. More on the funding front: Newsle, the service that alerts you when your friends make the headlines, closed 1.8M in a Series A. Founded by two Harvard undergrads, the service personalizes the news for you by serving up headlines for your address book and social media contacts.

    Weekend fun: I bet you were wondering if you could watch two Harvard professors sing the names of all the Chinese dynasties to the tune of Frère Jaques. Well, sure you can.

    Every Friday, find five, highly subjective links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally.

  • Tale of a social media meme

    It is a truth universally acknowledged that a person in possession of a social media account will eventually have a regrettable public post. Certainly, that’s the assumption of 59% of teen social media users who have deleted or edited something they posted in the past. Adults are not immune to social media remorse: 74% of 18-34 year olds claim to have removed social media posts for fear of career detriment. Privacy settings may mitigate the risk, but don’t eradicate it entirely.

    In the spirit of the Roving Typist’s I Am An Object of Internet Ridicule, Ask Me Anything, I offer up a personal story of a Facebook post gone viral.

    Nearly a year ago, my then-18-year-old son went on a three-month backpacking trip with NOLS. Upon his return to Wyoming, he shared this unfortunate selfie of his newly hirsute self on Facebook:

    beard reddit

    I couldn’t resist commenting, “Shave, or we’re changing the locks. Love, Mom.” A friend of his quickly shared both the photo and the exchange to Reddit. Sure, the names were lightly redacted, but the profile photo matches mine on Twitter. Within a couple of hours, an enterprising Harvard College junior — let’s call him Zach, because that’s his name — posted this:

    beard tweet

    So, less than a day for a theoretically private comment to travel from Facebook to Reddit to Twitter. I posted quickly on Reddit to implore the Redditors with pitchforks not to show up at the door, and assumed it would be an amusing anecdote about social media and the futility of privacy settings for a couple of weeks.

    unconditional loveTen months later, it’s a minor meme that wouldn’t die. Cheezburger. Fark. Failbook. Runt of the Web. New captions emerge: “Positive Family Interaction,” “On Facebook, Sometimes You Win and Sometimes You Lose,” or, my personal favorite, “A Mom’s Unconditional Love.” The beard meme surfaces often enough that in the past month it’s surfaced at a staff meeting and a nonprofit event in D.C.

    So, what lessons can we learn from all this? Like the recent New York Times article on mugshot extortion and editorial on revenge porn, it’s a vivid reminder that images uploaded in any context can persist on the web, and take on nefarious or amusing lives of their own. Secondly, nothing you post to a social network is truly private whatever your settings, so always presume a scenario where your post turns up on your boss’ desk. And finally, parenting is all about compromise:

    goatee

     

  • Friday 5 — 10.11.2013

    Friday 5 — 10.11.2013

    1. Social media study word cloudHow do the words we use segment us by personality, gender, and age? An open vocabulary study of over 700 million Facebook posts by 75,000 volunteers provides a range of insights into attributes associated with language use. As the word cloud shows, men use profanity and talk about xbox far more than women on the social network.
    2. Direct messaging, long the neglected stepchild of the Twitter user experience, are about to get a lift with experimental new feature @eventparrot. Follow the account and it will direct message you with personalized breaking news, defined as news items noticed by the people you pay attention to.
    3. GigaOm posits why app-based tablet magazines are a failure, despite a few notable exceptions. Paid individual magazines titles continue to draw only a very small market. The desire to create the bespoke apps seems to stem, as one commenter put it, from an obsessive need for control of font and layout rather than a more sensible embrace of the messy, social open web.
    4. Perhaps the other end of the continuum of perfection and permanence is analog and ephemeral, like the live performances of Pop Up Magazine. As many of us relentlessly record and document, a new niche emerges for a live 100-minute show, where nothing goes online or is recorded.
    5. 91% of US adults own a cell phone today, and 41% of them use it to watch video. Pew’s latest report on online video shows continued growth not only in consumption, where comedy and education videos lead the pack, but an increase in adults posting video online to 31% from 14% in 2009. A full 35% of those video posters harbor hopes of their video going viral.

    Weekend fun: fancy a little telekinetic rage with your coffee?

    Every Friday, find five, highly subjective links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally.

  • Friday 5 — 10.04.2013

    Friday 5 — 10.04.2013

    bitly realtime media

    1. Have fun playing with bitly’s new Real Time Media Map, which visualizes how content from different media outlets is being consumed across the U.S. As you can see from the drilldown above, we read a lot of The Onion here in Massachusetts.
    2. Next week Google Analytics opens its free, online Analytics Academy. Another example of MOOCs as the new marketing — and a great opportunity for anyone in digital looking to develop skills in a fast-growing segment.
    3. Snapchat shifts focus from the fleeting to a full 24-hour window with its move into Snapchat Stories. Users can now construct chains of moments into stories which expire after a day.
    4. Group messaging service What’sApp is being billed as another great threat to Facebook. Like WeChat, the service has strongholds in multiple markets outside the U.S.
    5. Twitter disclosed its IPO plans to raise $1 billion revealing both lower than anticipated revenue, and 218 million active users/month. Most significantly, 65% of advertising revenue is now from mobile.

    Every Friday, find five, highly subjective links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally. Please let me know what I’ve missed in the comments below.

  • Try it: 3 ways to use your Twitter archive

    Try it: 3 ways to use your Twitter archive

    Twitter users age over timeIn the past 7.5 years Twitter has gone from novelty to newsmaker. Today, Twitter boasts 200M monthly users and over 170B tweets sent with particularly strong growth in the coveted 18-29 demographic.

    If you’re a Twitter user and curious to delve into your past (even though you may regret some of what you’ve shared), Twitter allows users to download all past tweets. To access your own Twitter archive, go to the gear icon top right, click on settings, and scroll to the bottom of the page. A link will be emailed to you where you can download the zip file, but note that Twitter prevents you from downloading too frequently.

    [tweetable hashtags=”#twitter”]Three things to try with your Twitter archive [/tweetable]:

    1. Twitter archiveView tweet volume and navigate by month. For me, tweet frequency corresponds with conference attendance and making new connections. My archive shows the year I skipped SXSW with a far lower tweet volume in March. Click through tweets by month to see what’s going on in your high or low volume outliers.
    2. Search for the terms you mention in your bio. Unless you’re wonderfully creative, your Twitter bio is probably the best indicator to followers of what you tweet about. My bio references social and mobile technology and Arsenal Football Club. A search of my Twitter archive shows 659 references of social, 361 mentions of mobile, yet only 65 mentions of Arsenal, showing that there’s room to grow as a fan!
    3. Play with the data in the csv. In addition to the clean interface you get when clicking on index.html in the zip file, Twitter provides both JSON and csv files. A non-technical user can download the csv and sort the data in a variety of ways. One way to visualize the topics you tweet about is to download the csv, pull the text of all your tweets, and then plug them into Wordle, as I have below:

    twitter text