It's official. No longer the domain of the digerati, the Twitter short messaging platform has woven itself into regular peoples' lives to help with practical matters -- getting in shape, picking stocks, raising funds for a Senate run or selling cruise ship tickets. For proof, one need look no further than Wednesday night's Shorty Awards, which honored the best Twitterers as determined by a popular vote.
It must be really tough being a stupid company on the Internet. Once you make a silly decision and it's out there, travelling via the Interwebs, you'll pay for it very dearly - and probably would be paying for it forever, as it is likely to become the first thing that customers discover about you on Google. We have a growing number of various consumer advocates blogs and online groups to thanks for that. The rise of Twitter has even compensated for the relative decline in the power of once very powerful blogs like The Consumerist - which have seen themselves somewhat silenced by the proliferation of aggressive "search engine optimization" services like ComplaintRemover.com, which remove / demote links to online complaints about companies and their products (or that Mother of All Complaints - their customer service). And still - blame it on social media, but almost every time I see a group of bloggers and social media guys take on a company that has made an outright stupid decision, they usually win. Not only because they are right, but because the company usually ends up paying much higher fees in publicity services to deal with a swell of the negative publicity - all embedded in the precious Google juice - than the losses it would incur from dealing with complaints from their conservative customers, who may want to restrict the publication of certain materials - be that photos of breast-feeding mothers or rankings of adult products.
Susan Boyle appeared on Saturday's Britain's Got Talent show - prime time show in the UK - and shocked the judges with her fantastic performance of "I Dreamed A Dream" from Les Misérables after being sneered at for her looks.
As a simple online platform for conversation, Twitter is an ideal an ecological system through which we can understand the relationship between users and their environments on the Web. Especially compared to other social networks, Twitter simplifies most of the extraneous features and boils down its environment to people and content. The unusual simplicity of Twitter, though, continues to warp perception of how the relationship between user and platform operates. Many of the popularized studies examining influence on Twitter fail to identify the nuances of social interaction in the system. While attempts have been made (eg., http://twinfluence.com/about.php), the analyses tend to focus on the connections between users rather than the relationship of users, content, and platform. This report therefore aims to supplement previous investigations of the Twitter environment with more comprehensive data sets to enhance new approaches to understanding the concept of “influence” on social networks.
Google Wave is a new web-based collaboration tool that's notoriously difficult to understand. This guide will help. Here you'll learn how to use Google Wave to get things done with your group. Because Wave is such a new product that's evolving quickly, this guidebook is a work in progress that will update in concert with Wave as it grows and changes. Read more about The Complete Guide to Google Wave.
This is the latest instance of Datacopter for Channel 4 drama, The Promise. Here it is called a ‘Twitter Tracker‘ and it represents all of the conversation relating to the drama over the four weekly episodes. When Channel 4 first saw The Promise, they recognized that the drama may cause debate around the Israel / Palestine crisis, and wanted to find a way to represent this conversation in a fair way. Written and directed by Peter Kosminsky, The Promise is a compelling drama set in both modern day Israel and 1940′s Palestine, telling a tale of two ages via two main characters, Erin and her Grandfather. It’s definitely a gripping drama, which has had amazing tweets from people saying as much, so if you haven’t seen it I highly recommend catching up.