Did you know that Twitter is full of inane, boring tweets that nobody wants to read? It’s true, according to science! TIME Techland reports.
A joint study by researchers at Carnegie Mellon, the Georgia Institute of Technology and MIT found that most people are only interested in about a third of the tweets they read — the rest are either instantly ignored or disliked.
According to The Telegraph, people’s biggest pet peeves are too many hashtags, updates on day-to-day routines and negative tweets. The most hated tweet of all is the “conversation tweet,” in which two people have a private conversation (publicly) that everyone else could care less about.
Also not popular: Foursquare check-in tweets, because the only people who care where you just had breakfast are already following you on Foursquare.
The study was conducted with 1,500 Twitter users, who analyzed 43,738 tweets from 21,000 accounts. Some good news for Ashton Kutcher: Twitter users really like self-promotional messages from celebrities.
The weirdest thing about the rumor that Kim Kardashian gets paid $10,000 for a Twitter endorsement is that it’s true. New York Magazine reports.
The pay rate for endorsing companies like Old Navy, Toyota, Best Buy, and American Airlines is determined by the size of a celeb’s following and how that group responds to his tweets with shares and retweets.
On that sliding scale, Snoop Dogg (6.3 million followers) is in the top tier of payments, on the upside of $8,000 apiece, while Paula Abdul (2.2 million followers) falls somewhere in the middle, in the $5,000-each range, and Whitney Port (800,000 followers) falls in the bottom tier, making around $2,500 per tweet.
According to Twitter blog, President Obama’s State of the Union address saw the microblogging service record more than three quarters of a million tweets relating to the speech. TNW reports.
According to Twitter, 766,681 tweets specifically mentioned “State of the Union” or its hashtag #SOTU while Obama took the stage. Other statistics revealed show that education, energy and jobs were the most discussed topics from the address, while 548 members of Congress joined in the conversation on Twitter.
A new Twitter-inspired film, Republik Twitter, coming to the big screen in Indonesia next month. TheNextWeb reports.
The film is romantic comedy that looks at how young people use Twitter and social media in general. We should point out that this isn’t a look at its founding story — as The Social Network loosely was for Facebook.
The film is slated for release date on February 16, just after Valentine’s Day, and it will be in Bahasa Indonesia and not English, as is almost all of the promotional materials.
After some discussion here on Forbes about the validity of “influence” in social media, news that Twitter has a significant impact on scientific citations is something of a surprise. But could it be?
That debate has been ongoing in the science community through January. The possibility hit a wider public when Alexis Madrigal raised it in The Atlantic a couple of days ago.
The bottom line is simple: articles that many people tweeted about were 11 times more likely to be highly cited than those who few people tweeted about. Its implications are even more interesting. It generally takes months and years for papers to be cited by other scientific publications. Thus, on the day an article comes out, it would seem to be difficult to tell whether it will have a real impact on a given field. However, because the majority of tweets about journal articles occur within the first two days of publication, we now have an early signal about which research is likely to be significant.
The relationship is not even marginal. 11x more likely is a huge influence. The research appeared in the Journal of Medical Internet Research, and was conducted by its editor Gunther Eysenbach.
If you've been on Twitter today, chances are you've seen a change in some of the avatars.
Instead of regular pictures, about 2,500 people have changed their images to a black banner that says STOP SOPA using BlackoutSOPA.org.
SOPA is one of two bills (PIPA is the other) that wants to stop online piracy. But the way it's written could harm innovation and change the Internet as we know it.
Last night, Birgitta Jónsdóttir — a former WikiLeaks volunteer and current member of the Icelandic Parliament — announced on Twitter that she had been notified by Twitter that the DOJ had served a Subpoena demanding information “about all my tweets and more since November 1st 2009.” Salon reports.
What hasn’t been reported is that the Subpoena served on Twitter — which is actually an Order from a federal court that the DOJ requested — seeks the same information for numerous other individuals currently or formerly associated with WikiLeaks, including Jacob Appelbaum, Rop Gonggrijp, and Julian Assange. It also seeks the same information for Bradley Manning and for WikiLeaks’ Twitter account.
The information demanded by the DOJ is sweeping in scope. It includes all mailing addresses and billing information known for the user, all connection records and session times, all IP addresses used to access Twitter, all known email accounts, as well as the ”means and source of payment,” including banking records and credit cards. It seeks all of that information for the period beginning November 1, 2009, through the present. A copy of the Order served on Twitter, obtained exclusively by Salon, is here.
Starting this week, the official spokesperson of the U.S. Department of State will answer questions from Twitter users as part of press briefings held on Friday afternoons in January. TIME Techland reports.
The month-long experiment is part of the State Department’s “21st Century Statecraft” month, and is only part of a program of events that will also include state officials hosting what are being called “digital engagements across multiple platforms” to promote the Department’s support of the internet, social media and digital platforms of various flavors.
Journalists no longer have to make an application to tweet, text or email from courts in England and Wales following guidance issued by the lord chief justice, Lord Judge. The Guardian reports.
Twitter as much as you wish," he said as he delivered the guidance which takes immediate effect and covers the use of electronic devices including phones and small handheld laptops for live text-based communications.
On Wall Street according to Gawker, hedge funds are increasingly turning to Twitter, Facebook and YouTube trends to place social media driven bets in the "tens of billions of dollars," according to a company that sells them data.
Social media aggregator Gnip tells the Wall Street Journal that a handful of unnamed "macro quantitative funds" are using its data, along with complex computer models, to make bets on which way markets are moving. Assuming they're real and not an invention of Gnip's marketing department, these social-network-driven hedge funds join Derwent Capital, which made its name earlier this year as "the Twitter hedge fund."
There is actually a credible if unproven mechanism for how this might work: Twitter delivers the first word of Osama bin Laden's death, a trader makes an early and/or after-hours long bet on the overall stock market, which promptly spikes. Or, a Twitter rumor drives Latvians to pull money out of Swedish banks (true story!), which a trader already shorted when the rumor started trending.
Somalia's militant Islamist group al-Shabab has launched an account on the micro-blogging site Twitter. The BBC reports.
The feed has attracted dozens of followers since it was created on Wednesday.
The account might be an attempt by al-Shabab to counter Kenya's military spokesman, Maj Emmanuel Chirchir, who regularly tweets about operations in Somalia.
Twitter is the loudest — and usually the meanest — medium out there for the 2012 Presidential candidates, according to a study released Thursday by the Pew Research Center. The Washington Post reports.
The study compared tone and sentiment toward the 2012 presidential candidates in mainstream media sites, blogs and on Twitter from May 2 through Nov. 27 of this year. Here’s how they summarized their findings:
One distinguishing factor about the campaign discourse on Twitter is that it is more intensely opinionated, and less neutral, than in both blogs and news. Tweets contain a smaller percentage of statements about candidates that are simply factual in nature without reflecting positively or negatively on a candidate.
In general, that means the discourse on Twitter about the candidates has also been more negative.
The day after Russia's national elections, in which Vladimir Putin's ruling party was accused of fraud, pro- and anti-Putin took to protesting this evening at Triumphal Square in Moscow -- and, of course, on Twitter. Reports on the size of the protest against Putin's regime diverge wildly: Reuters counted 500 and Russia Today saw reports of 5,000 on Twitter.
Twitter has finally launched a self-serve option for its ad platform. All ThingsD reports.
It’s still just in test mode, and only open to a handful of advertisers. But those who can use it can now buy ads directly via Twitter, using a credit card and a Web browser, without ever having to talk to a human being. Right now buyers can only purchase some of Twitter’s ad products — specifically “promoted accounts” and “promoted tweets” — but Twitter says that will expand over time, as it rolls out self-serve to more buyers.
A growing number of theaters and performing groups across the country are setting aside "tweet seats," in-house seats for patrons to live-tweet during performances, including the Carolina Ballet in Raleigh, N.C., the Dayton Opera in Dayton, Ohio, and Writers' Theatre in Glencoe, Ill.
According to The Wall Street Journal, Twitter on Monday announced the acquisition of a two-person startup called Whisper Systems, whose technology protected people’s mobile-phone calls and text messages from being obtained by third parties such as governments.
Whisper Systems created a suite of services for human-rights activists or other privacy-conscious individuals, which were used by activists during the recent “Arab spring” actions.
... One piece of software from Whisper Systems, called RedPhone, encrypts people’s voice communications, while another called TextSecure scrambles text messages. A third Whisper service let people download applications from the Android Market without sending private information to the application developers, who sometimes require it.
... Kardashian's fee is not disclosed but her less-famous sister Khloe is rumoured to earn $US8000 per tweet to promote jeans, jewellery and, er, wind turbines. Other celebrities, including actor Lindsay Lohan and rapper Snoop Dogg, are reported to charge up to $US10,000 per tweet.
English is the most used language on Twitter, but Arabic is by far the fastest-growing language on the service, with a growth rate of more than 2000% over the last year.
A study of all tweets made last month showed a daily rate of more than two million Arabic posts, up from 30,000 in 2010, making the language the eighth most-popular on the service, behind Korean, Dutch, Malay, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese and English.
Twitter has announced the addition of Places on twitter.com and mobile.twitter.com, letting users tag their messages with their location, the company said in a blog post Monday.
Over the next week, Twitter will roll out Places to users in 65 countries. Users should keep an eye out for the "Add your location" link.
According to MarketWatch, the U.S. Department of Transportation has fined Spirit Airlines $50,000 for violating federal rules prohibiting deceptive price advertising.
In June, the Florida-based airline sent Twitter feeds announcing $9 each-way fares from Los Angeles that didn't disclose there were would be additional taxes and fees, or that a round-trip purchase was mandatory, the agency said. Only after visiting the airline's website were the taxes and fees disclosed, but the amounts were still kept hidden until a second click. Also, Spirit didn't print the tax and fee amounts on billboards and hand-held posters also used to advertise the new service.
Two new studies concerning Twitter have been released this week, simultaneously asking and answering why it's a social network that companies can't quite get an effective handle on. Why do people tweet, and why does that make it so hard for media organizations to take advantage of Twitter?
This is an interesting case, reported by arstechnica.
Noah Kravitz worked for PhoneDog, which is an "interactive mobile news and reviews web resource." Kravitz worked as a reviewer and video blogger. He used the "@PhoneDog_Noah" Twitter account, and it amassed approximately 17,000 followers.
When he left, PhoneDog asked for the account "back" but he demurred, instead changing the account handle from @PhoneDog_Noah to "@noahkravitz". PhoneDog sued, asserting claims for misappropriation of trade secrets, interference with economic advantage; and conversion.
A Remembrance Day service run by a group of Methodists will be held on Twitter on Friday and Sunday to commemorate Veterans Day, using 140 characters for readings, hymns, the last post, the names of those who gave their lives and contributions from veterans. @Poppy_Tweet
A federal judge on Thursday ruled that Twitter must reveal information about three of its account holders who are under investigation for their possible links to the WikiLeaks whistle-blower site. The New York Times reports.
The case has become a flash point for online privacy and speech, in part because the Justice Department sought the information without a search warrant last year.
Instead, on the basis of a 1994 law called the Stored Communications Act, the government demanded that Twitter provide the Internet protocol addresses of three of its users, among other things. An Internet protocol address identifies and gives the location of a computer used to log onto the Internet.
If your friend who’s running the Marine Corps Marathon posts to Facebook or Twitter in the middle of the race, don’t be that impressed writes The Washington Post.
It’s one of the latest gee-whiz advancements in runner-tracking technology within the past decade. It started with text messages of finish times to runners and their supporters, evolved into more sophisticated systems that relayed the pace of participants at several points during the race and has now reached social media platforms, along with mobile phone apps and GPS devices that allow spectators to follow every step of the way.
Fans of Lady Gaga or Justin Bieber looking for more than their 140-character tweets may soon be able to follow and hear their idols chatter over a new online service. Reuters repors.
Voice microblogging service Bubbly, which allows people to send Twitter-like short sound messages, has grown to reach more than 12 million clients in Asia in just 18 months and plans to take the service global this year.
It sends users a text message with a link to a short audio message from people they are following. The message is played back as a voice call.
... Bubble Motion plans to roll out applications for Apple's iPhone and Google's Android smartphone platform later this year and seeks to expand offerings from voice to text, photo and video in the future.
Researchers in the US have mined Twitter to map who tweets for and against flu vaccination, and found that the results parallel the prevalence of vaccination. Now they want to find out whether Twitter just reflects attitudes to vaccination or helps to spread them.
Did you know that Twitter is full of inane, boring tweets that nobody wants to read? It’s true, according to science! 
A joint study by researchers at 
The weirdest thing about the rumor that Kim Kardashian gets paid $10,000 for a Twitter endorsement is that it’s true. 
If you've been on 
Starting this week, the official spokesperson of the U.S. Department of State will answer questions from Twitter users as part of press briefings held on Friday afternoons in January. 
Somalia's militant Islamist group al-Shabab has launched an account on the micro-blogging site Twitter. The 
According to 
