Olympics Generated 150 Million Tweets


The 2012 Olympics in London generated 150 million tweets and Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt ran away with a big share of them, according to Twitter.

The social network, assessing the 16-day event, found that Bolt's 200m and 100m races prompted the most chatter during the Games. The former netted more than 80,000 tweets per minute while the former generated more than 74,000 TPMs as they're known in Twitter's headquarters.

Among the other highlights:

Andy Murray's gold medal in the men's tennis singles: 57,000+ TPM
Jamaica wins gold, sets world record in the 4x100 relay: 52,000+ TPM
Team USA beats Spain, wins gold in men's basketball: 41,000+ TPM

Other non-medal-winning ev…
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More About: 2012 London Olympics, Twitter, usain bolt

from Mashable! http://mashable.com/2012/08/13/olympics-generated-150-million-tweets/?utm_sou...

Olympics Finale Sparked Fewer Tweets Than Grammys, VMAs [INFOGRAPHIC]



In Olympics speak, Sunday's Closing Ceremony on NBC failed to medal in the competition of most-popular entertainment event in social TV history.

Propelled by musical performances from the Spice Girls, One Direction and Jessie J, the ceremony attracted 2.7 million comments on Twitter and Facebook, data from Bluefin Labs shows.

The Opening Ceremony incited more activity, netting 5.0 million comments. This year's Grammys (13 million), BET Awards (7.98 million), Academy Awards (3.8 million) and last year's VMAs (3.1 million) also placed higher.

SEE ALSO: 2012 MTV VMAs Opens Online and Mobile Voting: The Nominees Are …

Bluefin's statistics for the Olympics finale account for nega…
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More About: Bluefin Labs, Entertainment, Music, Sports, celebrities, olympics, social tv

from Mashable! http://mashable.com/2012/08/13/olympics-closing-ceremony-social-stats/?utm_so...

Twitter acquires Clutch.io, service essentially getting open sourced

Clutch.io is a service that allows iOS and mobile developers to easily and quickly do app testing, which helps them track just how customers use their apps. The service has been helpful in the past for a number of app developers and their products, but Clutch has now flipped over to just one client: The company has been acquired by Twitter. Clutch says it will work on the same type of work at Twitter, aiming to grow the company on a worldwide scale.

As for developers using Clutch now, there's both good and bad news. The bad news is that the service is getting shut down -- it will be supported until November 1, and after that Clutch's servers will no longer work. But the good news is that Clutch is basically open sourcing the whole thing. The company says it will release all of the necessary documentation and software for devs to continue to run the testing service on their own servers. And any currently running tests are designed to "fail gracefully" should Clutch's servers go down, so there shouldn't be any issues with end users at all.

All in all, it sounds like a good move for Clutch, and that developers who might be affected will at least have a way to deal with that. As for us Twitter users, I'm curious to see how this affects Twitter's mobile experience going forward. Twitter's one of my most-used services, so anything that makes it even better sounds good to me.

Twitter acquires Clutch.io, service essentially getting open sourced originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 13 Aug 2012 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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from TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog http://www.tuaw.com/2012/08/13/twitter-acquires-clutch-io-service-essentially...

What Type of Social Media Personality Are You? [INFOGRAPHIC]


In 1921, psychologist Carl Jung changed the fundamentals of his field. By distributing a psychometric test called the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator to patients, Jung claimed he could accurately boil down the psychological types of humans into 16 major categories.

Still in use today, the metrics determine whether test takers tend toward certain character traits, such as introversion (I) vs. extroversion (E) or thinking (T) vs. feeling (F). Once taken, test results produce an acronym per individual. For example, "ISTJ" is for an Introvert-Sensing-Thinking-Judging person.

SEE ALSO: Not on Facebook? Employers, Psychiatrists May Think You’re a Psychopath

The infographic below, based on…
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More About: Facebook, Social Media, Twitter, infographics, linkedin, psychology, trending

from Mashable! http://mashable.com/2012/08/13/what-type-of-social-media-personality-are-you-...

Think App.net is just a Twitter clone? Then you’re missing the point

Much of the coverage of App.net — the ambitious project from entrepreneur Dalton Caldwell that just raised $500,000 through a Kickstarter-like crowdfunding campaign — has focused on the idea that Caldwell is building a “paid version of Twitter.” That has led a number of critics to complain that no one wants an alternative to Twitter and therefore App.net will almost certainly fail. But whether it succeeds or not, the idea behind the venture is actually much bigger than just building a paid Twitter clone. What Caldwell wants to do is create what he and others think Twitter could have been before it decided to become a global media entity: namely, a unified message bus for the social web, or a way of tying together multiple apps and services into a single real-time information delivery system.

This is a much more ambitious goal than just cloning Twitter or duplicating some of its features. And while Caldwell has beaten many people’s expectations by even getting funded in the first place, it remains to be seen whether enough users and developers will be willing to pay for the service to make it an effective resource — especially since similar efforts to create an open ecosystem for the social web have mostly failed. Are there enough supporters of an open standard to make a difference, or is the social web doomed to be a world of competing proprietary walled gardens?

App.net wants to be a platform, not just an app

Orian Marx, the creator of New York-based startup Siftee, does a good job in a recent post describing the difference between what the alpha version of App.net looks like now and the broader ambitions of Caldwell and his partners. What you see when you go to the site appears to be a very stripped-down version of Twitter, but with far fewer users and features, and that has led many to dismiss it as a short-lived clone — one that will die because it won’t be able to compete with the kind of network effects Twitter has developed (although Caldwell argues network effects can be a negative as well as a positive). As Marx describes it:

“App.net will combine the simplicity of cloud infrastructure with the power of web frameworks to deliver the best platform for developing social web applications.”

In other words, the alpha is more like a test case or prototype of what could be built by using the platform App.net is trying to construct — one that uses open standards such as PubSubHubbub and ActivityStreams and other protocols that make it easy to distribute information through multiple networks, as well as allowing users to find and “follow” other users, and other things that we associated with Twitter or social networking in general. One comparison would be to Amazon Web Services, which is a collection of tools like the Elastic Compute Cloud or EC2 that developers and companies can use to build services on top of.

Another way of thinking about what App.net is trying to do is to think about what email used to look like, or (for those who aren’t quite as old) what instant messaging used to be like. There were competing platforms and competing standards, and nothing like an open API or any of the other things we associate with allowing different services to exchange information. Users of CompuServe Mail couldn’t easily send mail to other mail-hosting services, and later on users of ICQ or AOL’s Instant Messenger couldn’t easily chat with users of other competing platforms such as Microsoft’s MSN or Google’s GChat.

As Albert Wenger of Union Square Ventures notes in a recent post about the potential benefits of App.net, what the social web lacks is a way of tying together various standards and protocols that allow anyone to integrate or exchange information easily with any other similar service — in the same way that anyone can send email to anyone else on the internet:

“It would a huge benefit to society if we can get with social networking to where we are with email today: it is fundamentally decentralized with nobody controlling who can email whom about what, anyone can use email essentially for free, there are opensource and commercial implementations available and third parties are offering value added services.”

Will the promise of an open platform be enough?

birdhouses

While Twitter has become a powerful information-publishing system and a kind of real-time newswire, it is still a private corporation with its own commercial interests, and as it expands its attempts to control more of its network — in order to monetize it more effectively — it is clamping down on the use of its API in ways that have caused friction with both developers and users. Much of the impetus for Caldwell’s project came from that dissatisfaction, and the feeling that Twitter at some point gave up on its desire to be an information utility and chose to become an advertising-based media entity instead. As one App.net supporter put it:

“[App.net] provides a solid API platform that is less likely to be yanked out from under our feet when the VCs get antsy and want to see a profit or acquisition.”

There have been other efforts to create a kind of open platform for the social web, however, and most have not ended well: one was an attempt to create a public standard for social connections called OpenSocial, which was driven by Google but designed to be an open protocol. Although the project still exists, it made very little headway, and was more or less doomed when Google recently killed off its Social Graph API. Rightly or wrongly, the project was seen as Google’s attempt to compete with Facebook — but its efforts have since been diverted to promoting its own Google+ network (which ironically still doesn’t have a fully open API of its own).

In some ways, Caldwell’s App.net also has similarities to FriendFeed, the federated social network that former Google staffers Bret Taylor and Paul Buchheit (one of the original developers of Gmail) created in 2007, which allowed users to pull in messages and updates from multiple networks such as Twitter, Facebook and Flickr. FriendFeed was eventually acquired by Facebook in 2009 for $48 million and Taylor became the company’s chief operating officer and one of the architects of its market-dominating “open graph platform.”

Will App.net ultimately wind up on the scrap heap along with other attempts to create an open social ecosystem, a victim of the market power of incumbents like Facebook and Twitter and/or the ambivalence of users? Or will it gain enough support to become a real alternative to the walled gardens that currently make up the social web?

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Rosaura Ochoa and See-ming Lee


from GigaOM http://gigaom.com/2012/08/13/think-app-net-is-just-a-twitter-clone-then-youre...

An algorithm for tracking viruses (and Twitter rumors) to their source

No, Vanilla Ice isn’t dead — and if he had access to a new algorithm from Swiss researcher Pedro Pinto, the Ice Man could go all techno-ninja and track down who started the rumor claiming he was. That’s because Pinto and his colleagues at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne have developed an algorithm for finding the source of such rumors, as well as viruses (physical and digital) and other maladies, even across highly complex networks.

Their method, according to an abstract of a paper just published in Physical Review Letters, is ideal for situations where there is relatively little data to work with, and is “based on the principles used by telecommunication towers to pinpoint cell phone users.” Essentially, the algorithm starts by looking at a small collection of points within a network and working back from there to determine the origin, kind of like how investigators can zero in on a cell phone’s location using triangulation. The more connections, or observers, a particular point has, the fewer that are needed to track down the source point.

Tracking a cholera outbreak that spread over a river network.

Aside from tracking the spread of web rumors, the team also successfully tested the algorithm against a cholera outbreak in South Africa (analyzing its spread across both water and human networks) and the 9/11 attacks in the United States. Both times, it was able to identify the sources (among a small list of possibilities, at least) using only a fraction of the publicly available data on those events. Thankfully for Vanilla Ice and others concerned with the spread of information over the web, Pinto’s system has an easier time with that type of data because it’s usually time-stamped, which makes it easier to figure out who was “infected” first.

In an article from Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne describing the research, Pinto explains that his team’s method could also be used for everything from identifying the source of a computer virus to determining the blogs most likely to make web content go viral to preventing the spread of an epidemic or chemical attack by learning how it’s spreading.

With so much research coming out to analyze data around crime, disease and other perils, it will be interesting to see the results when the work makes it way out of the lab and into the real world. Death rumors on social media are often times just good fun, but using data science to stop the spread of an epidemic would really be something. Hopefully, public health, law enforcement and other officials are keeping up with the tools now at their disposal.


from GigaOM http://gigaom.com/data/an-algorithm-for-tracking-viruses-and-twitter-rumors-t...

Paid Twitter wannabe App.net hits $500K target with time to spare

DNP Paid Twitter wannabe Appnet hits $500K target with time to spare

Paid Twitter-style service App.net has achieved its self-imposed $500,000 funding goal with almost two days still left on the clock. The social platform is the brainchild of Dalton Caldwell, who said he wanted to spawn a service dedicated to users instead of advertisers. It was originally pitched to Facebook, but the two companies came to loggerheads when it clashed with the social network's own App Center -- inspiring Caldwell's Kickstarter-style campaign. Though the software is still in alpha, over 10,000 backers have paid $50 for an annual membership or put down $1,000 for support, developer tools and a meeting with the founder. The company will now start working on its terms of service, letting users offer feedback and discover new features -- and if you wanna be @John instead of @JohnFDoe99427 on the new service, you may want to pony up, quick.

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Paid Twitter wannabe App.net hits $500K target with time to spare originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 13 Aug 2012 09:31:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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from Engadget http://www.engadget.com/2012/08/13/app.net-hits-funding-goal-500k/

Book Review: Navigating Social Media Legal Risks

benrothke writes "In the documentary Scared Straight! a group of inmates terrify young offenders in an attempt to 'scare them straight'" (hence the show's title) so that those teenagers will avoid prison life. A 2002 meta-analysis of the results of a number of scared straight and similar intervention programs found that they actively increased crime rates, leading to higher re-offense rates than in control groups that did not receive the intervention. For those considering the use of social media in their business, it is quite easy to read Navigating Social Media Legal Risks: Safeguarding Your Business as a scared straight type of reference. Author Robert McHale provides so many legal horror stories, that most people would simply be too afraid of the legal and regulatory risks to every consider using social media." Keep reading for the rest of Ben's review.

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from Slashdot http://books.slashdot.org/story/12/08/13/1315256/book-review-navigating-socia...