Will Twitter Lead to US Spring?
August 28, 2012
Any doubts about Internet censorship as the next big thing? Check out TechNewsWorld’s “How Twitter Could Trigger a US Revolution” for an example of tech-related alarmism. The piece starts by explaining why our country is not immune to the sort of turmoil many other countries have been experiencing. Writer Rob Enderle supplies several reasons, which he summarizes with:
“In short, there is a growing number of increasingly heavily armed people [in the US] becoming convinced that their government is catastrophically flawed, and that the system itself — not just the people in it — is the cause. That would appear to be a formula for revolution, and key indicators appear to be drifting in that direction at the moment.”
Okay. . . . Enderle goes on to tie in the Twitter factor. He writes:
“What Twitter does that is unique is that it puts no time between the concept of a news item and what is published. . . .
“This suggests that a revolutionary group, hostile country, or terrorist group could relatively easily manufacture an event that could cause several large-scale riots — and if they controlled enough of the tweets, propagate them into revolution.”
The potential scene he describes involves disgruntled and understaffed law enforcement; rioters who will ignore all accurate but non-Twitter-hosted news stories; and revolutionaries egging each other on with hyperbole-filled tweets. He thinks the scenario unlikely—what a relief!—but says the thought exercise shows that we are vulnerable to Twitter-based upheaval.
Sigh. Enderle has a good point here and there, but the whole write up makes me think back over my history. Prophecies of doom have accompanied every step of our society’s advancement, and most (though not all) have proven to be off the mark. Let us hope that is the case with Enderle’s observations.
Let us also hope that such speculation does not give our lawmakers any restrictive ideas.
Cynthia Murrell, August 28, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Library of Congress Vows to Archive All Tweets
August 28, 2012
Andrew Phelps of Nieman Journalism Lab recently reported on a huge undertaking by the Library of Congress in the article “The Plan to Archive Every Tweet in the LIbrary of Congress? Definitely Still Happening.”
According to the article, back in 2010 the Library of Congress announced its plan to preserve every public tweet for future generations. Little did it know at the time, there are 400 million public tweets a day and the number is continuing to grow. However, when Canada.com recently reported that the “LOC is quietly backing out of the commitment”, an LOC spokesperson replied saying that the the project is very much still happening.
Library Spokesperson Jennifer Gavin said:
“The process of how to serve it out to researchers is still being worked out, but we’re getting a lot of closer,” Gavin told me. “I couldn’t give you a date specific of when we’ll be ready to make the announcement…We began receiving the material, portions of it, last year. We got that system down. Now we’re getting it almost daily. And of course, as I think is obvious to anyone who follows Twitter, it has ended up being a very large amount of material.”
Since the project is definitely going underway, the real challenge is how will this unstructured data be organized and made searchable. I’m interested to see what they figure out.
Jasmine Ashton, August 28, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
A Twitter Number of Interest
August 14, 2012
Australia’s 9 News reports on a milestone in “Twitter Clocks Half-Billion Users.” This factoid comes courtesy of social media monitoring firm Semiocast, whose recent study analyzed data on time zone, geolocation, and language to determine Twitter trends. The write up also tells us:
“The US accounted for more than 141 million of Twitter users, with Brazil ranking second with 41 million after seeing its number rise by 23 per cent since the start of the year. Japan came in third with 35 million users.
“Americans also posted the highest number of messages on Twitter, with 25.8 per cent of all tweets hailing from the US.”
The study also reveals that Japanese is the second most common language on Twitter after English, and that Japan produced over 10 percent of all tweets over the period studied. Interestingly, Indonesia’s capital Jakarta was found to be the most active Twitter zone.
Also noteworthy—Arabic is now the sixth most common language on the networking site; Twitter’s popularity soared in the Arab world after the events of the Arab Spring. Go figure.
Based in Paris, Semiocast supplies consumer-insight and brand-management solutions that tap into data on the real-time Web. The company was founded in 2009.
Cynthia Murrell, August 14, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
New Advancements in BI Semantics Asserts FiirstRain
August 11, 2012
Business Intelligence or BI is steadily becoming more and more relevant as we consumers continue to pursue online activity. The article, FirstRain Spotlights Semantics Across Domains discusses more about the application of newer BI technologies like FirstRain and how they are revolutionizing the playing field. The article claims that this particular BI can process thousands of pages of consumer relevant data for businesses on a daily basis from online content like news, blogs, PR, web sites, etc. YY Lee who is the head of the intelligence for FirstRain explained a little bit about how the company got to this point.
“Ten years ago we tried a taxonomy but they don’t really work because they are static…So we created a flexible data structure that could reflect the different atomic players and pieces in the business, and based on the information we see coming over we could [semantically] categorize and derive the structure of different business and relationships between entities. So, over time our internal data structures are driven by the information we process.”
By implementations like the addition of FirstTweet, a technology that processes Twitter postings for customer data it is clear sign that BI advances at least as fast as consumer activity does. But even this technology is flawed, “With tweets and social content the information ambiguity could just kill you,” Lee said in the article. One has to wonder if these kinds of kinks in the newest BI can even be solved before the technology becomes outdated.
Edie Marie, August 11, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Search for Year One Tweets
July 30, 2012
TechCrunch recently reported on the launch of a new Twitter search engine founded by Kellan Elliott McCrea in the article “OldTweets Reveals Twitter Founders’ First Tweets, And Yours Too (Wow They Were Boring.”
According the article, OldTweets is a tool allows users to access the 20,000,000 tweets from Twitter’s first year up and running from 2006 to 2007.
After poking fun of Twitter co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey’s first tweet, the article states:
“What does OldTweets tell us? Well, mainly that we were super-dull people on Twitter at first. (Maybe we still are, but have lost our sense of self-awareness?). Yes, we were tweeting the mundane details of our lives back then. As TechCrunch blogger-turned-VC MG Siegler notes of the early tweets, ‘my god they were boring.’ (One of his first, appropriately: ‘writing a blog post.’)”
Lucky for us, after SXSW 2007, the rate of tweeting across the United States increased dramatically and so too did the creativity of the content.
Jasmine Ashton, July 30, 2012
Sponsored by IKANOW
Amazon Creates A Stir on Twitter and in the Blogosphere
July 23, 2012
Benjamin Coe spent a recent Friday night dealing with the AWS outage. Based on the article he wrote on his blog entitled “My Friday Night with AWS,” it seems he may have spent quite a bit of time on Twitter checking the pulse of AWS users as well.
He chalked up his experience as a testament to the infrastructure of Attachments.me. However, those on the twittersphere either complained about how awful AWS is or they complained about how no one builds appropriately redundant infrastructure. His thoughts are that redundancy comes with a cost.
He states:
“The only way to ensure close to 100% up time is replicating your entire infrastructure. Ultimately it’s a trade off. Are the risks associated with parts of a system not having redundancy offset by reduced infrastructure costs and complexity? It’s obvious that Pinterest, Instagram, Heroku, and many other sites (cough, attachments.me), had parts of their sites that were not redundant. I can almost guarantee that in many cases this was a conscious choice. From my perspective, a lack of total redundancy can sometimes be an acceptable risk if approached responsibly.”
We have to hand it to cloud technologies to keep things exciting. No local data? no problem. Uptime, reliability, and great communication are characteristics of some of the new cloud services. The problem is, “Which service? and when?”
Megan Feil, July 23, 2012
Sponsored by IKANOW
Twitter Search and Discovery Overhaul
July 9, 2012
Twitter’s search and discovery side is about to get a significant upgrade, according to The Next Web’s “Twitter Is Poised to Overhaul Its Search and Discovery Features.” Writer Jon Russell points to a tweet (naturally) from Twitter engineer Pankaj Gupta which heralded the change with a frustrating lack of detail. Absent a response to his request for more information, Russell can only offer educated speculation. He writes:
“Discovery and search are two crucial aspects of the service, which has seen its popularity grow tremendously in recent times. The service is used by all manner of Internet users, but is yet to really hit upon the right approach to provide a fully engaging and personal discovery experience.
“Business Insider suggested that the company is pursuing a direction that will see it compete with social aggregation app Flipboard. . . . Twitter’s last significant focus on discovery saw it introduce the ‘Discovery’ tab late last year, in a move aimed at helping to find and better curate content on the service, in a Flipboard-like fashion.”
Is the Flipboard theory correct? Or does Twitter have something entirely different up its sleeve? We should find out soon.
Cynthia Murrell, July 9, 2012
Sponsored by PolySpot
To Turn Back the Tweets of Time
June 19, 2012
You just can’t turn back the tweets of time, at least not too far back. They’ve been going for the top spot in spontaneous micro blogging, but to the dismay of its 140 million users Twitter has issues. For a social site that was designed for speed updates, it works. Your nightmare begins if you dare try to look into the past beyond a few days according; Topsy knows what you did on Twitter last year.
Ironically, Topsy Labs has a database of tweets including links going back to 2008, however Twitter does not provide this service and:
“Why doesn’t Twitter, which has all this data in the first place, already offer its own archive search? The San Francisco-based company’s answer each time people have asked, including my most recent query on Wednesday, has been “we’re working on it.”
“I would suggest that before it embarks on yet another site redesign, it tackle this issue. We’re not far from it being impossible to write a memoir or biography of the average public figure without looking over what they tweeted.”
Twitter currently has over 400 million tweets hitting the internet daily. They are donating their database to the Library of Congress in the name of scientific research. Perhaps they can work out the problems that Twitter’s countless updates could not. For now there will be no turning back the tweets of time on Twitter itself, but Topsy has them.
Jennifer Shockley, June 19, 2012
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