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Social Tuesday: New Twitter Media Feature & CardStar Adds Foursquare Support

Talor Berthelson — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 20:15:23 +0000

In the social world today there are always plenty of news stories about the services people use to connect with each other, whether it’s Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, Flickr or any other platform of limitless possibilities. Today, we have Twitter testing a new functionality of the timeline including in-line pictures and videos and CardStar adding Foursquare integration into its iPhone app.

Twitter Testing Tweet Media Function

A mysterious new feature has popped up in a few users’ twitter accounts called “Tweet Media” which suggests that they are integrating videos and pictures into the timeline. The function, being sent to a test set of users at the moment, simply asks you if you’d like to view photos and videos from everyone. The description reads:

“By default, you’ll only see images and videos shared by people you’re following, and reveal those by people you’re not. Check this box to see media from everyone on Twitter.”

Despite having the option, the setting appears to currently have no function. Pictures and videos look the same after enabling the option. Twitter confirmed the feature:

“We’re constantly exploring features and settings. What you saw was a small test of a potential consumption setting for inline media. We show inline media on our own iPhone and Android apps.”

CardStar Adds FourSquare Integration

CardStar, known for being an excellent alternative to carrying around rewards cards from just about every store. Today, the service has added Foursquare integration to the iPhone app. When scanning a card from a store on CardStar, there will now be an option to check-in to Foursquare at the same time.

The idea is to eliminate the need for CardStar users to have to launch Foursquare separately and will center engagement for CardStar. “The typical CardStar user already launches the app at point-of-sale in retail locations, airports, gyms and libraries. The CardStar integration with Foursquare was the next logical step to deliver a more cohesive mobile experience,” says CEO Andy Miller.

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Twitter Publishing Shopping Deals Through Advertising Account?

Art Green — Sun, 04 Jul 2010 22:15:34 +0000

There have been a number of questions as to how Twitter might be able to monetize the monstrous user base it has. It has looked at a number of solutions, but this might be the best one yet: Setting up what are essentially advertising accounts that broadcast various shopping deals.

It current has an @earlybird account, where it appears they will publishing the shopping deals. The tweets are currently protected. You can send a request to be able to follow them, but as of press time I have not been accepted.

According to Carolyn Penner, a communications worker at Twitter, told ReadWriteWeb the following about the @earlybird account: “There are interesting things in store for @earlybird. Keep waking up early and you might be the first to find out what they are.”

Intriguing, eh?

Honestly, this is an ingenious way for people to essentially be advertised to through Twitter. People might not like an actually advertisement plastered on their screen about 20 percent off this or that, but if they’ve signed up for it and it’s simply another tweet in their list–it’s fine. I know I have no problem with following Amazon’s music Twitter, because they have good deals and I’m interested in them. This is simply targeted marketing in a new, innovative form.

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New Futurama Takes Aim at iPhone, Twitter

Art Green — Sun, 04 Jul 2010 18:00:53 +0000

Futurama is a former FOX animation comedy that has been resurrected on Comedy Central, and it hasn’t wasted anytime to offer up some topical jokes in its new season. In particular, the show takes aim at the iPhone and Twitter:

Futurama

Thursdays 10pm / 9c

The Twit Worm

www.comedycentral.com

Futurama New Episodes

It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia

You can watch the iPhone clip over at Engadget, where it shows Fry and the gang looking zombie-like in line for the “eyePhone” and being told that it is $500, can’t hold a charge or get good reception and can’t choose a carrier with it. Good stuff!

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How Twitter Responded to the iPhone 4 Launch

Talor Berthelson — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 20:45:24 +0000

Yes, we know sales of the iPhone 4 are spectacular with the 1.7 Million sold figure being tossed around for just the first 3 days since launch and that lines just to get one in your hands extended for up to 14 hours. How did Twitter respond, however? Mashable gathered a ton of data about the launch and I have summarized it for you.

On the simple term “iPhone”, since January 2009 the term has risen in popularity greatly with a few spikes thrown in for good measure. A spike on June 17, 2009 noted the release of iPhone OS 3.0 and June 7, 2010 the day of the iPhone 4 announcement.

While no data on the day of the iPhone 4 launch is available, we do have some hourly statistics for June 24th. About 55,500 tweets were sent on average per hour containing the word “iPhone” which approximates that around 1.3 million iPhone tweets were sent that day.

Opinion of the iPhone can also be factored in, and there were definitely more iPhone tweets that were negative rather than positive. On June 21st, 4 days before the iPhone 4 released, about 25% of all iPhone tweets were deemed negative. However, on the day of release on June 24th, about 28% of iPhone tweets were negative. What exactly these negative tweets were saying is unknown so it’s difficult to determine what people were complaining about.

Lastly, AT&T remained negative all through-out the Twitter verse with 35% of all tweets being negative towards them.

If you have a new iPhone 4, tell us what you think! We’d love to hear it.

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New York Times Editor Rages Against “Tweets”

Art Green — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 19:15:09 +0000

According to a MediaBistro report, one New York Times editor isn’t pleased with his staffers using the word “tweet”. Phil Corbett, the paper’s standards editor released the following memo to staffers:

Some social-media fans may disagree, but outside of ornithological contexts, “tweet” has not yet achieved the status of standard English. And standard English is what we should use in news articles.
Except for special effect, we try to avoid colloquialisms, neologisms, and jargon. And “tweet” — as a noun or a verb, referring to messages on Twitter — is all three. Yet it has appeared 18 times in articles in the past month, in a range of sections.

Of course, new technology terms sprout and spread faster than ever. And we don’t want to seem Paleolithic. But we favor established usage and ordinary words over the latest jargon or buzzwords.
One test is to ask yourself whether people outside of a target group regularly employ the terms in question. Many people use Twitter, but many don’t; my guess is that few in the latter group routinely refer to “tweets” or “tweeting.” Someday, “tweet” may be as common as “e-mail.” Or another service may elbow Twitter aside next year, and “tweet” may fade into oblivion. (Of course, it doesn’t help that the word itself seems so inherently silly.)

“Tweet” may be acceptable occasionally for special effect. But let’s look for deft, English alternatives: use Twitter, post to or on Twitter, write on Twitter, a Twitter message, a Twitter update. Or, once you’ve established that Twitter is the medium, simply use “say” or “write.”

Coming from a journalism background myself, I can understand Corbett’s need for stringent standards and consistency in how they present information to the public. Having said that–come on. Twitter is an established social media network with tens of millions of users and global name recognition. Even if people don’t completely understand it or like it, they’ve likely heard about it and know what a “tweet” is. Or, at the very least, can glean from something being quoted that this person said or wrote the statement.

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Grab a Hello Kitty Skin For iPhone Twitter App

Art Green — Sat, 05 Jun 2010 22:30:38 +0000

If you’re a big fan of the cartoonish and cute Hello Kitty and also a big fan of sending out tweets, you’re going to have to sit down and take a breath. There is a Hello Kitty Twitter client available for download in the App Store right now–all for the low price of $3.99.

According to Mashable, while the skin is definitely a novelty (especially for the price), it’s apparently a very serviceable Twitter application.

From the article:

In addition to being able to upload videos and pictures and shorten hyperlinks, Hello Kitty on Tappit lets you embed what are called “deco-images.” These images are basically little animated icons that can be viewed natively in any Tappit Twitter client or via a hyperlink for users of other Twitter clients. 40 of these deco-images are available in the app.

In addition to those features, the Hello Kitty application also gives you four different skins for you to choose from. The one flaw to keep in mind, according to the report, is that the pink text cannot be changed and is slightly hard to read.

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We Rule Brings FarmVille Goodness to the iPad, iPhone

Talor Berthelson — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 17:00:52 +0000

MediaBistro likes to compare We Rule to Twitter in that it is sticky and addictive, but occasionally unreliable. They also compared it to Facebook by stating that the rules often change without warning which is much like Facebook and its recent and ongoing privacy debacle. The good news is that We Rule is likely without any sort of fail whale.

We Rule is much like FarmVille in that you just simply plant different crops that grow over extended periods of time and then it’s up to you to harvest them to make money and experience. Collect enough experience and you level up, money is used to buy better and more expensive crops. While all of these are certainly familiar to anyone who’s spent more than 10 minutes with Zynga’s hit Facebook game, the comparisons are mainly in the addiction department. Both games are light on actual gameplay but offer incentive to keep coming back and playing every day.

With We Rule available for the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch for the cool price of free, you too can own your own kingdom of awesomeness.

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LG Ally’s Socialite Android App Combines Twitter and Facebook

Talor Berthelson — Mon, 31 May 2010 20:30:47 +0000

Earlier this month, LG launched the Ally phone with Android 2.1. The phone sports a fast processor, a custom UI and an app called “Socialite” designed for the avid Facebook and Twitter fan.

Droid-Life found the most interesting part of the app: You can install it on any Android phone that runs 2.1 or higher. They tested the app on a Motorola Droid and Droid Incredible and had no issues. The exciting part is that this app is more robust than the stock Facebook app, making it a very welcome addition.

If you’d like to install it for yourself, the instructions are:

Download: Socialite.apk

1. Download Socialite from your phone, or transfer it to the SD card.
2. Once it finishes, tap on it to install.
3. Done!

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OneRiot Offers a Deeper Look at Trending Topics

Brandy Shaul — Mon, 10 May 2010 19:00:12 +0000

Anyone who’s used Twitter will be familiar with the concept of Trending Topics – those hash-tags and phrases that appear on the right side of the screen, letting you know that, for one reason or another, they’re what’s popular in the world of Twitter at any one point in time.

OneRiot, a real-time search engine, likes the idea of offering trending topics to users, but they first explained the need for a new system by examining the flaws with Twitter’s. According to the official OneRiot blog, Twitter’s trending topics setup fails due to three main reasons:

A Trending Topics set that rarely deviates from a list of mass-culture popular phrases (aka the Justin Bieber effect)

A list that’s skewed by the particular demographics of a single service (aka the Apple fan Boy effect)

A list that is lagging behind what people are really interested in right now. This is especially true if a list is created based on search query volume. In the main, search query volume will spike because people already know about the topic.

The OneRiot Trending Topics Engine is set to change all of that, by analyzing user data from not only Twitter, but MySpace, Facebook statuses, Digg, and its own toolbar. Using “natural language processing techniques,” the system will pick out words or phrases that are appearing in mass amounts, and will remove the spam and adult content from these potential trending topics before working with them further.

Terms can be grouped into like categories, in the case of a natural disaster or political event, as examples. In the case of the January earthquakes in Haiti, the terms “Haiti” and “earthquake” would’ve been combined, to create a more all-encompassing topic.

As OneRiot says, the system creates a sort of central hub of one particular topic, and then creates a web surrounding it of all things that are important and related. In the case of the recent “Gizmodo iPhone leak” story, the terms “Gizmodo” and “iPhone” appear in the central hub, while stories concerning the police raids, and general searches for terms like “iPhone prototype” would appear as tendrils branching out from this center.

Using this new system, OneRiot’s partners will receive different trending topics based on their own particular needs, and users will be able to see just why a particular topic is trending, rather than just learning that it is.

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Facebook Traffic Up 69%, Twitter Up 45%

Talor Berthelson — Fri, 07 May 2010 22:00:29 +0000

Social networking in general grew 100% last year in a report from media data service Nielsen. Facebook and Twitter are still leading the pack with each gaining enormous amounts of users and internet traffic over the past year.

Facebook saw the largest growth with 69% which could largely be attributed to the launching of several games along with the ability to connect with just about anyone. Twitter also saw an increase of 45%.

Not everyone was so lucky as these two giants however, as once social king MySpace lost 24.6% worth of internet traffic. 4-5 years ago, this drop would have seemed crazy to most as MySpace once ruled the social world before Twitter and Facebook became the prominent players they are today.

To stay up to date on the latest news and information about social networking, Follow us on Twitter or Like us on Facebook.

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