Twitter changes presidential election conversations

Twitter has a significant role in shaping the political narrative and deciding the winners and losers of the U.S. presidential debates, according to Stephen Mills opined this week for the Guardian. 

Mills contends we are in “the era of Twitter,” with the last era of blogging going away. According to a reporter for the technology site Pandodaily, Hamish McKenzie, political blogs have gone from being the "first and fast reactors" to being "almost obsolete by Twitter."

Even media baron Rupert Murdoch seems to have plunged into Twitter to show what he thinks about the upcoming U.S. presidential election, Silicon Beat reported.

The Democratic National Convention (DNC) on Sept. 6 saw record-high tweets per minute, with the climax after President Barack Obama’s acceptance speech. 

The whole night’s event had about four million tweets. More than 9.5 million tweets were sent about the DNC during the entire DNC. The peak came at 52,756 tweets per minute following Obama’s speech, which set a new record for a political event, according to Silicon Republic. 

In August, Twitter's government and politics team announced the launch of the Twitter Political Index, a new barometer of what the public is thinking and tweeting about Obama and Governor Mitt Romney, Inc. reported. 

The Index is designed to evaluate and weigh the attitudes of tweets mentioning Obama or Romney, whether positive or negative. For example, a score of 65 for a candidate indicates that tweets are on average more positive than 65 percent of all tweets. The resulting index scores indicate how positive they are being mentioned relative to all tweets.

The Index for each candidate updates every day after 8 p.m. with a historical chart at election.twitter.com. 

The index aims to provide more nuance to political coverage, illustrating instances in which the social media conversation diverges from more traditional polls, Inc. noted.

Image: Twitter

Facebook hits one billion active monthly user mark

Facebook has hit one billion active monthly users, or one in every seven people in the world, its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, has confirmed. Facebook also used the milestone to launch a digital video ad titled "The Things that Connect Us,"  to promote its own advertising tools.

"Helping a billion people connect is amazing, humbling and by far the thing I am most proud of in my life," wrote Zuckerberg in a Facebook timeline update on his personal account. "I am committed to working every day to make Facebook better for you, and hopefully together one day we will be able to connect the rest of the world too."

Facebook has recorded 1.13 trillion Likes, 140.3 billion friend connections and 219 billion shared photos since its launch in February 2004. More than 300 million photos are uploaded every day and 62.6 million songs played, according to the Guardian. 

At the same time, rumours are circulating that Facebook makes public users’ private messages in Timeline, sparkling concerns of privacy issues, The Washington Post reported.

Facebook explained that the Timeline messages were actually old wall posts.

“Every report we’ve seen, we’ve gone back and checked. We haven’t seen one report that’s been confirmed [of a private message being exposed]. A lot of the confusion is because before 2009 there were no likes and no comments on wall posts. People went back and forth with wall posts instead of having a conversation [in the comments of single wall post],” TechCrunch cited Facebook as saying.

The world's biggest social network recently launched paid posts for individual users, allowing users to pay about $7 to promote their news in their friends' timelines.

Facebook’s tumbling IPO means it has to work harder, with smarter, more targeted and more lucrative advertisements, according to The Washington Post.


Image: Facebook

Realtime brings trending links in real time

URL shortener bitly launched last Friday a new search engine for the most trending bit.ly links, called Realtime, TechCrunch reported.

Realtime, or simply "rt.ly," is "an attention ranking engine, offering the power to navigate through the stories that the world is paying attention to right now," as described in an official statement by bitly. In other words, Realtime enables users to know, at any given time, what's most discussed on Internet.

Realtime aggregates all the bit.ly links shared by users around the world, while also paying attention to how many users have clicked on those links. Users can also filter the results by keywords, topics, countries, languages, and the social network or website on which it appeared.

However, the results will depend on how frequent the users themselves use bit.ly links. Also, since most popular social networks (Google, Facebook and Twitter) are using their own URL shortening services (goog.gl, fb.me and t.co.), results on Realtime can be limited too, as Sean Hollister wrote for The Verge.

Bit.ly already launched a social search engine for its enterprise customers last October, TechCrunch reported.

At the moment, Realtime has free beta service and can be applied through an invitation.
However, this blogger went to its website, registered and got access immediately.

Image: seetio.com

Highlight: The app making users comfortable with strangers

The popular app Highlight released its latest version Thursday. It is going to dominate and surprise everybody in this year’s SXSW music, film and interactive media festival in Austin, Texas.

Highlight is a part of new category of apps called “ambient social networking,” Businessweek reported. Its main feature: making users more familiar with their environment, especially the people around them.

The new genre of people discovery services is right around the corner, Highlight's creator, Paul Davison, told Businessweek.

“I’m completely convinced that in five or 10 years you’ll be able to walk into a room and know everyone’s name, where everyone works, and what people you know in common,” he said.

For example, when logging into your Facebook account and activating the GPS, you can see who is in the same area with you, including people you don't know. Using Highlight, you can view things they want to share via the app, such as their backgrounds or habits.

For some, Highlight makes the dream come true - they can know more about others around while jogging in the park, at parties, or at conferences without the embarrassing “I can’t remember his name” moment. The new version of Highlight also gives users a way of “Hightlighting” people; press the “Highlight” button on the person you are interested in, which is a way to publicly bookmark people.

But Highlight isn't a relationship builder; it's an information provider, Davison said in a separate interview.

“There’s no friend model, there’s no way to remember people, there’s no social currency, and that’s really weird for a social app,” he told VentureBeat. “But it makes sense because it’s not an app to stay in touch with each other.”

Highlight is still only available for iOS, and has been known to drain batteries. However, users can pause the app to save battery power or to halt the app when they are getting too many notifications. "This one is going to be a hit at South by Southwest this weekend,” Eric Eldon wrote for TechCrunch.

Image: Highlight

Storify, or how to do social storytelling

The Internet has long been a source of information overload, and companies that help sort that information bring almost as much value as the information itself. Enter Storify, which aims to do just that, but with a social twist.

The online storytelling platform enables users to create stories by combining content that is already published in different social media networks.

Beginning Feb. 22, the Storify app became available on the iPad, making the drag-and-drop system easier. However, the system is limited and has some bugs that need to be worked out, a review by Appolicious stated. Users are also unable to browse stories on the Storify system unless they use the in-app browser, which crashed a lot, stripped content or added it multiple times, according to the review.

Storify was created as a place to embed feeds for all types of social media. Starting with a blank page, users can then embed tweets, Facebook updates, Instagram and Flickr photos, YouTube videos, or any other link related to the story, along with their own words. Storify also helps them do a Google search right away. Aiming to be an all-in-one tool, Storify's sorting technique means all the content can be found on a single web page.

It is a handy way to narrate stories in real time, without even having "to go outside" to catch the information. In other words, Storify helps users to put information in order and develop a contextualised and coherent story, rtve.es explains. Users can also check out the featured topics on the front page to see which are the top stories from social media, Mashable noted.

Storify's public beta was launched in late April 2011. Prior to that date it was mainly used by professional journalists and major news organisations.