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"Everybody's on Twitter !" You hear that more and more often as Twitter gains adherents. Why, even the dead and the fictional (and the fictional dead ) are on Twitter. Not to mention celebrities. (Let's not.) Despite having over 100 million registered users, it's still small beer compared to other services. Facebook, for instance, has over 400 million. What's surprising are the ways people, companies and organizations find to use the service. And who those folks are. Here are five Twitter accounts you might find surprising. Sponsor Library of Congress . Although the LoC has upwards of 53,000 followers, they themselves only follow one. The Law Library of Congress . They have books down pat. Not sure about electronic communications.However, as ReadWriteWeb reported earlier today, they've acquired the entire Twitter archive, so maybe they'll pick up a thing or two. Federal Bureau of Investigation . Not too surprising that it's the Press Office that's Twittering. Fox Mulder might be off-putting to some, though possibly not as much as J. Edgar Hoover. At least these folks follow, although only a tenth as much as they are followed. NASA . Lori Garver, deputy director of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Twitters. And she does it right, mixing NASA news, issues of interest to space buffs and personal information. Well, mostly right. Honestly, Lori, there's no one worth following but for two other NASA Twitter accounts? NASA as an organization Twitters its brains out. The Tower Bridge . Inanimate objects Twittering is non-hilarious. This account, for a busy draw bridge in olde Londone towne seems on the level. However, it makes up for the unexpectedness of the account by the sheer almost operatic boredom of its Tweets. To wit: "I am closing after the Maintenance lift has passed upstream." We can tell from the few accounts it's following that the bridge has a real telescope fetish, though. Unseemly. Ivy Bean . Ivy has one unusual quality that makes her an unexpected Twitterer to most. She's 104. Yes, years old. Participation of the elderly in social media communications is not that unusual. The young and the old are less fearless than the middle aged in experimenting with different ways to communicate. But 104. Holy Toledo. Some have suggested Ivy's account was originally set up by journalists seeking "Digg bait." Who cares? Ivy rocks the keyboard a year after her "story" was first reported. I hope I'm 104 when I'm her age. For more, check out ReadWriteWeb's Twitter coverage . Of course, there's always @rww . Discuss
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5 Unexpected Twitterers
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The U.S. Library of Congress announced this morning via its official Twitter account that it will be acquiring the entire archive of Twitter messages back through March 2006. In addition to a massive printed collection, the Library already has an extensive collection of other digital assets. The Library of Congress is the biggest library in the world. The Library does extensive work with data format standards , the semantic Web and other platforms for outside analysis. The addition of Twitter into the organization's offerings could foster an enormous amount of academic research. From a new kind of historical record to an unprecedented opportunity for discovering patterns of social interaction, this is big. Sponsor When the Library of Congress was founded in the year 1800, publishing was very expensive and relatively few people did it. Today, thanks to blogs, YouTube, Facebook and certainly Twitter it's a new world. Publishing is far faster, easier and more accessible today than at any point in human history. That might seem obvious, but on a day like today it's worth thinking about some more. For now there are more questions than answers with regards to this Library of Congress Twitter news. Will the archive include friend/follower connection data? Will it be usable for commercial purposes? Will there be a Web interface for searching it, and will that change the face of Twitter search for good? Is there any way that the much larger archive of Facebook data could be submitted to the same body for analysis of the same kind? These kinds of large data sets are poised to become one of the most important resources the Internet creates. As Kenneth Cukier wrote in The Economist's recent Special Report on Big Data , "Data are becoming the new raw material of business: an economic input almost on a par with capital and labour." The Library's blogger Matt Raymond put it like this in the blog post about the announcement : Expect to see an emphasis on the scholarly and research implications of the acquisition. I'm no Ph.D., but it boggles my mind to think what we might be able to learn about ourselves and the world around us from this wealth of data. And I'm certain we'll learn things that none of us now can even possibly conceive. Nate Anderson at ArsTechnica offers this context: There's been a turn toward historicism in academic circles over the last few decades, a turn that emphasizes not just official histories and novels but the diaries of women who never wrote for publication, or the oral histories of soldiers from the Civil War, or the letters written by a sawmill owner. The idea is to better understand the context of a time and place, to understand the way that all kinds of people thought and lived, and to get away from an older scholarship that privileged the productions of (usually) elite males. Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said today that there are 105 million registered users on the service. How will those users feel about their tweets being archived for posterity? Will non-U.S. users be included (it is a U.S. based company) and object? Lots of questions remain. There's no word from Twitter itself about this news but we expect details to become public during the Chirp developers conference starting in just a few minutes. Update: Twitter HQ just told us that a blog post about this news is forthcoming. It's hard to imagine a more significant milepost in social media's early march toward becoming an essential component of our social experience. Discuss
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Twitter's Entire Archive Headed to the Library of Congress
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As Google has worked to add more and more real-time search capabilities by adding content from sites like Facebook, MySpace, Buzz and Twitter, we've been able to see more and more what people are talking about online. Google's latest feature that it is announcing today takes real-time data and puts it into a perspective we can work with - the past. Sponsor Rather than letting all of this real-time data simply stream past and evaporate into thin air, Google is rolling out a "replay" feature, that lets you look at real-time data, in this case tweets, at any specific time in the past. The feature offers a timeline of tweets, showing the volume of tweets containing relevant search terms, broken down according to scale. After playing with it for a few minutes, we were able to see that it even gets as narrow as a minute by minute breakdown of tweets on a topic. It will be available by clicking on "Show Options" on the left side of your screen and then "Updates". For now, Google says that it will offer tweets going back to February 11, 2010 but will soon extend back to March 21, 2006. The company says that the feature is currently rolling out and should be available globally in English within the next few days, but you can give it a whirl before then. As Google points out, the "replay" feature may be a great way to explore " how the news broke about health care legislation in Congress, what people were saying about Justice Paul Stevens' retirement or what people were tweeting during your own marathon run? These are the kinds of things you can explore with the new updates mode." We're looking forward to seeing what this sort of interaction with real-time data, in the aggregate, will bring to the table. It might not only be an invaluable reporting tool, but a great way to find out when a local restaurant is at its busiest. Discuss
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Google's Twitter Timeline Lets You Explore the Past
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Reporters Without Borders released its annual report [ PDF ] on online access today. They call it Enemies of the Internet, and it shows a world where online censorship, intimidation and worse is increasing. It's not surprising that as access to the Internet expands, more and more dictators and tyrants will try to suppress it. But what's troubling about this year's report is the inclusion of two democratic countries: Australia and South Korea. Sponsor Both countries were included in the report's Under Surveillance list - a sub group of the main Enemies list. Australia's proposed online filtering system is something RWB says it has "never before seen in a democracy." Additionally, in the state of South Australia it's now against the law to be anonymous online if it's in the context of an election. In South Korea, a new censorship law allows for five-year prison sentences for anyone found using the Internet "to disseminate false news intended to damage the public interest." The same law requires online visitors to register their real name and national ID card number when visiting sites with more than 100,000 members. Here are a handful of the worst violators of online freedom of expression on the Enemies of the Internet list: Burma Two high-ranking government officials have been sentenced to death for having e-mailed documents abroad. Net censorship is a serious matter in Burma. Massive filtering of websites and extensive slowdowns during times of unrest are daily occurrences for the country's Internet users. The legislation governing Internet use - the Electronic Act - is one of the most liberticidal laws in the world. China As its polemic with Google and the United States on the Internet's future unfolds, China continues to intensify Web censorship, faced with an increasingly forceful online community.The much-vaunted promises made by organizers at the open ceremonies of the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games have proven to be mere illusions for the world's biggest netizen prison. Expanded dissemination of propaganda, generalized surveillance and crackdowns on Charter 08 signatories are commonplace on what has become the Chinese Intranet - with significant consequences for trade. Egypt More than a mere virtual communications tool, the Egyptian Internet has become a mobilization and dissension platform. Although website blocking remains limited, authorities are striving to regain control over bloggers who are more and more organized, despite all the harassment and arrests. Iran Iran, one of cyber-censorship's record-holding countries, has stepped up its crackdown and online surveillance since the protests over the disputed presidential reelection of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on June 12, 2009. The regime is demonizing the new media, which it is accusing of serving foreign interest.While a dozen netizens are serving out their terms in Evin Prison, bold Internet users are continuing to mobilize. Saudi Arabia An emerging bloggers' community is up against harsh censorship. These bloggers are confronting the traditional forces of Saudi society, which are attempting to prevent the Internet from becoming a forum for free discussions. Saudi Arabia is one of the first countries to have been authorized to write Internet domain names in Arabic.The Internet penetration rate, currently estimated at about 38% of the population, is rising. How- ever, it is still one of the most repressive countries with regard to the Internet. Syria Syria is reinforcing its censorship of troublesome topics on the Web and tracking netizens who dare to express themselves freely on it. As a result, social networks have been particularly targeted by omnipresent surveillance. The promised technological improvements are slow to materialize. The authorities' distrust of the potential for dissident online mobilization may be playing a role in this delay. Vietnam The progress made by Vietnam in the domain of human rights, which allowed the country to become a member of the World Trade Organization in 2007, is nothing but a distant memory. As the 2011 Communist Party Congress draws nearer, the regime is muffling dissident views on the Internet, and its first target is critics of the country's policy toward China. Discuss
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'Enemies of the Internet': Not Just For Dictators Anymore
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It seems like in the past few months Google has relentlessly released new applications, some of which perhaps could have used some more baking in the oven before they were unleashed on the general public. To some it's becoming a tiresome exercise simply to try to keep up with everything that Google is doing week in and week out. But there is a method to the madness, and it has a lot more to do with Google's bottom line than you may think. We all know that the way the search engine giant makes money is through advertising - over $23 billion in 2009 - but what may surprise you is that its advertising-based revenue comes almost exclusively from sites that are owned by Google. Sponsor Guest author Daniel Cawrey is a freelance writer and tech enthusiast, among other things. You can check out his latest musings in blog form at thechromesource , where he writes about Chrome browser, Chrome OS and just plain Google in general. Take a look at this graph from the Silicon Valley Insider that depicts the location of advertising and the dollars associated with it: Ever increasingly, Google is relying on itself to make money through its own real estate - places where it can position the ads that advertisers purchase. This is a concern for publishers that rely on Google for revenue through Adsense because there has to be a point at which this is no longer a profitable exercise for the company. If it reaches that point, Google will essentially be subsidizing publishers. And it may not have a choice but to keep doing so. Because without fresh content creation, what is there for users to search for on the Internet that is of value? The main tenet of the search business is to provide quality results, and while that may be the case now, if publisher's Adsense revenues were affected, one can wonder what kind of effect that would have on content. So although Google may have made some mistakes with applications like Buzz, along with the half-hearted emergence and now slow death of features like Gears, expect them to continue to increasing space for content to grow, even if that means one of several strategies: Become an ISP An experimental program has been announced whereby Google will provide gigabit service via fiber directly to homes in select markets. Interested municipalities and community organizations are encouraged to submit a proposal for this right . At the World Mobile Congress, CEO Eric Schmidt talked about the goal of this program being purely experimental, which means showing infrastructure operators such as cable companies that this is possible, rather than Google becoming a full fledged ISP. But once the fiber has been rolled out, it doesn't roll back in, does it? How long does the "experiment" last? Trounce the Competition in the Browser Wars Google's Chrome browser is getting a lucky break over the next few weeks. That's because Windows users in Europe who use Internet Explorer will be getting an update to their machines notifying them about browser choices that they have . This is in response to the European Union's ruling that Microsoft's practice of bundling Internet Explorer with Windows restricts competition. While the update offers many browser choices, the result will be a boost to market share for Chrome. It has steadily grown in popularity and already has roughly 5% of the market since emerging in 2008. Offer Computing Architecture to Device Manufacturers Completely Free We've seen this already with Android, and it appears that the no-cost operating system has basically saved Motorola from a fall to obscurity with its release of the Droid. Expect to see more of these developments as 2010 unfolds with Chrome OS attempting to break into not only the netbook market, but also tablets and smartbooks, which fill the gap between a high end mobile phone and a netbook. So when you hear these new announcements of applications and services that Google rolls out, think of content. Think of how they can better deliver information to users. They want it to be as easy and as seamless as possible. While sometimes these initiatives don't always work out, they aren't going to stop trying. Discuss
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Why Google Releases New Apps: They're Desperate for Content
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