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Blackberry smartphone maker Research in Motion (RIM) has just launched a public beta testing site called the Blackberry Beta Zone . Here users can sign up to test pre-lease versions of official RIM products and services and provide feedback to the developers. At launch time, the available downloads include OS 5.0 for the BlackBerry Curve 8520 and 8530, an updated version of BlackBerry Messenger (5.0.1) and, for select corporate testers, Blackberry Enterprise Server 5.0.2. But what looks most intriguing, though, is the banner image gracing the new site's homepage. It clearly shows a phone running the upcoming official Twitter application for Blackberry. Sponsor Blackberry's Official Twitter App The official Blackberry Twitter application has been in a closed beta for over a month. From early reports , the app is shaping up well, and will include a number of features that rival (or top) those found in the current crop of third-party Blackberry Twitter apps. Features such as URL-shortening, photo-sharing, push messages, message list integration and filtered search by geo-location are among the app's included features. More recently, a leak posted on a Polish-language blog hinted at other improvements, such as the ability to edit profiles, support for Twitter lists and, on devices running OS 6.0, some sort of Twitter/Blackberry contact sync, integration with the Configuration Wizard and integration with universal search. Although RIM makes no mention of the Twitter app on the blog post announcing the Beta Zone, there's no doubt that as soon as the app becomes available for public beta tests, this will be the first place to find it. Those who previously signed up to be notified of the Twitter application's availability for beta testing will likely be directed to this new service. Beta Users vs. App World Testers To be clear, the new Blackberry Beta Zone does not replace the previously existing BlackBerry App World Test Center . That resource is designed for both RIM and third-party applications where as the Blackberry Beta Zone is for official RIM apps only. Also, the Beta Zone will feature applications much earlier into the development cycle. After first being tested via the Beta Zone, some RIM apps will appear later in the App World Test Center.
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Wikipedia , the online user-created encyclopedia and the number six website on the Internet today, is about to get a makeover. And it's a big one. According to a blog post from the Wikimedia Foundation User Experience team detailing the changes, the upcoming Wikipedia redesign, due to launch April 5, aims to make the site easier to navigate, easier to search and, perhaps most importantly, easier to edit. Sponsor Easier is Better The upcoming design, code-named "Vector," has been in use over the past six months by a group of 500,000 beta testers. Included in the update are changes like simplified navigation, a relocated search box, clutter reduction and even an updated Wikipedia logo. Also, all English Wikipedia users will soon be able to create PDFs and printed books from Wikipedia articles, a service previously available only to logged-in users. However, the most interesting change is how Wikipedia is making the page edit functions easier. A new toolbar will be provided which lets editors more easily insert links and tables, and an included cheatsheet will help users access the most commonly used functions. These editing changes launching next month are only the beginning, notes Naoko Komura on the Wikimedia blog . Later this year, the site will see even more radical revamps to the editing process. This includes the following: Reducing the amount of wiki code users see in the edit system and making it possible to change data in tables and information boxes through simple forms. Cleaning up the edit page itself, to use more understandable language and get rid of confusing clutter. Providing a new outline tool to navigate a long article while you're editing it. Wikipedia Needs More Editors Now the question is whether or not these changes will encourage more people to actually edit the online encyclopedia because, surprisingly, few users actually do. Wikipedia is often heralded as a shining example of how there's power in the "wisdom of the crowds," a phrase that implies how a diverse collection of individuals can be more accurate than individuals or even experts. However, the dirty little secret about the supposedly "crowd-edited" online encyclopedia is that, even though anyone and everyone can edit it, few do so. In fact, only 1% of Wikipedia users are responsible for half of the site's edits . Wikipedia's founder, Jimmy Wales, has even been quoted as saying that the site is really written by a community, "a dedicated group of a few hundred volunteers." Given these statistics, it's no surprise that Wikipedia wants to make some changes. Recent reports point to slowed growth , a downward trend that may be partly to blame on the increasingly complex editing process, according to some experts. Dr. Ed H Chi, a scientist at the Palo Alto Research Center in California, told the Telegraph that the site had become a "more exclusive place", where only a handful of the most experienced editors were responsible for editing and maintaining the site. In other words, Wikipedia became a site that wasn't representing the "wisdom of the crowds" anymore, but the "wisdom of an elite group." That in, turn, may have caused the slowdown. Over the past several years, the number of new articles per day has dropped from 2,200 in July of 2007 to 1,300 today. Is It Too Late? Or Just in Time? By simplifying the editing process, Wikipedia could potentially reverse this trend -
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In continuing to look at the way that Facebook has become a driving force behind online news consumption , Heather Hopkins of Hitwise has dove into the numbers again, this time examing how Facebook users compare with others in return visits. According to Hopkins' article , Facebook not only drives a high amount of traffic, higher than Google News, but its users are far more loyal, as well. Sponsor Hopkins took a look at the data earlier this month, noting that Facebook drives three times as much traffic to broadcast than Google News, and now we find that these users are also repeat offenders. That is, they don't just visit once, they come back for more. From the Hitwise blog : Hitwise data indicate that visitors from Facebook are more loyal to News and Media websites than are visitors from Google News. In particular, among the top 5 Print Media websites in the week ending March 6, 2010, 78% of Facebook users were returning visitors compared to 67% from Google News. The figures are almost identical for Broadcast Media, with a 77% returning rate for Facebook compared to 64% for Google News. Why do we care about this metric? Because "visitors aren't as valuable if they don't come back. Advertisers and retailers need some assurance that visitors will return again and again." Hopkins notes that even visitors from Google.com, often the leading source of traffic to these sites, are outpaced by those from Facebook when it comes to return visits. But why is this? Hopkins doesn't get into the "why" behind the numbers, but we'd be willing to wager that it has something to do with a few reasons. First, content posted by peers is more likely to be compatible with an individual's world view. Second, their trust in friends as sources might lead them to return for more. Google, on the other hand, can give great results just the same as it can lead you to the most worthless pages you've imagined. It doesn't offer that one thing we can all trust - the valued opinion of a friend. It's also possible that the friend making the recommendation in the first place is a return visitor who repeatedly recommends the articles they read. Whatever the reason, the numbers tell us one thing for sure - news outlets need to focus on making sure it is as easy as possible for readers and viewers to share content on Facebook. Or, as Hopkins so succinctly puts it, "with recent Pew Research showing that Newspapers have seen ad revenue fall 26% during the year and 43% over the past three years, understanding where to find loyal readers is becoming increasingly important." Discuss
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If You Tell Them On Facebook, They Will Come...Again and Again
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A group of researchers have proven something we already expected to be the case: your Twitter follower count is somewhat of a meaningless metric when it comes to determining influence. To reach this conclusion, the researchers examined the Twitter accounts of over 54 million active users, out of some 80 million accounts crawled by their servers. They then went on to measure various statistics about these accounts, including audience size, retweet influence and mention influence. The conclusion? Those with the largest number of followers may be "popular" Twitterers, but that's not necessarily related to their influence. High follower counts don't always mean someone is being retweeted or mentioned in any meaningful ways. Sponsor The findings from this research project have been published in an research paper available here on the project's homepage . How the Data Was Analyzed The data the researchers had access to is astounding: 54,981,152 user accounts, 1,963,263,821 social (follow) links and 1,755,925,520 tweets . In order to collect this massive store of data, the researchers contacted Twitter and asked permission to crawl Twitter's service. Twitter granted them access and white-listed the IP address range for the 58 servers that were used in the data collection. In total, the crawler was able to scan 80 million Twitter accounts during the month of August 2009. Only 54+ million of those accounts were actually in-use at the time, which, in and of itself, is an interesting finding about how many people create a Twitter account and then abandon it. Only 8% of the active accounts were set to private, so they were ignored during the data analysis. The researchers also used the Twitter API to gather additional information about a user's social links and tweets. The study focused on the largest part of the Twitter network - the "single disproportionately large connected component," notes the paper, that contained 94.8% of users and 99% of all links and tweets. Within that large network of "in-use" accounts, the researchers further narrowed down the data to focus on the "active users." These users where those who had more than 10 tweets and had a valid screen name that could be retweeted by others. (Interesting - it's possible to have an account and not a screen name?) That left "only" 6,189,636 active users out of the initial 80 million to examine. To measure the influence of these 6+ million users, the researchers looked at how the entire set of the 52 million users interacted with these active users. The Three Measures of Influence After examining the data, the researchers found that the most followed individuals spanned a wide variety of public figures and news sources and included accounts like CNN, New York Times, Barack Obama, Shaquille O'Neal, Ashton Kutcher, Britney Spears and others. However, the most retweeted users tended to be content aggregation services like TwitterTips, TweetMeme, and, interestingly enough, they counted the tech blog Mashable as an aggregation service, too. Other heavily retweeted users included Guy Kawasaki, the humor site The Onion and again, The New York Times. Meanwhile, those users with the most "mentions" - not a direct retweet including the original content of someone else's tweet, but just a casual mention of their name - were celebs. These three measures of influence - followers, retweets and mentions - has surprisingly little overlap when looking at the top influentials. The top 20 lists from these three categories only had two users in common: Ashton Kutcher and Puff Daddy. The researchers also examined the ability of Twitter users to influence others. They determined that the most influential users hold significant influence over a variety of topics, as opposed to being experts in just one area. Examining the 233 "All-Time Influentials" Out of the 6 million active Twitter users, the researchers picked the top 100 users in each of the three categories. Due to the overlap, there were only 233 distinct users on these lists. These were dubbed the "all-time influentials." Some of these accounts belonged to news organizations or celebs, but others were just regular users. Regarding that last group - it appears that those users who limit their tweets to a single topic are the most likely to increase their influence scores. In the end, what the researchers found was that follower count alone is not necessarily a worthy measure of determining influence. Other factors come into play as well. Although some heavily-followed accounts are also mentioned and retweeted a lot, just looking at audience size doesn't reveal an account's ability to influence and impact the Twitter universe. According to the project's homepage, the researchers are hoping to make the data they collected available to the community at large. Before doing so, they will discuss it with Twitter in order to determine that their data sharing plan agrees with the company's policy. They plan to have an update on this situation - possibly the data itself - by May 2010. Discuss
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The Million Follower Fallacy: Audience Size Doesn't Prove Influence on Twitter
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MindTouch has developed a top 20 list of the most powerful voices in open-source, compiled using Twitter and other sources. It's a good example of how a research project can be transparent and in the process, help garner thought leadership for both the individual and the company. MindTouch Vice President of Sales Mark Fidelman wrote a blog post yesterday, discussing the project and how they came to their findings. Sponsor Our interest is in much the process as the results. This is the kind of approach that has a number of uses. It answers questions for the organization. It creates a center of intelligence for the open source community. And it serves as a useful resource for sales and marketing. It also helps show that real research can be done using a few simple tools. Most of the people on the list will be of no surprise to veterans of the open-source world. Notables include Tim O'Reilly, Chris Messina and Jonathan Schwartz. The results show the degree of amplification than the average active user. This is where you have to consider the "nuance" factor by defining what it means to be classified in such a manner. Fidelman explained the process in this way: "We first set out to determine reach by examining the number of followers and buzz an individual has on sites like Twitter and Google. We then needed to determine how much impact an individual had with their followers and subscribers. We asked questions like: How often were they retweeted? How much buzz is created around their blog posts, tweets, and other messages? How often is the individual referenced in the blogosphere? Were they cited by influential people?" To create the list, Fidelman used Twitalyzer , Klout Twittercounter , ReTweetRank and Twitter . They also used Google, Google Blog Search, and Google Trends. That's a take on the process but what about the larger meaning for MindTouch. Fidelman had this to say in response to our questions: Question: How does this project fit into your approach for building a company? Answer: "We actually view it as building an industry. The Open source industry has a lot of innovative, influential leaders but until now decision makers haven't had a guide to know where to tune in. Question: How is the process of doing the research useful? Answer: It helps mindtouch and the industry learn where to find the open source broadcasters. If the industry needs to get the word out, these individuals should be targeted first. Question: Can you provide 3 tips for people in the enterprise looking to develop information that positions the company as a thought leader? Answer: It's about building a community around your personal brand. Matt Asay excels at this. He provides useful, relevant content that's actionable. If I were to characterize it Into three dimensions: 1. Actively participate in the open source dialogue on Twitter, Google Buzz and niche open source networks. 2. Build a community around your personal brand by reaching out and networking with other bloggers, industry analysts and consumers of open source software and hardware. 3 Develop and create useful content on a personal blog or third party blog. The more actionable and useful the better. This is a big area to cover and I'm probably not doing it justice in two sentences. He adds...Perhaps a guest post on this topic will help? 
Out of the information, Fidelman looked at the larger group and created a Twitter list . MindTouch, also did a little inclusive marketing by adding a badge that people can put on their site if they are on the list. Thought leadership provides a host of important dimensions. Enterprise companies that approach the market with intelligence are usually the smartest of the group. Luckily, the tools have never been easier to use in helping filter out the information that matters most. Discuss
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Why MindTouch Posted a Top 20 List of Open-Source Leaders
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