Q 8 Blog Reviews » Twitter

Hugo Chávez to Make Terrorist Threats, er, Join Twitter

cgseo — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 04:10:00 +0000

After getting the short end of the Twitter stick, Venezuela president, Hugo Chávez, called it " terrorism ," " a battle trench" and a "current of conspiracy. "The Internet cannot be free!" he proclaimed. Since he has taken six television channels he didn't like off the air and imprisoned reporters , who knew what he would do? Well, it turns out he intends "to open his Twitter account soon to wage the battle online," according to Diosdado Cabello, Venezuela's chief telecommunications regulator. Sponsor With Venezuela's once invincible-seeming oil-economy now in the toilet and his approval rating diving below 50% perhaps El Jefe feels he has no choice. Since mass media in Venezuela is under constant threat from its strongman head of state, his opponents and critics have monopolized the microblogging platform and that platform is becoming popular. Reuters outlined its recent growth. "The microblogging site has seen an explosive rise in usage in Venezuela to more than 200,000 active accounts. With growth of over 1,000 percent in 2009, Venezuela now has one of the highest rates per capita of Twitter users in Latin America." The moment you shut people up, you no longer speak for them. This has started to dawn on some of Chávez's once-vocal partisans. It may take longer for those whose solidarity is limited to their Che t-shirts. May I suggest you Sharpie #FreeVenezuela across yours? Top photo from Open Democracy Bottom photo by Corey Harmon Discuss

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Hugo Chávez to Make Terrorist Threats, er, Join Twitter

Twitter, DMCA Take-downs & the Prior Restraint of First Amendment Speech

cgseo — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 21:58:00 +0000

Last week, the big news in DMCA takedowns was the sweeping removal of Hitler parody videos . Earlier this year, it was Google suddenly wiping out six separate music blogs . Today, it's the removal of a tweet . While this might not seem like a big deal on the surface, it leads to some much bigger questions about free speech, what content should fall under a proper DMCA take-down and whether or not the DMCA is a legal method of applying censorship by any content owner. Sponsor Here's the story as told by TechDirt: The story involves a music blogger named JP, who runs the appropriately named JP's blog . Not surprisingly, JP also has a Twitter account , where he mostly seems to post links to his blog posts. One such post was about the leak of the new album by The National. That post includes a link to Amazon where people can purchase the new album... and also a link to a download of one song (in MP3 format) from the album. According to JP's blog post on the subject, Twitter sent him a message last Thursday "in response to a DMCA take-down notice". The email, he writes, read as follows: jp917, Apr 22 03:10 pm (PDT): Hello, The following material has been removed from your account in response to a DMCA take-down notice: Tweet: http://twitter.com/jp917/statuses/12499491144 - New Post: Leaked: The National - High Violet http://jpsblog.net/2010/04/20/leaked-the-national-high-violet/ JP denies posting any link to the leaked album in his tweeted blog post, saying that he will not bother filing a counterclaim to the take-down. He also links to an article in Plagiarism Today from a year ago that alleges that Twitter's handling of DMCA take-downs and counterclaims is problematic and that "there is clearly an organization issue here and that's leading to confusion." While last weeks' take-downs of parody videos may have been "overbroad take-downs of legal content" , as the Electronic Frontier Foundation asserted, this sort take-down may go an extra step, beyond constitutionally protected First Amendment speech. With the YouTube take-downs, at least there was copyrighted content present, although it may have been used according to the law in the end. In this case, according to JP, there was neither pirated content nor a link to any DMCA-violating content. While TechDirt argues that "specifically, nothing in the tweet itself is infringing -- which means that the DMCA take-down for the tweet is bogus, and a violation of the DMCA itself", we spoke with David Sohn, senior policy council with the Center for Democracy & Technology , who said that the question might not be so cut and dry. Section 5.12D of the DMCA relates to cases involving "information location tools" and "links". "One possibility here is that Twitter has gotten a take-down notice that might not stand up as a totally valid take-down notice," said Sohn. On Sohn's advice, we asked Wendy Seltzer, founder of ChillingEffects.org , what this all meant and she explained that the burden of proof lies with the person creating the content and not the platform. All the platform, in this case Twitter, needs to know is that the complaint me be valid and that, by removing the offending content, they cover themselves legally in the eyes of the DMCA. Whether or not section 5.12 D of the DMCA actually applies doesn't really matter. The introduction to her recent paper, "Free Speech Unmoored in Copyright's Safe Harbor: Chilling Effects of the DMCA on the First Amendment" (.pdf), speaks clearly to the problem we saw when first reading this story: Each week, more blog posts are redacted, more videos deleted, and more web pages removed from Internet search results based on private claims of copyright infringement. Under the "safe harbors" of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), Internet service providers are encouraged to respond to copyright complaints with content takedowns, assuring their immunity from liability while diminishing the rights of their subscribers and users. Paradoxically, the law's shield for service providers becomes a sword against the public who depend upon these providers as platforms for speech. The problem with the current format of the DMCA, especially in the case of something like a communication platform such as Twitter, is that a DMCA take-down notice becomes an extremely effective means of silencing information for a legally mandated period of 10 days. In essence, it provides those who wish to silence a voice a quick and legal means of enacting what is called a " prior restraint ", something clearly prohibited in First Amendment law. "When non-infringing speech is taken down, not only does its poster lose an opportunity to reach an audience, the public loses the benefit of hearing that lawful speech in the marketplace of ideas," writes Seltzer in the paper. Twitter offered this response: "Twitter regularly receives DMCA takedown notices. We strive to balance the interests of our users and copyright holders by reviewing each notice. After determining whether the notice is compliant with the law, we also consider other factors such as whether the notice is abusive to our users, or fails to take fair use into consideration. You can read more about our DMCA process here: http://help.twitter.com/entries/15795-copyright-and-dmca-policy "We are always working to improve our transparency. Users are notified immediately when content has been removed from their account. In this situation, we responded to a request to remove a Tweet containing a link to download content from an unreleased album. After reexamining our decision, we believe this was the correct first step. If the affected user believes we have made a mistake or that the notice is in error, the appropriate thing for the user to do is file a counter-claim. "We believe that the reasoning of the DMCA claim and its origin should be transparent to both the affected user and other interested parties. We are working on further steps to improve access to this information." So, our next logical question here is: Since this post includes the email from Twitter, which includes that original link to a blog post that supposedly linked to infringing content, can it too be removed according to the guidelines of the DMCA? Discuss

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Twitter, DMCA Take-downs & the Prior Restraint of First Amendment Speech

TwitterClaims: Be First In The Twitter Username Land Rush

cgseo — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 20:24:59 +0000

Last week after Twitter's Chirp conference, Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land asked Twitter Co-founder Evan Williams when we would begin to see the release of inactive and deleted Twitter usernames back into the wild. The answer turns out to be soon for some and later for others, but the question remains - how will we know when that name is finally available? Well, two developers, Blake Crosley and Luke Woodard , have jumped onto this goldrush and created TwitterClaims . Sponsor According to Sullivan, Twitter is still trying to figure out the proper way to handle the situation, as some usernames have been used but have recently sat inactive, while others were swept up in mass name claims by squatters and others still have simply been abandoned. (Sullivan notes an anecdote by Williams of one person who registered more than 10,000 names in one fell swoop but has done nothing with them.) So if you've been eyeballing that perfect Twitter username, just watching it sit there and do nothing, TwitterClaims claims to have the answer. Simply enter your email address and give the site up to ten names that you're looking forward to having and the service will email you when the name becomes available. The service checks once an hour to see if the name is available and once it is, it emails you to let you know. Simple. It looks like anyone can claim a name, so once it becomes available and the notifiction is set, it's on. You'll still have to get there first, and others can be getting the same notification about that same username. Discuss

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TwitterClaims: Be First In The Twitter Username Land Rush

First Public Draft: Taking the Wraps off of OAuth 2.0

cgseo — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 09:15:00 +0000

The OAuth 2.0 draft specification is out there. The efforts the group working on the specification are paying off in the form of an IETF working group submission. One thing that is clear is that there is a natural tension in following the processes of IETF and the hyper-innovation cycle of web standards that are now powered by the growth of social media. In this world, keeping up with all the work in the community itself is feat by itself. As proven recently, even aligning the naming of standards in our small community (xAuth, XAuth) proves challenging enough. With that said, we'll share we what we've learned about this version and what work has been incorporated in it. Sponsor For those coming up to speed on the issues surrounding OAuth 2.0, here is a brief summary of the state of the union: The OAuth Working Group in IETF generated a first draft of OAuth 2.0 . This group that is credited with this document consists of active leaders of both the Twitter API team as well as Facebook community standards team. A robust number of daily discussions are happening in the working group hosted at IETF include topics such as the default use of JSON that show the opportunity and challenge of growing the standard from a web-based to a broader set of devices and scenarios. One of the stated goals of the IETF OAuth working group is to maintain backwards compatibility with OAuth 1.0. From our sampling of the depth of change in scope and conceptualization of the standard, this may be a big deal for the group, especially if key members decide to legacy their support for the first versions. As part of the evolution of OAuth, there is the case of the OAuth WRAP Google Group . This group has forged ahead to develop profiles for scenarios seen as extensions to the profile OAuth 1.0A. This includes new ways to gain tokens bringing the use cases of Javascript or RIA applications. WRAP also redefines the dependency on SSL and provides a simpler way to get started using tools easily accessible to the web resource. With some changes noted, this work has been brought forward in the OAuth 2.0 public draft. David Recordon, a chief thought leader in the open web (also employee at Facebook) recently offered this summary " What's going on with OAuth ?" to help align the understanding of the evolution of the standard. Here we show one of the better known descriptions of the OAuth flow as provided by Yahoo. The annotations show a few of the areas that are under consideration for changes in OAuth 2.0 and/or in the work done in the OAuth WRAP group. Last week, at Twitter's Chirp '10 the Twitter API team gave this presentation, " Too many secrets, but never enough: OAuth at Twitter ". This document contains overview of the basic process of Twitter, commitment to the movement to OAuth 2.0, and discussion of Twitter's xAuth and OAuth Echos projects. Twitter Likes to Optimize Twitter is deeply intertwined with the inception and direction of OAuth. The company is both involved in the specifications but also is a lightening rod for discussion in the development community. In the Twitter blogs and developer groups, OAuth is being considered deeply in the trade-offs in implementation, design, and risk in the Twitter ecosystem. A few areas under discussion is how to remove the re-direction from the process, and also how to keep a running log of all account client accesses available to the user as a way to make sure users are aware and signaling proper account use. The Twitter API team has been willing to make change happen in the community by deprecating legacy processes, such as basic auth. With the changes coming in OAuth 2.0 the company may be in the best position to bootstrap developer adoption of the new standards. In this way, OAuth 2.0 need to adapt to the speed and need of the Twitter use cases, to avoid becoming like XML. XML is a good thing, of course, but when push comes to shove, JSON is lighter weight and more compact. This is helping it become the preference for data attribute exchange in APIs like Twitters that support OAuth. With the rise of the social ecosystem as the hub for authorization, it is becoming clear that the IETF efforts need Twitter as much as Twitter needs the IETF. This seems like a good balance that will guide use cases along the way to practical standards formalization. There are a lot of questions out there about OAuth 2.0. Top of mind is whether this technology release will see the effective join of Twitter, Facebook, and Google? Or, will the practical matters of business and strategy keep the standards intact, and the implementations as islands? What is your prediction for OAuth 2.0 and web resource authorization? Discuss

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First Public Draft: Taking the Wraps off of OAuth 2.0

What Twitter Annotations Mean

cgseo — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 01:42:30 +0000

I love to sit on the beach. One of the coolest things about the beach is the number of layers of visual depth. Look at the sand and it's beautiful, but zoom your eyes in closer and you'll see a whole layer of life running around on the sand that you didn't see before. Look even closer and you can see individual grains of sand, water and light dancing between them. Look closer still and you see that each grain of sand is a unique object with its own texture. If your eyes are strong enough, or you have a machine to help you, you can see even more layers by looking closer still. That's what Twitter is going to be like with the launch of Twitter Annotations this Summer. It's a beautiful vision, with huge potential, but there's another way to look at this analogy: you don't build on the beach sand because it shifts too much. Will Annotations live up to its incredible promise? Sponsor What Annotations Are Last week Twitter announced a forthcoming feature called Twitter Annotations: it's a system for almost any metadata to be connected to any Twitter message when it's published. Inside every Tweet is now a space where you could put or find anything, including links out to further instructions or larger bodies of information. That's always been the case with the 140 characters of content - but now we're talking about systematic metadata intended for machines, to augment the content. The idea is dripping with potential, but also some risk. Isn't much of life's meaning found in the play between limits and the infinite? Twitter has been considering adding Annotations for at least two years, according to Platform Team member Raffi Krikorian. That's a relatively large portion of the company's young life. Every time a new bit of metadata was added to Tweets, like geolocation information was last Fall, the company would ask itself "should we be doing this, or should we just open up the platform for and and all metadata?" Now the company has decided to do just that. Twitter publishing tools can now add a description to any tweet their users publish, not as a part of the 140 character message, but as a small machine-readable metadata field that travels along with the content. What might this look like? We could see Annotations fields like: Link to a media file, like podcast enclosures, photos linked to, etc. Context about the Tweet like where was the author when it was published, maybe what the weather was like there at the time. Your Twitter publishing interface could offer you a special option to write reviews of movies, books, or links you're sharing. The ISBN of the book, a link to a preview of the movie and the number of stars in your rating could be included in the Tweet Annotations. Any way you can classify, describe, append or otherwise enrich a Tweet with words or numbers can be included in Annotations. You Tweet, you attach a characteristic or quality, you define the characteristic and then you provide a value of how or what that Tweet did relative to the quality being referenced. Twitter clients like Seesmic, Tweetdeck and more will make it easy for users to add these annotations. Yes, this is meaningful in large part because of the 140 character limit on Twitter messages themselves, but isn't much of life's meaning found in the play between limits and the infinite? From Annotations Come Analysis Annotating a single Tweet is uninteresting, it's when you hit the Twitter databases and gather together all the Tweets that share a characteristic that thinks get exciting. When those selected Tweets can then be cross-referenced with other sets of data from outside Twitter - that's when the word fecund starts feeling inadequate. Show me all the Tweets from my friends that have links to music and play me those songs. Twitter clients like Seesmic, Tweetdeck and others are going to make viewing that kind of data a whole lot easier. Tweetmeme's Nick Halstead believes that Annotations will be used most extensively to communicate webhooks, links to instructions for a Twitter client to follow. He thinks it will enable game play and help Twitter start acquiring more users again. "Because of the size of the data you can put in the annotations, I think people will come up with links to offsite resources. Seesmic is building their own platform for Windows to support plug-ins, but this reaches much further, but this lets Twitter clients augment a tweet with other services. Sf you were Stocktweets, you could attach a link in the namespace that's in stocktweets, Seesmic could follow that link back to Stocktweets and ask it how to render it. So you could put a chart and any other associated information. It's like FBML [Facebook Markup Language], the ability to embed applications inside the Twitter clients. Maybe threaded conversations. A game of Scrabble where the link points at a currently rendered scrabble board, so other people could look at the board and join in playing it. Annotations and webhooks would allow gaming to start happening on Twitter." Halstead believes an Alpha version of Annotations could be made available to developers in a month. How about showing me all the Tweets from anyone that are referencing the President of the United States (subject: POTUS?), analyze the sentiment in the messages, show me where those Twitter users were located and tell me how those local sentiments change over time. Send me an alert when one of those starts to shift radically. Show me all the Tweets by people in their 20's and in their 50's (imagine an author age tag in Annotations, why not?), living near the site of a disastrous event. How do those discussions differ? There are all kinds of interesting questions that could be tackled when the developer world's imagination runs wild on the terms of description applied to our messages. Of course it will be tempting to draw all kinds of conclusions from this rich data. We'll surely be able to draw a whole lot of value from it. "You can learn something from almost anything," Big Data cruncher and 80Legs CEO Shion Deysarkar says. "Just give me enough data, I'll figure out something." But let's keep in mind the words of social network scientist danah boyd, who wrote the following on her blog this morning: Time and time again, I see computational scientists mistake behavioral traces for cultural logic...Big Data creates tremendous opportunities for those who know how to assess the context of the data and ask the right questions into it. But mucking with Big Data alone is not research. And seeing patterns in Big Data is not the same as hypothesis testing. Patterns invite more questions than they answer. Tweet Power Politics Twitter's Krikorian says the site will probably list "trending annotations" just like it lists trending topics today. There will probably be a wiki where anyone can find out what namespaces are being used for what purposes. Really though, the classification system is going to be determined by the market. That's something that worries a lot of people. "People who believe in building standards are conerned about our blase attitude about how we want to run annotations," Krikorian says. He believes that the developer community will work things out for itself, just as it has in the past. "There has been a lot of emergent behavior around how to relate to tweets anyway, without our imposing much structure around it. The Twitter platform is continuously evolving - the developers will figure it out. Twitter developers iterate in public." That's likely to be cold comfort for people focused on the power of structured data standards. Many people are calling for Twitter to embrace the well-built efforts of the Semantic Web community. Krikorian says that 90% of Twitter developers don't know what the Semantic Web is but that there's certainly room for standards lovers to work within the Annotations scheme. Still, the absence of standard terminology could really be a problem. Annotations can't be changed retroactively, either. Krikorian says that major players will dominate the obvious use cases for Annotations and the company will monitor and highlight really innovative Annotations developed by people on the margins. We'll see how well that will work. Imagination will make the sky the limit for this publishing platform used easily by more than 100 million people around the world. But a shortage of forethought, planning and agreed-upon standards may bring that platform's aspirations back down to earth quickly in the future. Time will tell. Discuss

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What Twitter Annotations Mean

Weekly Wrap-up: Twitter in the Library, iPhone Gets Multitasking, Goodbye Google Gears, And More…

cgseo — Sat, 17 Apr 2010 13:00:00 +0000

Our number one post this week was that Twitter's archives will soon be housed in the hallowed halls of the Library of Congress. There's got to be joke about librarians shushing tweets in there somewhere. We also continued our exploration of the significant Internet trends of 2010. We wrote about Internet of Things threads you'll be wearing soon, a real-time trip into Twitter's past, and that augmented reality is going to the fishes on the Discovery Channel. Read on for more. Sponsor Story of the Week: Twitter in the Library of Congress Twitter's Entire Archive Headed to the Library of Congress Apple Announces iPhone OS 4 with Support for Multitasking 10 Smart Clothes You'll Be Wearing Soon Goodbye, Gears - Google Docs Boots Plugin for HTML5 on May 3rd Top 10 YouTube Videos About Facebook New Google Docs Features: Added Co-Editing Capabilities, Similar To Google Wave More coverage and analysis from ReadWriteWeb ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit Join us for the ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit on May 7 in Mountain View, California as we explore the latest mobile development trends, both the technology and the emerging business applications. Be a part of the discussion on geo-location services , augmented reality , native app vs. browser-based , commerce and marketing , mobile social networking and the Internet of Things. Sponsorship enquiries: sales@readwriteweb.com . Mobile Web Where Does Android Register on Google's "Evil" Meter? Opera Takes a Back Seat to Safari on the iPhone Microsoft's New Phone Gets the Social/App Balance Wrong More Mobile Web coverage Augmented Reality Discovery Channel Puts AR In Front of Millions of Eyeballs More Augmented Reality coverage Augmented Reality for Marketers and Developers: Our Newest Research Report We're pleased to announce ReadWriteWeb's latest premium report, Augmented Reality for Marketers and Developers: Analysis of the Leaders, the Challenges and the Future . This report will help you develop a sophisticated understanding of Augmented Reality (AR), the mobile and Web technology that places data on top of a user's view of the physical world. The research included will help you decrease your AR development time to market by learning from the first wave of early adopters. AR offers a new marketing and product paradigm for a high impact, high value customer experience. More than 1,000 AR campaigns were kicked-off last year and we expect to see many more in 2010. In this report, we profile key AR development companies, their campaigns as well as development lessons learned. For more information or to buy the report, visit here . Internet of Things 10 Smart Clothes You'll Be Wearing Soon DASH7: Bringing Sensor Networking to Smartphones More Internet of Things coverage Real-Time Web Google's Twitter Timeline Lets You Explore the Past Microblogging vs. Blogging: 5 Ways to Create an Open Twitter Alternative More Real-Time Web coverage . Don't miss the next wave of opportunity on the Web supported by real-time technology! Get ReadWriteWeb's report, The Real-Time Web and its Future . Check Out The ReadWriteWeb iPhone App We recently launched the official ReadWriteWeb iPhone app . As well as enabling you to read ReadWriteWeb while on the go or lying on the couch, we've made it easy to share ReadWriteWeb posts directly from your iPhone, on Twitter and Facebook. You can also follow the RWW team on Twitter, directly from the app. We invite you to download it now from iTunes . ReadWriteStart Our channel ReadWriteStart , sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark , is dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs Under 30: Advice From Your Peers Mary Meeker's Internet Trends: The Future is Mobile Apple's Game Center: More Opportunities for Social Games Developers ReadWriteEnterprise Our channel ReadWriteEnterprise is devoted to 'enterprise 2.0' and using social software inside organizations. New Google Docs Features: Added Co-Editing Capabilities, Similar To Google Wave Social Media Analysis: SAS Makes Its Play ReadWriteCloud Our channel ReadWriteCloud , sponsored by VMware and Intel, is dedicated to Virtualization and Cloud Computing. Weekly Poll: What does Virtualization as a Service Really Mean? Drupal Founder Takes on Jive Software Another Cloud Computing Acronym To Drive You Bonkers Enjoy your weekend everyone. Discuss

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Weekly Wrap-up: Twitter in the Library, iPhone Gets Multitasking, Goodbye Google Gears, And More...

Sonoa Broadens Twitter API Management Service

cgseo — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 04:17:48 +0000

How do you connect to Twitter and understand its value and performance? That's part of the challenge for any enterprise considering how to adopt social technologies to connect with customers. This week at Sugarcon we heard a lot about how to manage a social CRM envrionment. Increasingly, companies are turning to API's for integrating third-party applications like Twitter to better connect and interact with customers. Sponsor Sonoa Systems calls it an API economy with Twitter serving as the most applied API on the planet. To manage API's, Sonoa offers Apigee , a free self-service for developers working with API's. This week at the Chirp conference, Sonoa broadened Apigee by providing analytics, monitoring, debugging and testing tools. For example, with API Analytics a customer may monitor usage levels, review usage patterns, see the geo-location and look at performance metrics like response time. The service now also allows users to share messages with other developers to help with troubleshooting and community learning. API management will become a major requirement for the enterprise, especially as more applications integrate into CRM environments. As Paul Greenberg stated in his keynote at Sugarcon, the focus is no longer about controlling the customer contact but interacting with the customer in the fashion they wish to communicate. [Disclosure: SugarCRM paid for a plane ticket for Alex Williams to attend SugarCon in San Francisco.] Discuss

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Sonoa Broadens Twitter API Management Service

5 Unexpected Twitterers

cgseo — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 03:00:00 +0000

"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

From Seattle to San Francisco, Social is Everything

cgseo — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 23:57:37 +0000

For the past few days, we attended SAS and SugarCRM user conferences in Seattle and San Francisco. These are just a few of the observations that comes from conversations with developers, business managers, product managers, entrepreneurs and executive management. At both companies, you see the influence of social technologies in the discussions and what their partners are offering. With this social wave comes a variety of new methods to crack the biggest nut: "The most effective way to organize, discover and share information." We've been pounding on that last issue for the past week. We have numerous examples for how web applications can be aggregated into environments like SugarCRM but its the complexity of organizing that data which becomes the biggest challenge. Sponsor The consumer social networks give people lots of ways to use applications. For example, Twitter is a hub for delivering messages to external sites from the application or services such as Tweetdeck and Seesmic. It is a bridge for external services that provide data services that aggregate Twitter data to be uses for specific uses. Recommendation services like Mr. Tweet provide a person with references to other people the individual may want to follow. The enterprise is a different beast. It is not the most popular for the hungry young entrepreneurs and developers we met at companies like Twillio Tuesday night on the eve of Chirp, the Twitter developer conference taking place this week in San Francisco. Still, in conversations there, we met a few people who are developing for the enterprise environment. What they bring is a fresh look at how the social technologies apply in a world where compliance issues abound, complex processes rule the day and knowledge often exists in ERP silos and email archives. What these young people see are front-end tools like Google Wave that serve as the foundation for collaborative services. These are platforms, for instance, that seek to eliminate email from the process. These young developers create a certain effect. They've developed ways to organize and share information that the enterprise accepts. So much so that the giants have developed their own services, again, in many respects, inspired by the developers building web oriented platforms. And it is having a transformative effect. On Sunday night, we sat in a conference hall at the Washington Convention Center. It was the 35th anniversary of the SAS Users Conference. It was our first time attending. Twitter was the focal part of the opening. Large screens showed the Twitter updates. Their vice president of marketing used his time on stage to push out his second tweet...ever. The singing group even tried to collaborate with the crowd to create an improvised song from their Twitter stream. We learned the next day that this was a first for SAS. Twitter and the variety of other social technologies in the market are giving this conservative, data analytics company a new view, best illustrated in the launch this week of its Social Media Analytics platform. It's a complete, powerful service that takes structured and unstructured data from social networks, applies it to preset rules and delver the results in a dashboard environment. It's lacking a certain level of automation. It's not self-service by any means. It requires SAS to do the analysis and then present it through a web site. But that's okay. The service acts as a pivot that gives SAS the capability to move into new markets. It moves them from the back of the deal to the front of the deal. In the back of the deal, for instance, SAS helps analyze customer guarantees. They do a lot more than that but it's an example of the textual analysis the company provides. Now they have greater access to the front side of the deal to. They can use the platform to reach into agencies where they can help customers craft brand strategies. That should have an effect all of its own. It gives SAS the opportunity to interact with marketers, designers and UI specialists. They may recruit a few people or take the knowledge inside the company and turn it into something. That should help SAS improve the Social Media Analytics platform, making it a service that is more easily available for users to do more on their own. At SugarCon, the story is also a social one. Perhaps best summed up in the second day keynote by Paul Greenberg: "Do You Really Have To Worry About the Social Customer?" I am not so sure you have to worry about a social customer. But it might be a good idea to get know them a little bit better so you can build on your own transformations, whatever they may be. Discuss

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From Seattle to San Francisco, Social is Everything

Twitter’s Entire Archive Headed to the Library of Congress

cgseo — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 17:25:24 +0000

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