Recently in Twitter Category

Flipboard and Paper.li are two of the hottest properties in media today. Over the last six weeks they have taken social news curation to a new level. This will undoubtedly soon spawn hordes of competitors, while these leaders in the field continue to evolve their offerings. The result will be that we all have far better access to the news that we want from world of infinite information.

Flipboard was launched on July 21, at the time announcing that they had received $10.5 million in funding. For several weeks it was ranked one of the top few free iPad apps in the News category in US, UK, and Australia, attracting massive interest for what it calls a “social magazine”.

Paper.li has been around a bit longer, but has just taken off properly in the last few weeks, as the chart below illustrates.

Some lovely research from Northeastern University uses sentiment analysis to show the changing moods of the United States through 24 hours.

In the video below showing changes over the course of a day, colors indicate people's moods from red (unhappy) to green (happy), while the size of the state shows how much Twitter activity there is.

A few things that stand out: Early morning and late evening are far happier than other times of the day, California and Florida are the happiest states, and from other research on the site, the unsurprising finding that people are happier on weekends than weekdays.

Click through for the detailed research including a high-resolution pdf summarizing the findings.

Back in our Future of Media Framework we showed some of the dynamics in content creation, as in the image on the left, where both users and traditional media were engaged in creating and filtering content. User content creation, in the form of blogging, micro-blogging, sharing on social networks and more, has of course surged exponentially.

User filtered content, which I've talked about for many years now as an alternative to human editors, has recently progressed primarily through tools that aggregate the links shared on Twitter, such as Tweetmeme and Topsy. This is because Twitter (and Facebook, though the data is not readily available to third-parties to use) has become the dominant platform in how people share links and content of interest.

These Twitter-based content filters are very crude, not least having no good way of sorting by interest profile. As such they are filled with the trivial rather than what would be interesting to any one person.

Micro-messaging processing company Semiocast has just released research showing that Asia has overtaken North America as the biggest user of Twitter, with 37% of total tweets.

Source: Semiocast

In June 2009 the US still accounted for 55% of tweets, in February 2010 statistics showed that half of tweets were in languages other than English, and by April 2010 US tweets accounted for 37% of tweets. The rise of "international" (as Americans describe the planet excluding USA) and corresponding decline of the US share is shown in the chart below. Today's study shows that US tweets have in the three months since then fallen to just 25% of the total. This is not because the US is slowing, it is because the rest of the world and particularly Asia is taking up Twitter at an enormous pace.

A few days ago I asked the question How much do people want to know their conversations are being monitored?, given how brands such as Gatorade boast about how well they listen to online conversations. As it happens, someone has an answer.

Fleishman-Hillard has just released their Digital Influence Index report for 2010, with a wide range of interesting research and conclusions.

Source: Fleishman Hillard

Aside from the announcement of Promoted Tweets, Twitter's advertising platform, the most important thing coming out of Twitter's Chirp developer's conference was a hazy pre-announcement of Annotated Tweets.

In a nutshell, developer's will be able to let users to attach up to (probably) 512bytes of structured metadata to a tweet (plans are to increase this to 2KB), which can be used in one or many 'annotations' with additional data. This can only be added at the time of the tweet, or it if is retweeted.

To put this in context, a character can be represented in a byte, so you can add over 3 times as much data as the 140 characters of a tweet, in whatever format you want.

It is very early yet, with estimates of being launch in two months, and many things to be ironed out, not least how people can untangle the plethora of annotation formats that are likely to be launched.

It is completely open what can be done with this. In its note to developers Twitter says: Think big. Blow our minds.

Ideas for what annotations could be used for, adapted from Twitter, Venture Beat, Scobleizer, plus quite a few of our own, include:

Just over 4 years since the first Tweet was sent, Twitter has announced its plan to sell advertising on Twitter, by the name of 'Promoted Tweets'.

A good interview of Twitter COO Dick Costolo on CNBC gives quite a bit of detail on the plan:

In the future there will be two types of people.

Either you will create content to share with the world, or you will not.

Many of us have already made the choice to share content with the world at large. We will be joined by many more.

The advantages of having a visible presence in a world awash with information will create a substantial economic and social difference between content creators and the rest.

Yet some people will not to want to share. Some won't want to share anything about themselves beyond family and close friends. Others will be concerned about the privacy implications. They will not share of themselves to the world.

However if you choose to be a content-creator, it's a slippery slope. Once you are sharing your voice online, be it through blogging, Twitter, social networks, videos, or other channels, the demands are intense just to keep it going. It's fun, it's rewarding, but it's a commitment.

When your reputation and personal potential are driven by sharing, you do more. So as I just wrote, there can be spiralling demands from content creation.

If you choose to create content, content creation will be your life.

I just got off the phone with Kate Ehrlich of IBM Research, who I've known for many years and was one my co-authors for our California Management Review article Managing Collaboration: Improving Team Effectiveness through a Network Perspective.

We had a great discussion about a variety of common interests, including where things are going in using social network analysis for performance improvement, and the value of social media in sales teams. Kate shared with me some recent research she has done with the use of microblogging inside and outside the enterprise, which has been written up as a paper titled Microblogging Inside and Outside the Workplace - it's well worth a read.

IBM established BlueTwit some time ago as an internal microblogging tool, and its employees also use Twitter. As such, they were able to do research comparing how staff used microblogging for internal and external audiences.

Source: Microblogging Inside and Outside the Workplace

The research showed that Twitter is used more for sharing information and status updates, while the internal tool was used more for asking questions and directed interaction.

The study also included a qualitative component of interviews with IBM employees on how they used the microblogging tools. Below are the motivations and perspectives identified in the studies, together with representative quotes. See the article for the detailed research.

WHAT EMPLOYEES SAY ABOUT MICROBLOGGING

Barracuda Labs' annual report contains some interesting analysis of the online space, including Twitter and security issues. A few highlights:

* Only 21% of Twitter accounts are active i.e. at least 10 followers/ 10 following/ 10 tweets
* Even so, there has been an increase in activity from dormant accounts - 40% fewer accounts have zero followers compared with six months ago
* 66% of users are following more or the same as the their number of followers (i.e. you are in the "top" one third if you have more followers than following)
* The most prolific Tweeters are those with around 1,000 followers. Those with more followers tend to tweet less - see chart below.

Software firm Sysomos has provided some more interesting research on Twitter usage.

Using this data, we have analyzed which countries use Twitter the most on a per capita basis, shown below.

I did the same analysis from Sysomos' report in June, showing the most prominent Twitter nations on a per capita basis at the time, according to the data provided.

While the results are fairly consistent between the June 2009 and January 2010, it seems that neither set of results is complete. Norway, which ranked as the third highest per capita Twitter nation last June, had no data provided on it in this survey, while Singapore - now the second highest ranked nation - and Ireland - now ranked fourth - were not included in the June survey.

On a relative basis New Zealand has gained ground, catching up with Australia and the UK, while Germany appears to have moved ahead considerably compared to other countries such as France.

Sysomos doesn't give details on its "proprietary" methodology for identifying the location of Twitterers, however it very interestingly says that only 0.23% of tweets are tagged with location through Twitter's geo-location API tool. I may have a play with getting some of this data directly at some point.

Other 2009 summary posts
Top blog posts of 2009: 6 on Twitter and the media
Top blog posts of 2009: Enterprise 2.0 and organizational effectiveness
Top blog posts of 2009: The future
Top keynote speech presentations/ videos of 2009

And one more summary of my blog posts that have attracted the most interest this year, this time on the topic of influence, which has become very central to my interests and research.

1. Launch of the Influence Landscape framework (Beta)
A visual framework to explain the role and mechanisms of influence today

2. “Influence is the future of media”
Why influence is at the center of where the media industry is going

Other 2009 summary posts
Top blog posts of 2009: Enterprise 2.0 and organizational effectiveness
Top blog posts of 2009: The future
Top keynote speech presentations/ videos of 2009

At this time of year it's good to look back at the blog posts I've written and see what is most interesting. Some have got quite a lot of attention, other posts I liked got passed over.

Having looked through my blog posts, the most useful approach seems to be by topics. I'll start with a list of six posts on Twitter and the media, including some embeds.

1. Twitter on ABC TV - the impact on politics, media and socializing

The post includes this ABC TV segment on Twitter, which includes interviews with myself and Mark Scott, Managing Director of ABC. Full analysis on the post.

I was interviewed this morning on Sky Business Tech Report. Some of the things we discussed in the interview are:

* How social media such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and many others change how companies engage with customers, become more efficient, and being competitive.

ABC TV ran a segment a few days ago on how companies are using Twitter to create value, including an interview with me on how businesses can use Twitter effectively.

This should be a topic of particular interest to small and mid-sized companies. If you are interested in learning more, SME Tech Summit in Sydney on 1 December will include specific in-detail coverage of how your company can use Twitter (as well as other social media tools) to build your success.

Comments made during the program include:

* Experts say Twitter is here to stay
* Twitter has become a legitimate business tool
* When you don't have much money to spend, Twitter can be an excellent way to promote your business
* You need to be conversational and human to engage your customers
* There are ways that companies in any industry to use Twitter
* It is hard to do properly, and you do need to be consistent if you start
* Twitter is here to stay as part of companies' branding strategy