Photo: Twitter

The social networking site Twitter has given itself a brand new look, while still remaining as distinctive as it’s always been. With a new home page as well as some brand new features, Twitter now has a new feel while not becoming completely unrecognisable.

New look aims to challenge the competition

For the first time in four years, Twitter has decided to change its look in an attempt to go head on in competition with Facebook, and has made deals with 16 different media websites. These sites include YouTube and Flickr, and the deals ensure that Twitter can now host images and videos on it’s site, instead of sending its users to possibly dangerous third-party sites. By viewing the files integrated on Twitter’s own interface, users spend less time with fewer clicks on different links, as well as avoiding potential viruses and other dangerous malware your anti-virus software may not pick up.

The aim of the Twitter revamp is to increase revenue by increasing users’ engagement. It is also part of a new advertising effort by marketers to use the site for multimedia purposes. Movie studios can now advertise their new releases using the promoted tweets service, and users can see video trailers on Twitter.

Facebook is Twitter’s main target

Enderle Group’s principal analyst Rob Enderle said in a press conference that this move is clearly an attempt to survive challenges from competition, especially from Facebook. ‘This will allow users to do more in Twitter,’ said Enderle. ‘And if this works, it will make third-party sites less popular, but only if this works.’

‘Twitter is clearly targeting Facebook,’ he added, ‘but people are creatures of habit and it’s very difficult to move them from a service they like.’

The new interface is still lacking in some areas. Conversation threads are still not provided, nor is the ability to store tweets between users for reference. However, Twitter remains simple and easy to use, and should do well to attract more users.

Photo: Skype

Two colossal web services, Twitter and Skype, have both announced that their CEOs are stepping down to let someone else take the rein for some time. While Twitter’s Evan Williams has stepped aside for insider Dick Costolo, Skype’s Josh Silverman will leave the company and be replaced by key Cisco exec, Tony Bates.

The switch up in summary

Evan Williams will focus on the tech side of things at Twitter while current COO Dick Costolo will be the new CEO. This switch up makes sense, since in recent months Costolo has become the corporate face at Twitter, showcasing his solid understanding of the challenges of monetising the business.

For Skype, on the other hand, Josh Silverman’s departure is a little unexpected, but being replaced by a high ranking executive who oversaw a $30 billion business at Cisco, a publicly traded company, makes perfect sense for Skype’s IPO ambitions. Furthermore, new CEO Tony Bates brings with him a keen understanding of the VoIP business, since that’s a key area of Cisco’s business, which might suggest acclimatising to his new role may not prove too difficult.

Fascinating product roadmap for Skype

Skype is widely considered one of the most promising Internet services in the world. The VoiP service has the scale – over 500 million registered users – and thus the potential to completely topple over landlines and mobile phone carriers around the globe.

Photo: Twitter

Of those registered users, 124 million of them are active users, but only 8.1 million of them actually pay to use the service. All the company needs to do – and this is, admittedly, easier said than done – is convince a greater percentage of Skype users to use the service for more than just free Skype-to-Skype calls.

This will be the first order of business for Tony Bates.

Interesting roadmap for Twitter

Twitter, on the other hand, have a proven, if unstable, web platform, with well over 100 million monthly visitors, but are still trying to make sense of how to make money from it all.

The centre piece? The smartphone

What’s particularly remarkable about this nigh-on simultaneous change of leadership at these organisations is how much both these company’s futures rely on and are tied to the prospects of the smartphone. Skype and Twitter both have used the iPhone as a key area for business, and there’s reason to believe much of Skype’s revenue will be sourced by people substituting voice calls for cheaper data calls on the iPhone.

Nevertheless, the new CEO of Skype and his counterpart at Twitter have their work cut out for them if they are to ensure the game-changing elements of their services actually amount to colossal revenue.

Photo: Niccolò Caranti / Flickr

A few years ago American political satirist Stephen Colbert coined the term ‘truthiness’. The word refers statements made (often by politicians) that just feel ‘right’ and are taken to be true whether or not they have any basis in reality. This caught the attention of academics at Indiana University, who are trying to use a combination of Twitter, crowd-sourcing, and automated text and network analysis to find out just how truthy politicians are – or not.

Focusing on Twitter

The Indiana team set up a website, Truthy.indiana.edu, to demonstrate and explain their system. They are focusing on Twitter because, apparently, an organisation called the American Future Fund set up Twitter accounts and spammed about 60,000 people with truthy statements on election day before their account was shut down.

Twitter also offers access to the content that flows through it, and the Truthy website will be making use of this feed to obtain raw material. The system will focus on memes, including hash tags, @-mentions and URLs that account for a lot of traffic on the site. A filter will then use a set of keywords to determine whether these discussions are likely to be political in nature.

Crowd-sourcing

So far, there is no system to identify the actual truthiness of a tweet, so the Indiana academics are also making use of crowd-sourcing. Users will be able to flag a meme as being truthy, and the Truthy system will keep track of these flags. To avoid this being abused by those with political motivation, there will be a few analytical tools for these flags, too.

Identifying emotional content

One of these analytical tools will attempt to identify a meme’s emotional content. An automated Profile Moods States test scans word use for mood, including Anger-Hostility, Tension-Anxiety, and Depression-Dejection. Every meme that finds its way to the database will be evaluated for mood.

Analysing networks

Finally, a software package will analyse the networks involved in spreading memes. The software will create a map of the ‘diffusion network’, producing graphs of the networks involved in the tweeting and retweeting of memes.

This network analysis will give us a clearer picture of how political groups work in the social media landscape which will be interesting, to say the least.

Photo: Facebook

In another one of those oh-so-stat-laden reports we love to latch on to – it appeals to the side of the human mind that goes ‘ooh’ and ‘aah’ – a new productivity survey by MyJobGroup revealed that British workers could be costing their business £14 billion per year from continued social network use.

Surveying the productivity landscape

The MyJobGroup productivity survey, which quizzed 1,000 British employees, has extrapolated that six percent of Britain’s working population – that’s two million of 34 million people – spent half an hour a day on average social networking. The collective financial consequence of that lost productivity was equated to £14 billion pounds per year. Of those people polled, 14 per cent admitted that social networking was adversely affecting their productivity, while 10 per cent claimed using social networking tools like Facebook and Twitter actually made them more productive.

MyJobGroup Managing Director Michael Fayer explains: ‘Our results clearly show that UK workers are spending increased time whilst at work on social media networks, which, left unchecked, could have negative repercussions on the productivity of many companies across the country.’

But nothing necessitates they would be working instead

Photo: Twitter

The funny thing about these kinds of surveys is that they implicitly suggest employees would be working instead of spending time on social networks like Twitter and Facebook. The reality, in fact, is nothing necessitates that that reported half an hour a day would be transferred over to being productive, as opposed to just wasting time doing something else.

Perhaps it would be fair to say the study hypothesizes on the additional £14 billion pounds that could be made per year, as opposed to £14 billion pounds that is lost a year. If people do not enjoy their work – as many people don’t – they will find pockets of time to do something else, whether it be social networking or chatting to colleagues over a cuppa. You don’t need a productivity survey to conclude they could otherwise be making more money for their companies and, overall, the British economy.

Photo: Jason McELweenie / Wikimedia Commons

Facebook is, simply put, the most influential web service since Google. If for no reason other than the fact that 500 million highly engaged users is 1/13^th of the population of, oh, just the whole planet. Facebook is such a big deal that it even earned its CEO some face time with Britain’s newly anointed Prime Minister, James Cameron.

More transparent policy

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who is attending a London Facebook Developer Garage, took time out to meet with Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt at Number 10. The meeting, which Hunt tweeted about, seemed to have made an impression on both the tech leader and the politician, with hunt saying, ‘Just met Mark Zuckerberg, Founder of Facebook. Really smart guy with some good ideas on improvement digital engagement in policy making.’

Mark Zuckerberg says he was pleasantly surprised at the volume of civic projects being worked on at the London Facebook hackathon. He added, saying upon mentioning it to staff at Number 10 he found ‘they were really excited, wanting to open up data and are excited about what can be done.’

Prime minister ‘popped in’

Photo: Facebook

During Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg’s meet with Jeremy Hunt, Prime Minister David Cameron popped in to say hi. Speaking on the Prime Minister at a later stage, the Facebook founder said ‘David Cameron seems very insightful. A lot of the stuff we talked about was opening up government data.’

What to make of this?

Well, it reaffirms that Facebook is no longer a pastime where college students share pictures and laughs. It’s bigger than that. A veritable social utility, if you will, and politicians are wising up to this, as are console makers, smartphone manufacturers and, most importantly from a financial perspective for the company, advertisers, too.

Were any of you at the London Facebook hackathon or Developer Garage? If yes, how was the experience?

Photo: Facebook

In the age where social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter reign supreme it is surprising to note that the number of people suffering from loneliness and depression is increasing. In research published by the Mental Health Foundation (MHF) it was discovered that about 11 per cent of the population, which is about one in every ten people, often feel lonely and about 48 per cent of the population believe that people are getting lonelier in general.

Feeling disconnected

Loneliness is something that is usually associated with older people but recently it has been discovered that younger people, especially young women, are more prone to feeling lonely, with the research depicting that someone between the ages of 18 and 24 is twice as likely to become lonely as a 55-year-old person.

The researchers name the social networking sites that are suppose to bridge connections are one of the reasons that people are getting lonelier. This is because even though social networking sites such as Facebook makes it easier for one to communicate and keep in contact with others, many people have said that they spend far too much time chatting to people online and they lack face-to-face contact, which makes them feel lonely.

Photo: Stock.Xchng

The chief executive of the Mental Health Foundation, Andrew McCulloch, comments that the reasons for feeling lonely differ from person to person. Work has also been listed as a common reason why young people for are feeling increasingly lonely. With the extra hours that people are working as well as the increasing pressure on them, people are simply not in the mood to socialise because they are so exhausted when they come home from work. Also, people who have lost their jobs are at risk of becoming lonely as people withdraw from others and lose contact with their colleagues.

It is not untreatable

Fortunately there is a lot that one can do to help oneself. The University of Nottingham’s Martin Haggard has commented that those that feel this way should note that they are not alone as the above figures show that increasing amounts of people feel lonely. A good idea to get out of the slump that you are in is to join classes or groups in whatever interests you as then you can meet people who share the same interests as you and it can help you to get over your feelings of loneliness and prevent you from becoming depressed. So dust off that yoga mat and start meeting people!

Photo: Twitter

Someone has registered a Twitter account under the name BPGlobalPR. This very official sounding account seems to be everything but, laced with dark humour referencing the oil spillage. The account, which now has over 35,000 followers, is littered with Tweets like ‘We feel terrible about spilling oil near American waters, we’ll make sure the next spill happens where the terrorists live’ and ‘It’s official, the phrase “All the tea in China” has been replaced with “All the oil in the gulf” – Can’t wait for the royalties’! Public relations nightmare? You bet! Yet it’s the kind of stingingly true yet raucously funny humour you smack yourself on the hand for laughing about.

Who does your social media?

Photo: British Petroluem

While, admittedly, those of us who use technology as an extension of ourselves think it ridiculous that not all major companies aren’t on both Twitter and Facebook alone, at the very least, the truth is the need for business social media hasn’t proven itself for everybody. Until now, that is. The damaging tweets put up on @BPGlobalPR and its being allowed to continue means someone at the petroleum company is not doing their job.

We think it’s ridiculous British Petroluem spilled all this oil to start with and has handled the result irresponsibly, at the very least, but perhaps their spin doctors need a crash course in business social media skills to try nip this in the bud.

Photo: Twitter

Twitter for iPhone is the number one app on the App Store, and it was only released two days ago. Apple’s showing full support, too, making the app iPhone App of the Week.

Not much has changed

Twitter’s basically just given Tweetie, the app made by Atebits, a new name and a new logo. Tweetie was doing very well in the popularity stakes as it is, but now that it’s free, downloads have skyrocketed. What might really be making the difference, though, is new branding. It’s simply called ‘Twitter’ on the App Store, which makes it much for visible to people looking for Twitter for the iPhone by searching the store.

Ok, it is slightly different

Twitter for iPhone is still the best Twitter client for iPhones. The small changes in the new app offer more emphasis on retweets, which some people aren’t very impressed with, still. The app is faster pverall, search works better, and the price, of course, is 100 per cent better. The biggest complaint people have about the new App Store Twitter for iPhone is about the new icon. If that’s the only downfall, well done Twitter.

Making up for a half- roll out?

Photo: Apple

Apple may have given Twitter the coveted position of App of the Week to make up for their half-roll out of Twitter for iPhone a few days ago. For over a day, you couldn’t click on the app. Bad form on the part of Apple, really. On the other hand, they might simply love the app. Either way, it’s already been downloaded tons of times, and it looks like it will continue to be.

All Squared

Apple is also featured Square, the mobile payment company started by Jack Dorsey, Twitter creator, as App of the Week last week. Things are looking bright for Twitter.

Twitter for iPhone can be downloaded here.

Photo: Twitter

Tweetie 2, the popular iPhone app, has gone missing from the app store, and the smart money is on it being replaced by Twitter for iPhone in the coming days.

Acquisition put to work

Twitter acquired Atebits, the one-man company that made Tweetie (for both Mac and iPhone) and immediately announced they would rename the popular app to Twitter for iPhone. Furthermore, they would make the app, which had a price of $2.99, a free download. Twitter also announced that Loren Brichter, the previous owner of Atebits and the Tweetie developer would join the Twitter mobile team.

Developer alienation

With this acquisition preceding the very first Twitter Chirp conference for third party developers, many questioned the micro-blogging service’s moves and how much it actually cared for those who’ve help make the program what it is.

Photo: Apple

There’s a growing fear in Twitter developer circles that the company is shutting out the very people who helped make it the success that it is. Firstly, with Twitter acquiring specific developers in specific Twitter verticals, the company is seen as endorsing one application to the detriment of others. And the extent of the alienation differs from platform to platform, so while this may not be such a big deal for Twitter for BlackBerry, it certainly is a massive deal for Twitter for iPhone, which is quite possibly the platform with the most Twitter clients.

Charmed life

Twitter for iPhone will invariably become the most popular Twitter application on the iPhone, which makes sense considering Facebook’s own Facebook iPhone app is the most popular application on Apple’s platform, too. Whether the iPhone app will be accompanied by an iPad app is as yet unclear, but what we are pretty much 100 per cent certain of is that iPhone users who enjoy Twitter will soon have a very polished Twitter client freely available.

Photo: Stock.Xchng

Twitter over email? That’s TweetyMail. No more going to a Twitter client. Just send an email and a list of new tweets from your followers will reach your inbox in a few minutes. If you want to tweet back, just send off another email. And if you want to follow someone, you can do it via email. That’s it – your tweeting experience, in full, over email. But how do you do it?

How does it work?

Everything you do on Twitter has a different email address on TweetyMail. Just link your email account to the service. All you have to do is verify your email address, and you’re set. Even better, you can use any, or all, of your email addresses.

Sign up for alerts

Photo: Twitter

You’ve got the option, with the service, to set up email alerts. Three types are supported: Tweets Alert (receive new tweets automatically), Search Alert (get the latest Tweets that match a search from across Twitter), and Mentions Alert, which will send you an email if someone on Twitter mentions you. All of this can be scheduled, too. For example, you could ask the service to send you updates in twenty minutes’ time, or schedule exactly when you would like a tweet to be posted.

@tweetymail email addresses

To post a tweet on TweetyMail, use the address tweet@tweetymail.com. For updates on the users you follow, use the address latest@tweetymail.com. To send an email directly to a user you follow, use the address message@tweetymail.com. Follow a user with follow@tweetymail.com. Block a user who is following you with block@tweetymail.com. To unfollow someone, send an email to unfollow@tweetymail.com. Finally, delete one of your tweets with delete@tweetymail.com.

There you have it. All of your tweeting via email, on your laptop or PC. For more details, see the TweetyMail website.