The word "love" elicits reactions from everyone, and some of those feelings are not pretty. Except when they're absolutely beautiful.
On Valentine's Day, Internet users' emotions were plentiful and mixed. Twitter trends like #CandyHeartRejects and #FedValentines popped up, illuminating the thoughts of quite a few bitter birds. Facebook also celebrated Valentine's Day with some birdlike activity. News leaked last month that the Angry Birds would crash onto Facebook on Valentine's Day. It's the perfect game for pissed off single users to play on the heart of hearts day. But for all the love-related bitterness on social media, there are still moments of grace.
TweetReach has a cool stream graph that takes all of the speculation out of who was being talked about when during Sunday night's broadcast of the Grammy Awards.
No surprise: Adele topped the evening's Twitter activity with 340,000 mentions. The official #grammys hashtag was tweeted 2.1 million times by 700,000 users.
"That's huge, bigger than other similar events," TweetReach founder Jenn Deering Davis said in an email. "Musicians have the largest followings on Twitter (Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, Rihanna, Taylor Swift all have 10+ million followers), compared to film or television stars, politicians, brands, etc."
Twitter has joined the list of companies making sheepish confessions that it uploads your smartphone's address book when you install its app.
Last week Path made a similar dicslosure, which was followed by changes by photo app Instagram to give users more privacy controls. And that led to a bit of discovery by smartphone users themselves that nothing is truly free.
Don't expect a initial public offering of shares of Twitter anytime soon.
CNN is reporting that the company has placed restrictions on employees who hold shares, forcing them to keep 80 percent of the shares they own. The cable news outlet cited company emails about the policy, which has been in effect for a year, and said at least one high-level employee resigned because of the policy.
Katy Perry's got nothing on Nicki Minaj.
At the 2012 Grammys, Perry rolled on-stage with a blue wig and her hit song "E.T.", then abruptly transitioned into "Part of Me," which pop news sources have attributed to her break-up with Russell Brand. (There are lines like "So you can keep the diamond ring," for example.) Things just haven't been the same since Perry's religious parents have tried to hook her up with Jesus-lovin' Tim Tebow.
Yet Perry was formerly the queen of cotton candy cloud sensuality, of references to sucking Snoop Dogg's lollipop and a hyperfemininity that only a white girl of pastor parents could muster. Sweet and adoring in her innocence, Perry doesn't stand a chance against hardcore female rapper Nicki Minaj, who stole the 2012 Grammys with "Roman Holiday." Both a tribute to and a pushback against the movie "The Exorcist," Minaj's performance engaged the short attention spans of social media users, compelling them to post their own thoughts on Minaj's "interpretation" of Catholicism, exorcism and the use of highly charged religious imagery in pop culture social media spectacle.
Hamza Kashgari, who fled his native Saudi Arabia, has been sent back to face a possible death penalty. He left the country, intending to seek political asylum in New Zealand, after a series of tweets on the Prophet Muhammad's birthday resulted in hundreds of death threats.
Kashgari was apprehended at the Kuala Lumpur airport Wednesday by the Malaysian authorities, at the request of Saudi Arabia, with whom Malaysia has no extradition treaty. Sunday morning, Saudi officials took custody of him at the airport and flew him back to Saudi Arabia in a private plane, according to a source close to the situation.
Just because you're not ready to shell out $99 per month to figure out the best times to tweet and post Facebook status updates doesn't mean you can't take better control of understanding your social media output.
Indeed, paid Twitter analytics services may offer way more than the average user needs. And despite increasing sophistication of their competitors, some of the best analytics tools remain free for users, either on a trial or permanent basis. Here are four free tools to get you started in better understanding how and when to tweet.
Will this article get re-tweeted? According to a new HP Labs white paper, we can now predict whether or not it will become popular on Twitter.
The findings are crucial because most previous analysis of how tweets travel have focused on who has been tweeting as opposed to what they have been tweeted. If someone influential on Twitter tweets something, the conventional thinking goes, it will spread. That thinking still plays a big factor, but the new research highlights that content matters.
A 23-year-old Saudi Twitter user, Hamza Kashgari, fled the country Sunday to avoid being arrested for his religious tweets, only to find himself in the hands of the Malaysian police today. He was heading to New Zealand to request political asylum.
On Saturday, the anniversary of the Prophet Muhammad's birthday, Kashgari tweeted three times, expressing his religious beliefs about the founder of Islam. Within hours, he was inundated with violent threats. Despite a full renunciation, a warrant was issued by Kingdom authorities for his arrest and the Kingdom's religious Fatwa Council condemned him as an apostate and an infidel, crimes which are punishable by death.
Foursquare, about to celebrate its third birthday, is big but not huge. It has signed up 15 million users, hired over 100 employees and now boasts several million check-ins per day. That is impressive work for three years, but it must keep growing.
To do so, Foursquare co-founder and CEO Dennis Crowley says the company is in the process of redesigning its mobile app for a broader audience, disassembling it and trying to put its features back together in a way that's more useful and interesting. It has also launched new features on its Web site, such as the neat and powerful "Explore" tool, which can help you find cool places to visit in your neighborhood or in an entirely new city.
As Twitter realized a few years ago, Crowley says Foursquare is seeing a big chunk of its growth from people who want to use parts of Foursquare, but not necessarily broadcast to the world. That means building a service that's useful to more casual users, and not just early Foursquare diehards.
I recently sat down with Crowley at the company's brand new, roomy headquarters in New York City, for an idea of what's next. Here's a lightly edited transcript of our chat.
