Twitter may become the heavyweight in analytics of its own content, boxing out rivals HootSuite, bit.ly and Klout.
As first reported by ReadWriteWeb, Twitter plans to launch sophisticated analytical tools, according to Erica Anderson, Twitter's manager for news and journalism.
Anderson, who made the comments last weekend at a social media conference at Columbia University in New York, said the analytical tools will better help publishers track the reach of tweets sent through the microblogging service. Twitter already offers similar services to its advertisers.
Twitter's sponsored tweets and sponsored hashtags are cropping up more often as the social network places a heavy focus on advertising. As with any new advertising offering, we'll learn how to use it effectively by watching the efforts of others. Advertising on a social network offers up opportunities for engagement that can't be found elsewhere, but that opportunity comes with significant risk.
Sponsored hashtags can blow up in your face, they can be stolen by a competitor and they can be surrounded by risky UGC. But they can also very quickly achieve some great attention for your brand. Choosing to advertise on Twitter is a risky move, ripe with opportunity and danger. It shouldn't be undertaken lightly or without serious thought.
San Francisco-based U.S. Magistrate Judge Maria-Elena James will allow a case by a company arguing that a Twitter list created by an ex-employee is its property to proceed.
PhoneDog LLC, which reviews mobile phones and other tech products, is claiming that former employee Noah Kravitz owes it $340,000, or $2.50 for each Twitter follower he kept by switching the name of his Twitter account after he stopped working for PhoneDog. James denied a motion to dismiss by Kravitz on Monday in a case that is being closely watched by companies that have employees develop social media platforms as part of their jobs.
The creator, Michael Shirley, describes it like this: "The device is triggered by a reed-switch sensor that monitors magnetic proximity. The signal is sent through an Arduino board to a Processing sketch, which tells the computer to snap a webcam photo of Peterson and upload it to Twitpic with a saying chosen from a pool of prewritten zingers. The Twitpic post is immediately loaded to the BossTracker5000′s Twitter feed. Voila! A chair that tweets." Most importantly, it also updates when the boss is away.
Google's Blogger has found a way to handle local government takedown requests similar to the way Twitter now does. It will now start redirecting readers to country-specific top-level domains (TLD) instead of the usual blogspot.com domain. It does so based on the location of the user's IP address, just as many other Google services do. This gives Google the "flexibility" to comply with removal requests according to local laws.
But don't start your knee-jerking just yet (as so many did with Twitter's local compliance policy). This is a way around censorship. Would you rather Blogger and Twitter be blocked in some countries outright? As Google Operating System (the original purveyor of this fine story) points out, the content at the "blogspot.com" domain will continue to exist. "Content removed due to a specific country's law will only be removed from the relevant ccTLD," Google explains in its support document.
Officially, Sree Sreenivasan is the dean of student affairs and a professor at Columbia University's Journalism School, but for many he is the curator of Sree's Tips, a Tumblr blog crammed with how-to social media information, as well as a leading figure in the social media movement. This past weekend he was also the point person for Columbia's Social Media Weekend in New York.
What follows is a recap of some of Sreenivasan's best advice for better utilizing Twitter from the weekend, as well as nuggets of information for doing better social media that were culled from the more than 50 speakers. When talking about social media, Sreenivasan tends to stress connections over self promotion (although being connected tends to lead to better promotion). He was also quick to stress throughout the weekend "We're all learning here."
Twitter will unveil a series of new tools in the next few months, including sophisticated analytical tools, according to Erica Anderson, Twitter's manager for news and journalism.
Anderson said the analytical tools will better help publishers track the reach of tweets sent through the microblogging service. She made her comments Saturday at Columbia University's social media weekend in New York.
Some of the messages Twitter is sending about its new policy on censoring tweets in certain countries seem ambiguous at best.
Perhaps the biggest piece of confusion for people trying to make sense of yesterday's announcement is Twitter's inclusion of a link with instructions on how to change your country setting. The change would appear to at least temporarily allow some users to read messages banned in their country by overriding the IP-address detection mechanism Twitter uses to assign a country to a user.
Twitter will censor tweets in certain countries while still publishing them throughout the rest of the world, the company said Thursday on its blog.
"As we continue to grow internationally, we will enter countries that have different ideas about the contours of freedom of expression. Some differ so much from our ideas that we will not be able to exist there," the company said. "Others are similar but, for historical or cultural reasons, restrict certain types of content, such as France or Germany, which ban pro-Nazi content."
The Saudi prince who invested $300 million in Twitter in December said the move was not politically motivated.
"It was a pure financial investment with economic objectives," Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, Chairman of Kingdom Holding Company, told CNN. "Politics has no ingredients whatsoever in that investment ... the secure economic financial investment with expected huge returns to our company Kingdom Holding."
Alwaleed, who also has a stake in Apple, said he expects the computer maker to thrive despite last year's death of Steve Jobs.
