Despite his reputation as a darling of the Left for his anti-American rhetoric, Venezuela's strongman Hugo Chávez is known by many in his country as a dedicated suppressor of free speech. An article in the International Herald Tribune today by Francisco Toro spells out the lengths Chávez has gone to stifle one of his bêtes noires, Twitter.
The Twitter accounts of many of Chávez's critics have suddenly begun spewing pro-Chávez, anti-opposition propaganda. More recently, the tack the hackers have taken has begun to show more subtlety.
With hundreds of add-on tools, Twitter certainly has plenty of ways you can analyze its data. I set out to find the best tools that I would recommend for you to track and compare your own Tweets, as well as examine the growth of followers and when you actually send out your 140-character missives. My two faves are TweetStats and Twittercounter. As you are resting from your Thanksgiving feast, you might want to try them out, along with several others that I will show you.
There are other tools that involve "sentiment analysis," being able to examine what people are Tweeting about or the attitude they are expressing in their tweets. The tools in this article are mainly for more quantifiable metrics. We look at whether you need to pre-authorize the tool to access your Twitter account, how much customization is available on the reports displayed, if there is a fee to use the service and whether you will need something outside of your browser to do the analysis. Most of these are completely free, which is nice since you can experiment and see what makes the most sense for you.
PostPost, a powerful, noise-reducing search tool for Twitter, has pushed out some updates that make it even more useful. When we first covered PostPost in April, we were struck by how easy it made sifting through one's Twitter timeline. To do that, it indexes your last 3,200 tweets and then narrows your stream down to the most important 200 users and indexes the last 800 tweets posted by each of them.
Since then, PostPost has been updated to handle searches far more effectively. First, it switched its default search operator from OR to AND, which improves the results for queries containing multiple words. It also now uses a link: operator to let you search for links to specific sites or pages. Searches for multimedia content now return more specific results as well. Instead of searching broadly for videos or photos, you can drill down to just YouTube or just Instagram.
In a new study released today, Pew Internet Research found that 66 percent of American adults online use Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and LinkedIn. They cite staying in touch with family and friends as one of the major reasons for using these sites. Seventy-one percent of the younger demographic, ages 18-29, cites staying in touch with current friends as a major reason for using social networks. Fifty-five percent of users ages 30-49 are on social networking sites to connect with old friends they'd lost touch with.
A U.S. Federal Court in Virginia caused quite a stir among digital privacy advocates last week when it ordered Twitter to grant the Justice Department access to private data from the accounts of three suspected WikiLeaks supporters. That data includes IP addresses, session times and relationships between other Twitter users.
Normally, requests for this type of information are not particularly controversial, but in this case a warrant was not required and the subjects of the data inquiries have not yet been charged with any crimes. The government is able to make such warrantless requests thanks to a 1994 law known as the Stored Communications Act.
Whether you think the protestors camping out in various city parks around the world is justified or not, it is interesting to see this analysis published in Technology Review today. They used a tool from SocialFlow that examined a pile of Twitter data. Did you know the first use of their hashtag was in a July 13 Adbusters blog post?
That social media is having an impact on television is hardly breaking news at this point. For a few years, Twitter and other social networks have served as a sort of digital, real-time water cooler where viewers convene and discuss TV shows as they're broadcast.
This behavior has emerged more or less organically. Just as with major sporting events and breaking news stories, people naturally gravitate toward services like Twitter and Facebook to post their thoughts about television shows.
When it comes to crafting social status updates to ensure maximum exposure and click-throughs, many of the tried-and-true methods seem somewhat obvious. Posting at certain times of day, for example, can have a dramatic impact on performance. Makes perfect sense.
Sometimes, effective optimization can come from places you didn't expect, and the only way to find out is by analyzing a large set of cold, hard data.
On October 6, the #OccupyWallStreet hashtag spiked with 13,133 messages following news of the mass arrest of protestors on the Brooklyn Bridge. Traffic spiked again four days later, on October 10, when barely-known GOP candidate Buddy Roemer and Ben & Jerry's ice cream brand openly declared their support for the movement.
How were Twitterers feeling about the movement on October 10? According to data from NM Incite, a Nielsen McKinsey company, 22% of tweets that day were in support of #OccupyWallStreet - double the number of tweets against it.
Analytics firm comScore released new data today showing that U.S. mobile social media audiences increased 37%, and more than half of social mobile audiences read a post from an organization, brand or event on their mobile device.
While the mobile browser accounted for more visits, research shows that the social networking app audience has grown five times faster in the past year. While the mobile browsing social networking audience has grown 24% to 42.3 million users, the mobile social networking app audience shot up 126% to 42.3 million users in the past year.
