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Twitter: In The Final 3 Minutes Of The Super Bowl, There Were 10,000 Tweets Per Second

Achilles — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 09:29:08 +0000

Big TV events are becoming an increasingly popular catalyst of activity on social media, with sporting events being at the top of the list. Many of us can no longer enjoy a Super Bowl without checking Twitter every three seconds. Last year, there were several moments during the Super Bowl that set records for the most tweets per second during a sporting event, with a high of 4,064 TPS. The highs during the Super Bowl were no match for New Years Eve 2011 in Japan, which saw 6,939 tweets per second. A year later, the Japanese continue to be avid tweeters, as the premiere of Japanese movie “Castles In The Sky” set the all-time record in December for tweets per second, at 25,088. As Alexia shared at the time, the TPS record has since been held by a U.S. women’s soccer team’s game at 7,196 Tweets per second, which came among other notable Twitter events: Steve Jobs’ death at 6,049, Bin Laden’s death at 5,106 TPS, the day of the Japanese earthquake and Tsunami in March at 5,530 TPS, and the Royal Wedding in England in April at 3,966 TPS. Clearly, we are getting a glimpse of the increasing relevance and popularity of Twitter during important events, as Twitter’s official Twitter account (head explosion) announced tonight that, in the final three minutes of Super Bowl 2012, there was an average of 10,000 tweets per second. Obviously, this is less than half the tweet frequency (I’ll coin the “TF” acronym) of the Castles In The Sky premiere, but by all accounts this is the record for TF during a live sporting event. No doubt the 2012 Olympics in London, and 100 other events will give tonight’s Super Bowl a run for its money, but, for now, let us revel in tweet history. Twitter will no doubt be sharing more on the activity during the Super Bowl, which we will include as soon as we have it. In the final three minutes of the Super Bowl tonight, there were an average of 10,000 Tweets per second.— Twitter (@twitter) February 06, 2012

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Twitter: In The Final 3 Minutes Of The Super Bowl, There Were 10,000 Tweets Per Second

MVF Reveals Your Most Valuable Twitter Follower, Facebook Coming Soon

jos — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 00:38:39 +0000

Ever wonder which of your Twitter followers you should be sucking up to? Well, you can go to MVF and find out. The app is a side project created by two startup guys — Alex Taub, who leads business development at Aviary, and Michael Schonfeld, a developer at Nerve Dating. Now, the idea of measuring online influence is nothing new, but where Klout and its competitors have built fairly complex scoring and measure influence in different topics, Taub and Schonfeld offer a simple app to ask a relatively straightforward question: “Who’s my most valuable Twitter follower?” MVF (which, naturally, stands for Most Valuable Follower) already attracted some attention when it launched a couple of days ago, and since then, Taub and Schonfeld have been adding new features. Most importantly, they’ve improved their method of measuring “value”. Instead of just going purely by follower count (a number that can be inflated by following a lot of people), the measurement now combines total follower count with what MG Siegler dubbed the Golden Ratio — namely, the ratio of number of followers to the number of people you follow. There’s a big viral component to the app, since it encourages you to tweet the result at your valuable follower — in fact, you’re required to do so if you want to see your second to fifth most valuable followers. So folks who roll their eyes at public obsessing/bragging over social influence may soon have something else to complain about, especially after next week, when Taub and Schonfeld plan to unveil a version of MVF for Facebook on-stage at the NY Tech Meetup. (They’re calling it “Most Valuable Friend,” which I find a little unsettling, though whether that says more about MVF, Facebook “friends”, or me is an exercise I leave to the reader.) Oh, and my most valuable follower? Turns out it’s a certain tech blog . I was confused, at first, because I thought TechCrunch could give those guys a run for their money, but then I realized that TechCrunch doesn’t follow me. Ouch.

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MVF Reveals Your Most Valuable Twitter Follower, Facebook Coming Soon

Showyou Rolls Out All-New iPad App With Improved Video Discovery, Better Social Tools

ACMAir — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 22:00:40 +0000

Social video browsing app Showyou just launched version 3.0 of its iPad application, a major update with a ton of new features. Competing in a hot space with competitors like Fanhattan , Shelby.tv , Squrl , Vodio and others, Showyou offers a grid-like view for browsing the videos your friends are sharing on social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, YouTube and Vimeo. Once connected, you can watch any of the over 30 million videos indexed by the Showyou search engine. With version 3.0, four months in the making, the focus is offering users a better way to find content and new ways to drill down deeper into their favorite videos and topics. The Showyou application now pulls in over 5,000,000 videos retrieved from users’ Facebook and Twitter feeds per day, and includes nearly 700,000,000 “social signals” (data from tweets, other metadata) in its search index. According to founder Mark Hall, Showyou is now handling a video volume of 150 videos per second and 5 million videos per day – numbers which represent the incredible amount of videos being socially shared across various networks. With the new version of the iPad app, the aim was to use this massive archive of data to improve Showyou’s social discovery mechanisms. In Showyou 3.0, users can tap on friends’ user icons within the app which will then launch a grid of the videos they’ve shared. Another update involves a new category grid feature that lets you see the top videos within a given topical area. You can also now browse the videos by social network (e.g. those shared on Facebook, Twitter, etc.), toggle between popular and recent videos, and browse through videos associated with Twitter hashtags, among other things. There are actually dozens of features in this new update, some of which involve user interface improvements which, like the above, are easier to see and use than they are to explain. Hall tries to simplify things, saying “we’ve gone from this 2D grid to being able to drill down into more specific grids for users… and that interaction is going to really fun.” (Well, yes it is.) But given the increasingly crowded social video discovery space, the question is not necessarily why is Showyou fun, but why is it the one to beat? Hall says that one of the app’s distinguishing features is its “immersive, engaging UI – it’s really unique.” The other thing is that the app is “really data-driven,” he says. “Doing that at scale, I don’t think anyone’s close to us,” he says, “And using that data in really intelligent ways to make the grid more responsive and intelligent is another area where we are excelling and will continue to excel. It’s not just a pretty interface, it’s a pretty interface powered by incredibly sophisticated data.” The updated version of Showyou is live now in the iTunes App Store here .

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Showyou Rolls Out All-New iPad App With Improved Video Discovery, Better Social Tools

LeVar Burton Snags @ReadingRainbow Twitter Handle To Push New Reading App

bestcbstore — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 05:55:25 +0000

While we nerds may best remember LeVar Burton as a VISOR-clad Starfleet officer, he also spent much of the 80s and 90s instilling in children an appreciation for reading. In fact, Burton is still stuck to the idea of encouraging childhood literacy — he launched a new company called RRKidz this past September that’s currently working on (among other things) a “disruptive” new iPad reading app. But when the time came to set up the all-important Twitter account to provide “the latest info on the upcoming relaunch of [Reading Rainbow] as an app,” he found that someone had already laid claim to the @readingrainbow handle. What’s more, the account owner hadn’t so much as made a peep in the last three years. Being a nice guy, Burton tried reaching out to the account owner but was apparently met with silence. So what’s a geek icon like LeVar Burton to do? Why, call on his fans of course. Burton tweeted the following last night to his 1.74 million followers and the official Twitter account: Dear @ twitter I'm trying to contact the individual who's sitting on @ ReadingRainbow but he hasn't Tweeted in #3YEARS Can you help? Thanks! — LeVar Burton (@levarburton) February 01, 2012 Ultimately, over 700 users ended up retweeting Burton’s call for help, which apparently prompted the folks at Twitter to leap into action. The @readingrainbow account ended up in Burton’s control within just over two hours of his initial plea. It’s a pretty impressive turnaround time considering some folks faced with similar situations have had to wait days before Twitter managed to make things work in their favor. Then again, most people can’t claim to have spent time debugging the warp core on a Galaxy-class starship. I crack me up. Incredibly lame pop culture references aside, Burton’s story isn’t exactly a new one. Though Twitter representatives declined to offer specific numbers when it comes to instances of name squatting, they lay out a clear stance against the practice in their (aptly named) Twitter Rules . It’s a potentially huge problem for Twitter — with growth still on the uptick , more and more people look at Twitter as a crucial source for real-time news and insight into other people’s lives. Squatters, be they inadvertent or not, have the potential to mar brands and personal reputations, and Twitter will have to keep their collective guards up if they want people and companies to keep up all that sharing.

Twitter’s Dick Costolo: “We’re Growing Faster Than We Have Ever Grown Before”

jos — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 08:09:46 +0000

Does Twitter need Google or does Google need Twitter? It’s a question complicated by recent events, such as the two companies not coming to an agreement to extend their previous partnership through which Google showed Tweets in search results. That deal wasn’t renewed,and then Google decided to promote its own Google+ results in search, which didn’t go over well with Twitter at all. Asked about this at by Peter Kafka at the D: Dive Into Media conference this evening, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo responded: “All of us look to Google as the shining light on the hill, a mission-driven company. We think when people are searching for things like a hashtag on a billboard, people will go to Google to look for them and we think Google should return the results they are looking for.” Costolo was visibly fuming. (Or maybe that was just his regular intense demeanor). But then asked whether Twitter can be successful without Google and all that lost search traffic, Costolo insisted: “We’re growing faster than we have ever grown before, irrespective of whatever Google or Facebook is doing. All of these services can co-exist.” Later on during the conversation, Costolo reported that Twitter’s advertising business is growing and engagement rates on Proomted Tweets, trends, and profiles is high. “We’ve figured out the business,” he says. “The advertising model is working, we just have to scale it.”

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Twitter’s Dick Costolo: “We’re Growing Faster Than We Have Ever Grown Before”

Twitter Posts Awful/Hilarious Recruiting Video To YouTube

Achilles — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 22:56:29 +0000

Twitter has posted a seriously awful/hilarious recruiting video to YouTube, which the company says was the product of last week’s “ Hack Week .” During this time, employees were able to take time away from their day-to-day work to collaborate on new ideas. Although it was only posted on Friday, the video has already seen over 400,000 views at the time of writing. Why so viral? Because it’s parodying the entire genre of startup recruiting videos by purposefully being bad. Really, really bad. So bad it’s funny. Or at least that’s the hope. The video has everything: amateurish effects, cheesy music, stilted speech, bad acting, poor production quality, and sayings like: “Man this is a sweet job. But working at Twitter isn’t just a sweet job, it’s a way of life – a way of life that’s like a sweet job.” Yeah, you pretty much have to watch this one. Credit/blame for the video goes to Ian Padgham and Twitter video producer Jeremy Briggs , and it even features a cameo from Dick Costolo, Twitter CEO. (As well as a version of him as a drawing with talking lips.) The inspiration for the video clearly comes from Saturday Night Live’s “Laser Cats” skits , a series of digital shorts that feature Andy Samberg and Bill Hader pitching a similarly disinterested Lorne Michaels their low-budget movies involving cats with lasers strapped to their heads. Swap in Costolo for Michaels, and you end up with this: While you’re watching, look for the Easter egg among the list of available jobs that scrolls by too fast to see. I won’t spoil it for you, but that particular job sounds seriously awesome. Hat tip: AdWeek

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Twitter Posts Awful/Hilarious Recruiting Video To YouTube

Twitter, Democracy, and Internet Freedom

vertical8 — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 04:00:31 +0000

Editor’s Note: Richard Fontaine , a Senior Advisor at the Center for a New American Security, is the co-author of Internet Freedom: A Foreign Policy Imperative in the Digital Age . Follow him @rhfontaine . Twitter has taken fire in recent days from activists and bloggers who fear that the company’s new censorship policies will muffle online freedom. News reports recall the ways in which protestors have had made use of Twitter to oppose dictatorships, and dissidents express concern that their ability to communicate will be harmed. The more immediate issue, however, may lie elsewhere. Twitter’s new policies demonstrate vividly the complicated relationship between Internet freedom and democratic government. The complications take on greater importance in light of America’s global Internet freedom strategy. The U.S. government began an active policy of promoting Internet freedom in the second George W. Bush term, and its efforts have accelerated in the Obama administration. The State Department devotes tens of millions of dollars to support technology and training for online dissidents, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has given a series of major speeches highlighting the issue. In one , she invoked Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s famous four freedoms, added a fifth — the “freedom to connect” — and observed that “the spread of information networks is forming a new nervous system for our planet.” It is easy to imagine two sides locked in pitched battle over Internet freedom: The democracies, embracing the freedom to connect for all, and the dictatorships, who censor, monitor, and disrupt. Indeed, pressing the cause of Internet freedom has thus far generally meant taking on autocracies, like Beijing and its Great Firewall, the Mubarak regime when it shuttered Egypt’s Internet during the 2011 protests, or Iran as it systematically monitors domestic dissidents. But it has become increasingly clear that autocracies alone do not challenge Internet freedom; democracies do as well. In the blog post explaining its new policy, Twitter hit on this truth, noting that the company will be active in “countries that have different ideas” than the United States “about the contours of freedom of expression.” All democracies restrict speech to some degree, and the forms of banned expression vary, ranging from child pornography (which is illegal virtually everywhere) to hate speech (banned in Europe and other places but not the United States) to country-specific expression (such as criticism of national heroes or monarchs). America, however, is an outlier. The United States recognizes some limits on free expression – slander, perjury, “fighting words” and certain other forms of expression are illegal online or off – but its commitment to free speech is nevertheless the most absolute of any major country. This puts it in potential conflict with fellow democracies about what constitute legitimate restrictions on online expression. Given Washington’s role as the world’s most active proponent of Internet freedom, it also complicates its efforts to rally fellow democracies behind the cause. The examples of differing democratic practice abound. Witness, for example, the recent request by Indian telecommunications minister Kapil Sibal to Google, Yahoo, Facebook and others that they remove content deemed insulting to leaders of the Indian Congress party. Mr. Sibal pledged that his government would take unspecified steps to act if the private sector would not. This month, during a hearing on a related case , an Indian high court justice said that, “like China,” the government could block websites entirely if their hosts do not remove offensive content. Turkey banned YouTube for two years because it refused to remove videos that Turkish courts deemed insulting to Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. Germany and other countries prohibit Holocaust denial online, and France bans the sale of Nazi paraphernalia over the Internet. Governments in Britain, Italy and Germany have established lists of blocked websites – generally those containing child pornography, hate speech, or online gambling platforms – even though those lists are not always transparent. The differences arise not only in national policy, but in international law as well. A number of European democracies, including Denmark, France, Slovenia and Switzerland, have signed an additional protocol to the European Convention on Cybercrime , which requires them criminalize such acts as using computers to distribute xenophobic material or insult people because of their race, religion, or ethnic origin. The United States faces its own potential contradictions. Secretary Clinton used one of her major addresses on Internet freedom to explain why the notion did not apply when Wikileaks published thousands of classified cables online. A district court recently ruled that, as part of its lawful intercept authorities, the Justice Department can seize Twitter feeds. And then there is the tremendous debate that has emerged over the Stop Online Privacy Act. The truth is that the U.S. government will always enforce some limits on free expression, and our political system will continually wrestle with where the limits should be drawn. But we should not allow this to undermine the important cause of promoting global Internet freedom. Authoritarian governments will inevitably attempt to shield themselves from criticism and pressure by pointing to democracies that ban online expression. Denying them the opportunity to do so successfully will require the United States and other to articulate, publicly and consistently, the critical distinction between the restrictions placed on online speech by democracies and the repression favored by many autocracies. The distinction rests not only in the kind of banned speech, but also in the process by which the decision to restrict it is made. True democracies bar forms of expression based on law and regulation, and they make decisions to do so in accordance with due process. Their pronouncements are generally transparent, with decision makers accountable to the law, to legislatures, and ultimately to the people, who can turn them out of office in periodic elections. There is a world of difference between a democracy banning speech on “security” grounds when the citizens know what the decision is, who made it, and how to change it, and a dictatorship banning its own “security”-infringing speech by autocratic fiat. It is crucial to make that distinction clear. Doing so can benefit America’s diplomatic effort to promote Internet freedom, and it may also help guide policymakers at home. Resolving tough new issues often involves complex considerations of technology, law, and fundamental principle. In remembering what makes a democratic approach to the Internet distinctive, we might avoid falling prey to measures that would suggest we are otherwise.

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Twitter, Democracy, and Internet Freedom

Facebook Stumbles — Is Anonymous Responsible? (Oops: No.)

A D M I N — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 06:56:56 +0000

Update: Looks the tweets claiming responsibility were just a prank . Sorry about that. Is Facebook the next target for activist hacker group Anonymous? Depends on who you ask. The group went on the warpath last week following the takedown of file-sharing site Megaupload, with attacks that targeted the Department of Justice website, the MPAA, the RIAA, and others. Then, a few days ago, the group seemed to post a video on YouTube , claiming that Facebook would be next, with an attack on Jan. 28. However, the AnonOps Twitter account called it a “mass media lie”. Then, at 5:15pm today, we received several emails at around 5:15pm Pacific saying that Facebook was down, and several TechCrunch members had trouble accessing the site too (others said they haven’t had any problems). The YourAnonNews Twitter account wrote , “cough cough, uh, looks like http://facebook.com is having a slight accessibility problem. #Anonymous”. Strangely, however, the AnonOps account took the opposite stance, writing , “#Facebook.com is NOT under denial of service attack. STOP LYING.” It seeEither way, Facebook seems to be back up. Or as YourAnonNews put it , “You are now free to play Farmville and Mobwars.”

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Facebook Stumbles — Is Anonymous Responsible? (Oops: No.)

Someone Finally Makes “Shit Silicon Valley Says”

bestcbstore — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 03:25:33 +0000

After an onslaught of “Shit [blank] Says” videos in my Facebook Newsfeed, I appealed to Twitter yesterday, surprised that the industry that invented YouTube hadn’t weighed in on the phenomenon. Little did I know that husband and wife team Tom Conrad and Kate Imbach were already on it, coming up with the idea on Monday morning and shooting yesterday, with no script (Imbach just said random techy things and Conrad spliced them together into this in edit). While I really like “I saw it on Techmeme ” and “Who throws a party in Palo Alto?” (Seriously though, who does that?) avid TechCrunch reader Hillel Fuld volunteered his top 13. “I don’t think you can call that a platform yet.” “I already reblogged that. I reblogged it AND RTed it. I RTed it, reblogged it, and checked into it.” “This app is so elegant.” “It’s stealth so I can’t say too too much right now.” “Ashton invested.” “I don’t really get Tumblr.” “He had his first exit when he was 9.” “He made an Instagram for hamburgers.” “Airbnb for Facebook games.” “A Netflix for Youtube.” “I check in on Path, and then I send it to Foursquare. I also send it to Tumblr, and Tumblr auto posts to Twitter and Facebook. Then you can go onTwitter, RT and share it on Facebook”. “Do they even have an API yet?” “I saw it on TechCrunch” “I heard myself explaining my Path / Instagram / Tumblr / Twitter / Facebook / FourSquare cross-posting strategy and decided it was time for someone to take us all down a peg or two,” says 8Tracks Marketing VP Imbach. Interestingly enough, Conrad also works at a music-focused tech startup — as CTO of Pandora. Sidenote:I’m currently shooting the shit with another tech reporter, making up our own versions in Skype: “It’s viral,”””Our business model *is* data,””We met at Stanford” and “We’re totally hockeysticking right now.” It’s a pretty fun game. Full list (via reader Dwight Burks) below: Are you cancelling cable? I don’t really think you can call it a platform yet… I already reblogged that. I reblogged it and retweeted it. I retweeted it, reblogged it, and I checked in to it. This app is so elegant Are you gonna get the new Kindle? I saw it on TechCrunch. I met him at LeWeb. I met him at Burning Man. Wait, no, I met him at Davos. Was it Davos, or LeWeb? I get those two confused. Or maybe it was the Lobby. I don’t know. There was a beach. It’s stealth, so I can’t say too, too much right now. Ashton invested. How is this different from Facebook? They don’t even have a Foursquare venue for their apartment. I don’t really ‘get’ Tumblr. Is the Internet down? Michelle Obama invested. Did you see this thing on Quora about product cycles? I didn’t even finish high school. He’s like 14. He had is first exit when he was 9. Think of it like an Instagram for Hamburgers. He’s a genius. It’s like Pandora for cats. Are you gonna get the new iPhone? I think Bono invested. I got an MBA from Harvard The whole Royal Family invested. It’s like AirBnb for Facebook games. I saw it on Techmeme. Who has a party in Palo Alto? Think of it as a Netflix for YouTube. How is this different from Rdio? I have such an amazing team. Do you have an iPhone charger? I miss seasons. I saw it on Laughing Squid. I check in on Path, and then I send it to Four Square. I also send it to Tumblr and then Tumblr auto-posts to Twitter and Facebook. Then you can go on Twitter or you can re-tweet it and share on Facebook. Have you seen Helvetica. Do they even have an API yet? He dropped out of middle school to start his company. Can you just call in Uber?

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Someone Finally Makes “Shit Silicon Valley Says”

Biz Stone, 500 Startups And Others Put $1M In CRM For Web Businesses Intercom

Budowniczy425 — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 03:00:03 +0000

CRM and 500 Startups incubated company Intercom has raised a seed round of $1 million from angel investors including twitter co-founder Biz Stone, Huddle founder Andy McLoughlin, Dan Martell, 500 Startups and Digital Garage. Intercom’s customer relationship management tool (CRM) is designed specifically for web businesses. The web-based SaaS features Google Analytics-like integration so that its database of customers is always automatically up-to-date, tracking every interaction. With its flexible filtering function, users can be segmented into groups for whom the business has different goals (i.e. converting free users into paying customers). Here’s how the startup differs from the standard CRMs. Intercom get its data from a JavaScript snippet that users add to the applications, similar to Google Analytics. As a result of this, the platform automatically learns a businesses’ customer base, and how they use a product. Intercom includes the ability to contact customers directly from the product itself, so if you see a high-profile user signing up, greeting him with a personal message in the app is super simple. You can also create messages based on rules within the app. For example “show users this message when they have spent more than $100″ , or “show all users with more than 1,000 twitter followers this message”. In order to figure out who a businesses’ users are, Intercom will track activity data of how often customers use an app, business data pertaining to what plan are they on and/or how much money have they spent, social network profile data and communications and contact data. All of this data, combined with the features mentioned above, will help online businesses convert trial users to paid accounts, and to grow a long-term relationship with customers, explains CEO and co-founder Eoghan McCabe. For example, beta customers like GitHub are using Intercom’s messaging features to learn about and engage with their customers—individually and automatically, at scale. The Intercom product, which has been in private beta, currently has 1,500 active users from 500 companies, tracking and communicating with over 1 million customers. “Intercom brings real human relationships back into the picture for web businesses and their customers,” says McCabe. “As ‘software eats the world,’ in the words of Marc Andreessen, and all businesses become web businesses, genuinely personal and personalized customer service is the most effective, long-lasting way for companies to differentiate their offering and fight commodification.” McCabe and his co-founders Des Traynor, Ciaran Lee, and David Barrett all hail from Ireland and previously founders created error tracking service Exceptional, which was acquired in 2011. Today, Intercom will be available to the public and will be free until the first full version of the product launches this summer.

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Biz Stone, 500 Startups And Others Put $1M In CRM For Web Businesses Intercom