Category: Social Media

Twitter Turns 7, Boasts 200 Million Users

It’s Twitter’s seventh birthday, and the social network has two reasons to celebrate: It’s also reached its 200 million active user milestone.

Twitter is now boasting some big user numbers, a 60 million user bump since last year. Now 400 million tweets are being sent per day.

Twitter has come a long way since Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s co-founder, published the first tweet “just setting up my Twitter” back in 2006. It started out as a microblogging site by Dorsey and co-founders, Florian Webb, Noah Glass, Evan Williams, and Biz Stone who could never have imagined the cultural, business, and societal impact that Twitter would have on Internet users today. There are some details surrounding the founding of Twitter (then Twttr) that are hotly contested. Some of its co-founders aren’t even recognized for their role with building out the foundation of Twitter, back when it was just a side project at once doomed and now defunct podcasting company Odeo.

However, Twitter has also played a more serious role; for many people, it helped shape global events such as the Arab Spring and the responses to the 2010 Haiti earthquake and 2011 Japanese tsunami.

Top Twitter moments also include: Barack Obama’s tweet after winning his second presidency, the first off-Earth message from the International Space Station and, more recently, the coverage of the papacy – when activity reached an astonishing 130,000 tweets per minute during the announcement of the new Pope.

Today Twitter released this video to commemorate its seventh birthday.

March 21, 2013
Facebook Pushing Android App Update Outside Play Store

There are reports that Facebook is pushing updates to its Android App outside of the Google Play Store, meaning users would still install the app initially through Play, but updates after that would come straight from Facebook. This functionality would only be for Android users, because this sort of thing would be impossible on iOS.

As Liliputing first reported, users are receiving a persistent notification letting them know that an update is ready, and on clicking the notification are taken directly to the Facebook app to download the new version, known as 141046.

This Facebook update is reportedly talking about adding some new and seemingly expected features such as being able to change your profile picture as well as being able to download files without notification.

The updates would only be downloaded over WiFi, and won’t use your data plan.

According to Facebook product manager Ragavan Srinivasan, “We’re working quickly to improve Facebook for Android and want to make sure everyone is using the best version of our app. You’ll experience these updates when you are on Wi-Fi, and they won’t rely on your data plan.”

One reason for this update to be pushed outside of the Play Store could be that Facebook is just trying it out, and it isn’t the final version yet.

It is interesting to note that Google’s terms of service does not give permission for apps “that cause users to unknowingly download or install applications from sources outside of Google Play.” Will the legal eagles there deem Facebook as crossing the line this time around?

March 16, 2013
Skype iOS App Updated With “All New Calling Experience”

Skype has just received an update that adds a better designed calling experience along with some other enhancements and fixes. If you frequently use Skype for messaging, the update also brings with it quicker ways to clear out messaging histories.

Skype for iPad v4.6 is compatible with the iPad, iPad 2, iPad mini and the latest iPad with Retina Display. The app has been updated to include a new calling experience. Users can mark all their recent chats as “read” in a matter of a few taps. One-to-one chats appear in the correct order in the app now.

The updated iPhone app too includes the above mentioned features. Skype for iPhone v4.6 is compatible with the iPhone 3G, iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPhone 5, plus 2nd, 3rd and 4th generation iPod touch. iOS 5.0 or later is required on all devices.

Skype describes its new interface as a “beautiful new calling experience.” And it’s true, the new look is cleaner and more modern than before. Though functionality-wise, it’s not that different.

[toggle_box title=”Change Log” width=”Width of toggle box”]

What’s New In This Version:

? Beautiful new calling experience

? Mark all your recent chats as read with just a few taps.

? General fixes and improvements

?One-to-one chats now appear in the correct order.

[/toggle_box]

You can download Skype from the App Store for free.

March 8, 2013
Instagram Now Has 100 Million Users

Instagram has officially announced it’s hit the 100 million active users mark.

The social photo sharing app remains the most prevalent network for sharing images worldwide. Launched in October 2010, the platform has seen exponential growth since. The app actually reached the 100 million registered users mark by September 2012, according to Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, which purchased Instagram at a $1 billion pricetag in April of last year. Today’s 100 million users number refers to those who post images via the app on a monthly basis.

[quote]”It’s easy to see this as an accomplishment for a company,” co-founder Kevin Systrom wrote in a blog post, “but I think the truth is that it’s an accomplishment for our community.”[/quote]

Even after the whole controversy a few months ago where many misread a change in Instagram’s terms of service as saying user photos would be used in advertisements, the network continues to grow like crazy.

Instagram is only available on two platforms, iOS and Android, with a third possibly coming in the form of BlackBerry 10. Whether it will be as a port of the Android version (more likely) or as a native app (far less likely) remains to be seen. There is no sign of Instagram for Windows Phone, nor has the company alluded to it.

February 27, 2013
Facebook For Android Update Brings Better Cover Photos Management

The official Facebook for Android application has been upgraded in the Google Play Store to make life easier on those who tend to change their profile cover photo quite often. Users can now make the change right from their timeline instead of having to dig through settings and go through the grueling, nerve-wrecking task of pressing button upon button upon button.

No one ever accused Facebook of being swift or thorough with its app updates, but they’re at least usually very welcome when they arrive. Back in 2011, the social network introduced ‘Timeline’, the now-mandatory profile layout that gives you one giant photo at the top, with a secondary profile picture in the bottom-left corner. Up until recently, you couldn’t change your cover photo on mobile. Now, in version 2.2, you can.

Again, not a huge feature but certainly appreciated. We’d love Facebook to redesign the app or, barring that, improve the performance of the one we have. But the company clearly has different priorities. That said, today’s upgrade is waiting for you in the Google Play Store so get over there to check it out.

Temple Run 2 for Android has also been updated, the developers have added the ability to restore the coin doubler if you happened to have re-installed the app on your device and purchased the power up.

[Phandroid]

February 15, 2013
American Express Launches Twitter Shopping, Buy Through Hashtags!

Have you ever skimmed your Twitter feed and thought, wow, if only I could buy an Amazon Kindle just by replying to a Tweet? No? Me, neither. But American Express is making it happen anyway.

Starting Monday, AmEx customers who sync their cards can buy items if they use the right hashtag. The first such item is a $25 AmEx gift card, which will go for $15 if you tweet #BuyAmexGiftCard25. Other offers will be rolled out on Wednesday Feb. 13 at noon EST including an Amazon Kindle Fire HD for $149.99 (a $50 discount), an Xbox Controller for $29.99 (a discount of about $10) and an Xbox 360 4GB console with a three-month Xbox LIVE Subscription and two game tokens for $179.99 (which is the price of the console without those extras.)

If consumers opt for those items and use the correct hashtags, then they will get a verification from @AmexSync, which will contain a confirmation hashtag. Cardholders then have 15 minutes to tweet the confirmation hashtag to confirm their purchase. If they do so, the item will be shipped to their home within two days for free.

That could generate a chunk of payments for Twitter if it takes a slice of those purchases. But the service, with more than 200 million users worldwide, is also beginning to ratchet up prices for reaching users: last week it raised the price of a “promoted trend” – visible to many users as they look to see what topics are generating the most interest – to$200,000 per day.

Twitter generated an estimated $350m in revenues in 2012, and its growth and increasing interest among advertisers seeking to place promoted tweets and trends could double that in 2013.

February 13, 2013
Twitter App Update Brings Changes To Search And Discover

Twitter has updated its official mobile app on iOS and Android with features that should make it easier for users to discover new content.

The most major addition comes from the Discover tab, which now consolidates tweets, activity, trends, and suggested users to follow in a single timeline, which sounds useful and not overly cluttered at all.

Search offers a bonus treat for iPhone users with the latest update, offering a persistent search icon next to the compose tweet button at the top of the app. The search button was already part of the Android and iPad Twitter apps, but Twitter has seen fit to let the iPhone app catch up with the other versions.

To bring a little more clarity to the Discover tab there are also now previews for user activity and trends at the top of the tab, which users can tap to see those lists independently.

In the Connect tab, the default view will now show new followers, retweets, and mentions. Previously, the default view would only be mentions, but users can adjust that setting

Users can also now click on URL links in tweets directly from the timeline, rather than going through the extra step of expanding a tweet before opening links. This was a no brainer and we’re glad to see it finally arrive for their mobile app.

The Twitter Play Store listing also mentioned improved support for Arabic, Farsi and Hebrew. As well as miscellaneous bug fixes and performance improvements.

[Tech Radar]

February 7, 2013
Facebook Turns 9 Today!

The few Ivy Leaguers privileged enough to join “Thefacebook” nine years ago would hardly recognize the site today. It celebrates its birthday today!

Zuckerberg started with an invite only Ivy League college website, from where he took Facebook to a different level. These nine years for Facebook brought many changes to the social media platform bringing in features like social networking games, business pages and of course relationship status.

In nine years, the company has overshadowed the mobile platforms for not just social networking but also messaging. Change being its fixed feature, Facebook came up with an application called Poke which self-destroys message once it’s read. Facebook has proved its worth when it reached to a remarkable milestone of one billion users which many biggies like My space, Twitter and Orkut had only dreamt about.

According to a report by GlobalWebIndex, in Q4 alone last year, Facebook saw 693 million users globally, with a growth rate of 33 per cent.

In 2012 Facebook floated its IPO and the company went public with a peak market capitalisation of over $104 billion. The hype was short-lived and the stock of the company soon took a battering.

In January, this year Facebook announced the launch of Graph Search that allows users to search the site for photos, places, likes, people on the site.

February 4, 2013
Facebook Has Knocked Out 37% Of Spam Accounts Since June 2012

While spam accounts are obviously still an issue on Facebook, they have been able to make a considerable dent in the amount of fake accounts that are registered. Since June 2012, Facebook has been able to remove 37% of spammers, bringing the total amount of spam accounts down to about 9.5 million compared to 15.1 million in mid-2012.

There are millions of spam users still on Facebook, according to the Facebook Q4 2012 earnings report, about 1.3% of their monthly users are spammers.

The spam fighting states were discovered on page 23 of the company’s Q4 2012 earnings release. Facebook refers to the spam accounts as “undesirable accounts” and says they “represent user profiles that we determine are intended to be used for purposes that violate our terms of service, such as spamming.”

Spam accounts have a tendency to create fake data on the social network by flooding accounts with spam photos, links and other information. Because Facebook relies on user behavior to tweak its advertising and sales platforms removing those accounts is critical to the company’s future successes.

Facebook urges all of its users to report spam accounts when they are spotted. You can report those accounts by following the photo listed at the top of this post. Simply click on the pop down menu next to the message icon and choose “Report/Block…”

What do you think? Is spam hurting your user experience on Facebook?

January 31, 2013
Twitter’s Vine App Turn Vile As Pornographic Clips Show Up

Since Twitter’s video capture application Vine was released for iPhone last week, plenty of users have been looking for interesting ways to utilise its six-second clip taking. There are some clever short animations, skilled cutting sequences and more. Oh, and of course there’s porn. Lot’s of it.

As with Twitter, Vine users can tag their clips with hashtags, and it doesn’t take much searching to find “#sex” and “#porn” well populated with the sort of content that wouldn’t be appropriate for younger Viners. Apple, for instance, rates the Vine app as suitable for those aged 12 or over, calling it out for infrequent or mild suggestive themes, nudity, or sexual content, though that description is at odds with the hardcore pornography readily available today.

In response, Twitter has said it has a two-stage complaints system which relies on users to initially report anything they deem inappropriate. Questionable content such as ”nudity, violence, or medical procedures” can be flagged within the app or on the website, the social company told Business Insider, at which point any future viewings will be preceded by a warning message.

However, that flag will also trigger a review by the Vine team itself, which will decide whether or not the content should be left in place or removed. Vine users can also have their accounts terminated, Twitter points out, if the material does not meet with the terms of service.

This may be enough for some, but Apple may take a tougher stance. Apple has a strict policy on applications that allow access to graphic sexual content, having removed picture app 500px for allowing users to see pornographic images in a similar way to Vine.

It will certainly be interesting to see what the Cupertino company will do about it. And, if it decides to remove the app, how Twitter will respond.

Via: businessinsider.com

January 28, 2013
France Bans the Word ‘Hashtag’

#RIP the hashtag. It had a good run, August 2007 – January 2013. At least it’s still alive and respected in every other country apart from France.

It’s a dark day for the Gallic Internet, as the French Government drive to preserve their language by altering the settled will of the online community. The hashtag will no longer be used in official communications or papers.The replacement term will be mot-dièse.

The decision was made by a government office, the Commission Générale de Terminologie et de Néologie, which is tasked with inventing French-language equivalents to foreign-language terms found popping up in France.

While Twitter users in France won’t be penalized for referring to hashtags, all official French government legislation and correspondence will be required to refer to mot-dièses instead of hashtags. Back in 2003, the same commission mandated French citizens refer to email as courriel with some success. Compared to other Western governments, France actively takes an interventionist approach to Internet use within the country: Various protectionist Internet laws have been proposed, including taxing Internet companies for data mining. All this is in addition to paternalist policies surrounding the French language to stop cross-cultural fusion like le hamburger. Maybe they’re just nostalgic for the days of the Minitel?

[Forbes]

January 26, 2013
New MySpace goes live, Along With Exclusive New Justin Timberlake Single

New Myspace — with its drastically different redesign — has left invite-only mode, opening up the revamped social network to the public.

The landing page for New.Myspace.com shows a dapper Justin Timberlake and promotes his new “Suit and Tie” single that he released late Sunday night.

Timberlake, who took an ownership stake in the company in 2011, had given the world a sneak peek of New Myspace in September, but now anyone can use the refurbished network.

The tie-in with Justin Timberlake’s new single is bound to drive considerable traffic back to MySpace. Whether or not these new users will hang around after they’ve heard the track is anyone’s guess, but MySpace’s new interface and fresh design might prove to be a refreshing change from the dull blue hues of Facebook and it’s spam ridden newsfeed.

Facebook is a social network first and foremost, with music discovery bolted on the side and pushed into the newsfeed, thanks mainly to Spotify. The new MySpace, on the other hand, puts the theme of music discovery front and centre. With social networking features used more as tools for artists to contribute to the network, rather than for general users to post status updates and pictures of cats.

It’s quite clear to see that MySpace is sticking with music as the focus of their service. The new design offers greater potential for artists to promote themselves and interact with their online audience, compared to plain Facebook pages and text-centric Twitter feeds.

The site ranked as the 46th most-visited Web property in a report released by analysis firm comScore in December, down from 43rd in a list released in August.

According to the report, the site logged 27 million unique visits in November 2012, behind Facebook’s 148 million, Twitter’s 39.5 million and Tumblr’s 29.7 million. It did, however, beat out Pinterest, which was ranked 50th with around 26 million unique visitors.

January 15, 2013
Hashtag Declared 2012 Word of the Year

These days it seems like everyone goes around declaring the “word of the year,” but the tradition began with the American Dialect Society, which met last night in Boston for its 23rd annual Word of the Year vote. It’s a spirited event, where the members of the society—a group of linguists, lexicographers, and other professional language scholars—argue for their choices.

The American Dialect Society has selected its Word of the Year for 2012, and the winner was a bit of a surprise. It wasn’t fiscal cliff, the ubiquitous term in the news from Capitol Hill. And it wasn’t YOLO, the youthful acronym for “You Only Live Once” that quickly rose (and just as quickly fell) this past year. No, the ultimate champion was that mainstay of the Twittersphere, hashtag.

A hashtag is a convention used on Twitter to organize conversations, mark topics, or make witty commentary, created by appending a word or phrase with the hash symbol (#) preceding it.Word of the Year is interpreted in its broader sense as “vocabulary item” — not just words but phrases. The words or phrases do not have to be brand-new, but they have to be newly prominent or notable in the past year.

This isn’t the first time an Internet term has gotten the nod: “Tweet” was declared word of the year by the group in 2010, while “Google” was then-named the word of the decade. In a nod to the worldwide Occupy movements, the group declared “Occupy” to be last year’s word of the year.

January 6, 2013
WhatsApp Pushed Record 18 Billion Messages On December 31st

WhatsApp has a message for its users — a lot of them.

The mobile messaging service announced today that it set a WhatsApp record on New Year’s Eve, processing 18 billion messages on the last day of the year. The company said it delivered 7 billion inbound messages and 11 billion outbound messages, surpassing its previous record of 10 billion messages processed in one day back in August.

In comparison, Apple revealed in October that its iMessage text service had delivered about 300 billion texts sent by iOS users during the previous 12 months — an average of less than a billion a day.

WhatsApp is an ad-free, paid service intended to replace your text messaging plan. Generally it works out cheaper, particularly when sending messages overseas, because it uses WiFi or mobile networks to carry texts instead.

It’s available for Android, BlackBerry, iPhone, Windows Phone and Nokia phones.

Its success hasn’t gone unnoticed – according to rumours published last year by Techcrunch and others WhatsApp might still be facing a potential acquisition by Facebook.

WhatsApp denies that Facebook has made an attempt to buy the service, but with this kind of success it can’t be out of the question that several companies would be sizing up a potential takeover.

January 4, 2013
Good Riddance! Zynga Shuts Down 11 Games Including PetVille And Mafia Wars 2

December was a tough month for Zynga, the company pulled the plug on 11 games, as the gaming company reallocates resources to more successful titles as well as creating new ones. While this is an important move for Zynga, it couldn’t have been easy, and it has to be even harder for the gamers who spent months or in some cases years playing these games and now have nothing to show for it.

Zynga had a brilliant start by launching titles after titles and grew as Facebook grew. Everything seemed to go great till the IPO. But recently Zynga shares prices have been plummeting. Investors feared it had become bloated, free virality on Facebook had been curtailed, competitors were proliferating, and the shift of Facebook users to mobile from Zynga’s stronghold on the desktop canvas would break the company. Zynga’s share price is down 3.52% to $2.33 from its $10 IPO price a year ago.

Those that weren’t shut down or pulled from the app store already no longer accept new sign ups and will stop altogether next month. Here’s the full list:

PetVille – Shut down December 30th
Mafia Wars 2 – Shut down December 30th
FishVille – Shut down December 5th
Vampire Wars – Shut down December 5th
Treasure Isle – Shut down December 5th
Indiana Jones Adventure World – Closed to new players, shuts down January 14th
Mafia Wars Shakedown – Pulled from app stores
Forestville – Pulled from app stores
Montopia – Shut down December 21st
Mojitomo – Pulled from app stores
Word Scramble Challenge – Pulled from app stores

To numb the pain and try to get gamers hooked on titles that will keep running, Zynga offered people who played FishVille, Adventure World, and some other titles a free bonus package of virtual goods in one of its flagship games CastleVille, ChefVille, FarmVille 2, Mafia Wars, or YoVille.

This might be good news for most Facebook users who were irritated by the repeated requests from these games!

December 31, 2012