Nicole Wong, a deputy counsel at Google responsible for high profile censorship cases, has moved on to Twitter. She follows several other Googlers who have made the move in recent months. Read more »
Fake Twitter accounts for Nate Silver, Diane Sawyer and Mitt Romney offered humorous moments on election night — but one day they may also be important sources for political historians. Read more »
It might be a marketing tactic, but it’s certainly a refreshing one: Buffer, the app best known for scheduling your tweets and Facebook status updates, candidly explains how they’ve been profitable so far and why they aren’t necessarily looking for more fundraising right now. Read more »
Evan Williams, the founder of Blogger, Twitter and, more recently, The Obvious Corporation, discussed during GigaOM RoadMap 2012 how starting a tech company has changed in the past dozen years. Read more »
Crowd labor is outsourced information work that can be provisioned automatically. It’s ideally, inexpensive, on demand, and elastic. Platforms providing such services are on the rise in 2012, promising customers lower labor costs in the short term and higher-quality output in the long term. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Twitter has changed the way it responds to DMCA copyright notices. Rather than removing tweets, it is “withdrawing” them instead. This helps show when and why tweets go missing, and also brings new transparency to the DMCA process. Read more »
In this week’s episode, we look at the Hurricane Sandy’s impact on social media and the damage caused to the web’s infrastructure as well as the big changes that happened in Apple’s executive ranks. Read more »
An MIT researcher says he has created an algorithm that can identify Twitter trends hours before the service can itself. If the algorithm works as he says, it could help Twitter — and many more companies — make a lot of money. Read more »
What should be done with Twitter prankster @ComfortablySmug? The topic sparked quite a discussion among GigaOM staffers this morning, and we decided to share it with you all, thinking you might want a glimpse into how we think about our world. Read more »
Brand advertising’s focus on cross-platform media measurement has grown dramatically in the past five years. Within the next 36 months cross-platform digital video advertising will standardize, driven by the shift in media dollars to online viewing and the adoption of the Making Measurement Make Sense (3MS) initiative. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
A New York man who used Twitter to send fake news reports during Hurricane Sandy is one of the city’s biggest jerks. But should he also face criminal charges? Read more »
The purpose of the on-screen guide has shifted. By connecting the guide to content-recommendation engines and advertising platforms, service providers and connected-TV device manufacturers are using the EPG as an access point for understanding consumers and reaching out to them to own the living room. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Critics of social media like to focus on how much fake news gets circulated during events like Hurricane Sandy, but Twitter and other services are also quick to correct those kinds of reports, and have become part of an expanding ecosystem of real-time news. Read more »
Journalists like Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward have questioned whether social media or the web have anything to contribute to journalism, but the case of Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong shows alternative sources like blogs and Twitter can play a powerful role in breaking news. Read more »
The folks at News.me closed their doors to future iOS downloads on Wednesday, saying they would no longer attempt to compete with Twitter in the curation space as the social network closes down on third-party requirements. In other words, another Twitter app bites the dust. Read more »
EMC’s Greenplum division hopes to encourage users of its Chorus big data application to reach out to the Kaggle community of data scientists to do real-world work. The company also inked partnerships with Gnip and Tableau and open-sourced a version of Chorus. Read more »
Posting to Twitter from someone’s funeral might be seen as inappropriate, but to me it seemed like the perfect way to honor my friend — and it also allowed others to feel as though they were part of the ceremony even though they couldn’t be there. Read more »
Social media technologies continue to permeate marketing and enterprise collaboration, even if investors felt let down in the third quarter by their consumer-facing businesses like Facebook, Groupon, and Zynga. So B2B technology offerings in support of marketing and collaboration will soon steal all the social tech attention. This quarterly wrap-up analyzes these events, and provides a near-term outlook for trends, technologies and companies to watch in the next 18 to 24 months. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Tapbots explained the $20 price tag on its heavily anticipated Mac Twitter client by blaming Twitter’s “token limits,” set forth this past summer, which effectively cap how many users their Mac client can have. Read more »
First Reddit and now Twitter have had to confront issues related to freedom of speech recently, and decide which way they are going to go when it comes to protecting it. As social media becomes more mainstream, such battles will likely become more frequent. Read more »
The third quarter saw many parts of the traditional media business in flux. Other developments included the rollout of new device-based content ecosystems, red flags and red ink for traditional consumer electronics makers, and a resurgence of consumer purchases of movies. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Datasift, the UK company that has access to the Twitter firehose analyzes petabytes of tweets and ships terabytes of insights around the world. And the infrastructure needs to keep up. That and dark social were topics of interest today at Structure:Europe. Read more »
Twitter continued its buying spree by acquiring mobile app development platform Cabana for an undisclosed price. Cabana will help Twitter’s developer create new experiences for the Twitter ecosystem. Read more »
Twitter CEO Dick Costolo says the most powerful feature of Twitter is the way it can show us what others watching the same event are thinking, and that the best use of this feature is as a companion to a televised event like the Olympics. Read more »
When the man at the center of the ‘Twitter Joke Trial’ had his conviction quashed, it seemed some sanity had returned to the British legal system’s approach to online offensiveness. But that’s not how things worked out. Read more »
Your hunches about the Twitter population are probably correct. A new study by an analytics firm of 36 million users confirms some assumptions but also present some intriguing facts about ordinary Twitter users. Read more »
The number of female executive at a startup correlates to its success, according to a new study. We take a look at 10 popular startups to see how many women are in their executive ranks. Read more »
The way that social-media tools like Twitter, Foursquare and Instagram have changed our lives is often taken for granted, but the way that they can inject some much-needed serendipity into our lives is often overlooked — even by those who use them a lot. Read more »
Win or lose, it usually doesn’t cost a lot for patent trolls to bring spurious lawsuits against companies and technologists. In this guest post, Ben Lee of Twitter argues that it’s time for trolls to bear more of the costs they create with baseless lawsuits. Read more »
Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey was brought back into the company last year to be its chief product visionary, but his role appears to have been dramatically reduced. So who is Twitter’s product visionary now, and what does that mean for the future of the service? Read more »
This week’s flap over Big Bird shows how unexpected digital media events can provide companies with amazing advertising opportunities — so long as they are nimble enough to make and buy ads in a matter of hours. Read more at paidContent »
The debate between President Obama and Mitt Romney was the most tweeted-about event in U.S. political history — but is the kind of real-time commentary and instant analysis that Twitter provides a good thing or a bad thing for the political process or society as a whole? Read more »
The service, which lets users search for Instagram photos by location, had a great start – for a day or so. With sudden popularity hitting the ceiling of API limits, it’s just as well Worldcam is a side-project. Read more »
Although Twitter is pushing itself as a platform to gauge public opinion around popular events — including the upcoming presidential election — not everyone is buying the hype. Stats about sentiment and tweet velocity are certainly interesting, but man cannot live on tweet data alone. Read more »
Prismatic founder Bradford Cross doesn’t come from a traditional media background — he is a data scientist who specializes in machine learning — but what he is doing with content recommendations says a lot about how the media business is evolving and what the future might look like. Read more »
New research from the Pew Center into news consumption habits shows that the impact of mobile and social continues to grow. Almost twice as many users got news from a mobile device compared with 2010, and almost three times as many got news from a social network. Read more »
News that Neil Young is on Twitter led thousands of exultant fans to follow him. It’s too bad, then, that Young appears to have nothing to do with the account. The fake hype reflects badly on both the company and the musician. Read more »
Welcome to the fast-growing world of work media, a class of social tools oriented toward the needs of enterprises. Their emergence is due to the shifting expectations of an increasingly social workforce and the sense that older approaches to work like email are arguably approaching obsolescence. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
The Internet has a new advocate for greener technologies: Evan Williams, CEO of Obvious Corp and former CEO of Twitter. At the kick off to Climate Week in New York on Monday, Williams called for reframing the discussion away from talking about climate. Read more »
Former executives from the NBA and the NFL say that teams and leagues should encourage players to use Twitter — even if some foreseeable headaches occur. The marketing benefits are worth it and the number of gaffes may subside as players get used to the medium. Read more »
