The study, entitled “Mapping the global Twitter heartbeat,” was published in the university’s peer-reviewed journal First Monday in May, and used what is known as the Twitter “Decahose” — which is made up of one-tenth of all the messages sent across the network. Access to the data was provided by Gnip, one of the companies that is licensed to sell Twitter’s full firehose, as part of a demonstration project with computer maker Silicon Graphics called “Twitter Heartbeat.”

For that demonstration, the researchers used the Decahose — which streamed more than 1.5 billion tweets from 71 million unique users during the period from October 23 to November 30 of 2012, an average of 38 million tweets a day — to show a real-time map of global discussion about topics such as Hurricane Sandy and the U.S. federal election. As part of that project, the team created one of the largest databases of global tweets with geographic data included, based both on GPS data and user profiles.

In addition to some interesting data about where most geo-located tweets come from (Jakarta in Indonesia and New York City were two of the top locations), the study looked at what the Twitter data shows about the way that social networks have changed the way we communicate. In many ways, the researchers said, networks like Twitter have “created a world in which a person may speak to another on the other side of the planet with just a few millisecond delay, effectively removing the geographic barrier.”

“Users on Twitter communicate with others both near them and half a world away, illustrating that the role of physical proximity in communication seems to be reduced in the era of social media.”

These maps of real-time connections produced for the Illinois study reminded me of similar maps created with Facebook data, such as the one that Facebook intern Paul Butler produced in 2010 (which appears below) — or the one that data researcher Pete Warden created by scraping Facebook user profiles, a fascinating map of connections that he later had to delete after the social network threatened to sue him for breaching its terms of service.

Although Twitter CEO Dick Costolo likes to talk about the service as the “pulse of the planet,” it’s worth noting that most of the world’s population still doesn’t tweet — and even most of those who do aren’t using it all the time: Twitter has about 550 million users, or about eight percent of the world’s population, but the top five percent account for almost half of all tweets sent. Of the sample the U of Illinois researchers looked at, one quarter tweeted only once.

In addition, the study notes that only 8 percent of all users had location data available. About one percent of all users surveyed accounted for more than two-thirds of all geo-referenced tweets, showing that geo-located are created by what the researchers called “an even more extreme subset of users” than overall tweets. They noted that studies relying on these tweets alone would have a “skewed view of the Twitterverse, especially over short periods of time.”

That said, however, it’s fascinating to see tangible evidence of how social networks like Twitter can help to erase geographical barriers and connect users around the globe in real time.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Dunechaser

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But one replacement product that I wouldn’t use? An RSS news reader from Facebook.

In one sense, it wouldn’t be surprising for Facebook to launch an RSS reader at its press event next Thursday in Menlo Park, as some people have speculated. Anyone using Google Reader has to find a replacement by July 1, and it’s still a pretty wide-open market. Products like Feedly seem to have a head start, but there’s still time for someone to roll out a new product and win over users.

We’ve seen that Facebook has no problem quickly launching products to try to disrupt a growing market, even if it’s not a sure thing they’ll succeed. (Just look at Poke, the company’s challenge to Snapchat.) And between the company’s launch of hashtags last week to improve the real-time nature of the news feed (even if I think hashtags are better saved for ironic conversation), and the addition of new tabs for following people on the new News Feed, Facebook clearly has ambitions to be more of a resource for news. (After all, brands and advertisers love the real-time nature of constantly updated live events and news.)

But as a hardcore Google Reader user, I have no interest in using an RSS reader replacement from Facebook, and there are several reasons why it seems like an ill-suited product for the social platform.

The appeal of Google Reader was that it was a reliable tool for importing and consuming news — one that wasn’t influenced by trends. When I subscribe to a feed, I want to read everything in that feed. With Twitter and Facebook at my disposal, I don’t need another site to see articles that my friends are sharing. I rely on my RSS feeds for work to catch every item of technology news flowing across the internet every day — I need to see everything, not just what’s popular, to do my job. And I follow probably 20-30 blogs about topics like fashion or cooking, where the writers post infrequently but where want to read every one of their posts.

So why wouldn’t I look to Facebook to re-create this experience? Probably because I don’t want my RSS reader to be social — I have Twitter and the existing Facebook for social news. I don’t want all my friends to know that I read fashion blogs on a daily basis. I don’t want the news I read to influence the ads I see on Facebook, or the stories that show up in my news feed. As the Washington Post’s auto-sharing from its social reader experiment showed, people don’t want everyone to know what they’re reading.

Of course, we don’t know if Facebook is launching an RSS reader at all, let alone what it would look like. The company did not have any comment on the matter when we asked. But social sharing is embedded in Facebook’s DNA, so it’s a reasonable assumption that any RSS reader put out by Facebook would have serious social attributes, with a heavy emphasis on sharing.

Sure, there’s room for social news on Facebook. On my account, I “like” a lot of news outlets, as well as journalists and celebrities and business figures. In fact, a quick glance at my news feed would show mostly news stories, and very few posts from my friends. It’s a great way to see what’s popular right now in the news, or to catch an older story I might have missed on Twitter. But social news is a distinctly different experience from what people knew and loved about Google Reader — and that’s a distinction that a company like Digg seems to understand.

As I wrote previously, Digg’s new RSS news reader will likely incorporate some social features but will also serve as a separate product from the popular stories posted on Digg.com. And while Google Reader used to have much-beloved social features, these were complements, not a replacement, for the feeds themselves.

Would it make perfect sense for Facebook to create a dedicated spot on its site for news? Sure. But that likely wouldn’t keep me from searching for my next RSS relationship.

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The Oriella Digital Journalism Study asked 553 journalists in 15 countries about their outlook and their publications, and reflects some interesting geographic differences. Here are some highlights:

• 59 percent of journalists are tweeting in 2013, versus 47 percent in 2012.
  

• Twitter use is highest in English-speaking countries, while barely a third of German journalists have a Twitter account.

Here’s a graph that shows the relative popularity of digital and social media tools:

And here is how social media use varies across countries. Note the difference between France and Germany, which is surprising given the reactionary attitudes towards digital journalism often found among news organizations in both countries.

Here are a few other interesting nuggets:

• Citizen journalism is making inroads: A fifth of those surveyed said it carries as much credibility in their organization as mainstream reporting.

• Thirty-nine percent of journalists regards themselves as “digital first” (perhaps the flip side is more striking — 61 percent still regard themselves as print journalists).

In a related release, Robin Grainger, Director of the Oriella PR Network, said the findings suggest that “‘Shorter but quicker’ journalism may afford media brands greater prominence – and consequently greater traffic — in search rankings, news readers and social news aggregator apps such as Flipboard and Pulse News.”

The countries surveyed were Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Italy, New Zealand, Portugal, Russia, Spain, Sweden, the U.K. and the U.S.. On average, 37 journalists were surveyed in each country. You can find the report and more here.

(Image by Aaron Amat via Shutterstock)

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First Belly is bringing its free samples program, Belly Bites, out of beta, offering it up to its nationwide merchant base. Bites is designed to give an active component to a normally passive loyalty program, by letting businesses offer free samples or services to all Belly users. Customers can see what nearby Bites are available from their Belly smartphone apps or online, which in turn encourages them to visit new stores.

According to CEO and founder Logan LaHive, Bites has been a runaway success in its trials in Chicago and Washington, D.C. Merchants have given out nearly 500,000 free samples through Bites, and those samples are prompting repeat visits. In the case of high-turnover quick-service businesses coffee shops, those return rates are as high as 70 percent, he said.

Belly’s new command center app – basically the interface you see on Belly check-in tablets at more than 6000 stores – is becoming kind of a digital in-store sales assistant. Business owners can now view all of their customer history, demographic and sales figures, track and adjust individual loyalty points and launch promotions directly from their terminals. This gives a proprietor real-time insight into who is in their stores, who their most loyal customer are and who has the potential to become a loyal customer, LaHive said.

Finally, Belly is offering more social media tools. It’s using its analytics to track loyal customers and prompt them to write Yelp reviews. LaHive said Belly is being very careful about who it targets – it doesn’t want to alienate a business’s customers by constantly spamming their inboxes. But once a customer has visited a certain number of times or has redeemed a reward from the loyalty program, they’ll get an email with the Yelp review request. In addition, Belly is integrating closer with Facebook, letting customers “like” a business with one tap on an in-store terminal.

Backed by Lightbank and Andreessen Horowitz, Belly started out in Chicago as a digital loyalty platform for small businesses, letting businesses tailor unique rewards programs while giving customers a universal loyalty card in their smartphones they could use at multiple local stores. But it’s quick growth – it has processing more than 1.5 million check-ins a month – attracted the interest of the big retail chains, and Belly terminals are making their way on trail basis into 7-Elevens and McDonalds locations throughout Chicago.

LaHive said much of the interest from the bigger chains is driven by their customers. They wanted to use Belly as a universal loyalty card rather than subscribe to a bunch of separate national rewards program. While Belly certainly welcomes the enterprises’ business, LaHive said, the company’s focus is still on small local merchants, and its long-term plan is to provide those businesses with digital retailing and marketing services beyond the baseline loyalty program.

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The switch comes as the company is looking expand, both in terms of the social media platforms it supports and brands it works with. Starting Tuesday, customers will be able to accept credit and debit cards from both domestic and international customers, as well as send and accept automated clearing house (ACH) payments through Chirpify’s system. Previously, these transactions were processed through PayPal, and sellers would pay both a PayPal and Chirpify fee, which will now be reduced to just the Chirpify fee.

Several companies have tried to figure out the problem of social purchasing, but not everyone has suceeded. Chirpify is probably the best-known company that allows you to buy something by sending a single tweet or posting a Facebook comment: Talk about an impulse purchase. Big brands using Chirpify to sell directly to consumers via social media include Adidas, the Portland Trailblazers, Green Day, and Snoop Dogg (who is apparently a huge draw).

Once consumers create a Chirpify account with all of their payment information (including credit cards or PayPal accounts), they can make purchases on social media by posting a Facebook comment or sending a tweet:

There’s a major revolution going on in mobile and social payments right now, from Stripe optimizing payments for paying people through services like Airbnb or Lyft, to Square re-imagining the cash register for small businesses. At the moment, it looks like Chirpify is making strides when it comes to payments through social.

This post was updated to note that consumers can still connect their PayPal accounts to their Chirpify accounts to make payments.

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For instance, I’ve pinned a lot of recipes to my food board and scrolling through them looking for a specific one is kind of a pain. Now if I’m looking for a salad recipe, for instance, I can search for “salad” and then select the “just my pins” option to search within my saved items. The new feature is coming to web first and mobile soon, the company said. Pinterest also noted that the ability to search within your own pins was a top-three requested feature from users.

Pinterest has been rolling out a large number of new features recently, most notably the integration with major U.S. retail brands last month that connects pins of certain items to the stores that sell them, setting the company up for a wide variety of ways to eventually make money. A February Pew report on social media put the percentage of online adults using Pinterest at 15 percent.

The company has said repeatedly that it wants to connect the act of pinning photos to boards on Pinterest to real life activities, something CEO Ben Silbermann talked about with Om in a recent interview:

“We want to make pinning actionable,” he told us at the time. “Our focus has been to become a very valuable service.”

Here’s a screenshot showing how the new search will work:

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Instagram, Pinterest and Tumblr are all hugely popular social companies that aren’t making much money right now (with the exception of Tumblr, and that might be debatable.) They’ve raised huge amounts of venture capital or have been acquired by companies for such large price tags that they’ll have to make money soon. But the core value proposition for these three services, one that’s certainly reflected in the attitudes of the founders, is that that they are beautiful, creative online spaces. So how do you put ads there without ruining the atmosphere you’ve created and that users have come to expect?

Mad Men advertising executives explore the brand new world of video ads in the 1960′s.

Obviously, many forms of advertising have been around for hundreds of years, but only in the past 15 or so have we seen a change in how search and contexual ads have had an impact on the business. This search-driven model existed before Google, but from the time the company launched AdWords in 2000, the concept of text-driven and contextualized ads based on search really began to take off. This data-driven approach has affected much of online advertising since then, and Google has developed a billion dollar business around the practice.

And along with search, display ads have also been a signficant part of the puzzle. In the early years of online advertising, it seemed that banner ads and other forms of display would be able to mimic more old-school advertising methods, since they weren’t all that different from the then-profitable ads in print. But the format is no longer dominant — in fiscal year 2012, search ads brought in 46 percent of revenue from advertising, compared to the 21 percent of revenue coming from display ads, according to an IAB report.

Why advertising should get to know us

Most recently, the rise of social media and smartphones that track everything in our daily lives from location to spending habits to real-world friends have made keyword search or banner ads start to feel fairly impersonal. Now Facebook can serve you ads for cars if they think you’re likely to buy a car soon, or Twitter can show you promoted tweets based on the messages you post. These companies haven’t totally cracked personalized ad-targeting yet, but they’re working on it. As those companies know, advertising needs to feel useful and relevant if it’s going to work — all without seeming creepy or invading of a person’s privacy, and useful to a person on both desktop and mobile.

That’s a tough balance to hit, and it certainly doesn’t seem that those companies have totally succeeded yet. If the Mad Men era Madison Avenue experts figured out how to tap into a person’s core desires to re-create advertising in the 1950s and 1960s, we’re still waiting for someone to do the same with in the current digital era, by adding a layer of emotion and desire to the social media and consumer data that’s out there.

The idea of the moment, which we’ve written about extensively here at paidContent, is native advertising: creating “sponsored content” from brands that fits in with the look and feel of the site but is labeled as an ad and supports that particular brand. Tons of sites, from Buzzfeed to The Atlantic to the New York Times (to GigaOM itself) do sponsored stories. It’s how Tumblr’s ads are rolling out for companies like Denny’s. And in particular, for sites like Instagram, it seems like potentially the only way to preserve the aesthetics of the site while letting brands in the door.

Young founders look to their history books

When the Yahoo/Tumblr deal closed, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer talked about her intentions for ads on Tumblr and how CEO David Karp (who had previously decried advertising of any kind) imagined them on his site:

“David talks wistfully about the ads that he saw as a child, that would make him want to go see a movie or own a particular type of car,” Mayer said. “He says the current state of internet advertising doesn’t aspire to be as good as the content itself. We think that should change … we’re aligned in those ideals. When you hear us talk about native ads, where the ads are every bit as good as the content, and maybe even make the content better — that’s what we are aiming for. We want the ads themselves to create that aspirational feel that, for example, television ads or movie ads do.”

And speaking at the Commonwealth Club on Thursday in San Francisco, Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom was equally nostalgic about old-school advertising and how it might work for his own company:

“We made a promise that Instagram would be a self-sustaining business, and that promise still holds true today. The deal makes no sense if you think this thing will never make money. We’ve always had plans, and it’s just about when, and it’s just about how,” he said. “Think about the magazine Vogue, for instance, and how half that magazine is advertising, but that advertising is really compelling.”

Instagram co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger talk with Google Ventures’s Kevin Rose at the Castro Theater in San Francisco on May 30, 2013.

Finding the Don Draper approach to social

Systrom and Karp might be inspired by old Vogue ads, but it doesn’t seem that Tumblr users are as enamored by Denny’s gifs, and it’s fair to say that I’d be far less offended by a slightly off-target ad on a news website than one posted in my Instagram feed. The founders have accomplished a remarkable feat of creating companies where users feel personally and emotionally attached to the experiences they have there — just ask someone like Om who’s made a digital friend with someone he’s only “met” through Instagram.

But by raising the bar for what we expect on their services, the founders might have made navigating advertising that much harder for themselves. We’re in a whole new world of digital media, just as Don Draper and his executives faced with the rise of the television. But just as those executives saw the change as a new opportunity to reach consumers in their living rooms, so too could Pinterest and Instagram see this as an opportunity: to make digital advertising personal.

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Twitter is framing the partnerships as a way for marketers to reinforce brand messages by reaching consumers on television and small screens at the same time. For consumers, this is likely to mean seeing more video content within their Twitter feeds and more hashtags on the shows they watch. In its news release, Twitter framed it this way:

We think these types of two-screen sponsorships are a win-win-win. Users receive spectacular, timely content that rounds out their TV experience or reminds them to tune in. Powered by Promoted Tweets, broadcasters reach new audiences and open up new business lines. Brand advertisers get, for the first time, an integrated cross-platform tool for reaching the social conversation wherever it happens.

The company is branding the deals as “Twitter Amplify” or, as one executive said on stage, simply “Twitter Amp.” Other partners, which join earlier participants like ESPN and the NFL, include A&E, Time Inc and Warner Music.

The announcement is part of Twitter’s effort to strut its stuff before Madison Avenue and to show that it is now part of “the New York City community.” The company is engaged in a major push to raise revenue as it prepares for an IPO widely expected to take place later this year.

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As the Columbia Journalism Review describes in a post on the project, Climate Desk not only found and interviewed their comment troll — a 57-year-old insurance executive named Hoyt Connell — as part of a video series called “The Secret Life of Trolls,” but also profiled a scientist who spends much of her time engaging with trolls on the topic of climate change. In the final instalment, the scientist and the troll met each other via Google Hangout.

The CJR post criticizes the Climate Desk series because “it doesn’t shine as much light under the bridge as it could have,” since it doesn’t go into detail about why Connell latched onto climate change as a topic, or what drives him to comment so aggressively (fittingly enough, Connell comments on the CJR post himself to try and clear some of this up). But what impressed me was how normal this mega-troll seemed once he was interviewed.

Comment trolls are people too

I found the same thing — and I think others did too — when Gawker Media outed a notorious Reddit troll named Violentacrez last year, after attention was drawn to several offensive sub-Reddits he created. Although clearly much of his behavior on the site crossed a line, the interview showed him to be a more-or-less normal, and in some ways even sympathetic (or possibly just pathetic) character. Not that this justified his conduct, but it helped to explain some of it.

We’ve written before about how the value of comments transcends the occasional troll, and how the best way to maintain a civil dialogue is to engage with readers directly, a point blogging pioneer Anil Dash also made in a post a couple of years ago. And writers like Ta-Nehisi Coates of The Atlantic have shown that commenters can be much more than just a noisy distraction — in some cases, they can actually become collaborators. The Climate Desk series is a good reminder that trolls are people too.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr / Jeremy King

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About 24 percent of teens who go online were using Twitter at the end of 2012, marking a dramatic increase from the 16 percent who were on Twitter in 2011. The new findings on teen social media use and attitudes toward online privacy come from a new report from the Pew Research Center, “Teens, Social Media and Privacy,” that’s set to release on Tuesday. Here’s how things changed in just a year:

Apart from the raw numbers, Pew conducted focus groups with teens across the country to get feedback on how they use different sites. Here are the five most important trends you should know about teens and social media:

1. Teens are outpacing the grown-ups on Twitter

The rise in Twitter use among teens is particularly interesting since adult adoption hovers around 16 percent, according to the latest Pew report on adult social media use. Numbers among online teens are even stronger for African-Americans, 39 percent of whom are on the service (compared to 23 percent of white teens). Teens have shown a remarkable adoption of the service since 2009, when Pew first asked about the site, when only 9 percent reported using it.

2. Public is the new private on Twitter

The majority of teen Facebook users have their accounts set to private, but not so on Twitter. Some 64 percent of teens have Twitter accounts set to public so anyone can read their tweets, with 24 percent setting their accounts to private. Perhaps of most concern, 12 percent reported they didn’t know whether their tweets were public or private.

3. Teens are tired of Facebook, but they’re still using it

The media has been reporting teens abandoning Facebook for years now, but the Pew report finds that like a lot of adults, teens are frustrated by Facebook but stay on the platform because of the integral social role it still plays. The report explains: They dislike the increasing number of adults on the site, get annoyed when their Facebook friends share inane details, and are drained by the “drama” that they say is portrayed frequently on the site. The stress of needing to manage their reputation on Facebook also contributes to the lack of enthusiasm.” Yet 94 percent of them still use the site.

4. Tumblr numbers still aren’t very high

Yahoo might have liked the younger audience on Tumblr when it decided to acquire the site, but teen use of Tumblr is still pretty low. Only five percent reported using the site in 2012, although that’s up from 2 percent in 2011, a decent jump.

5. The subtweet goes mainstream

You heard it here first: 58 percent of teens are making inside inside jokes or sharing “cloaked messages” on social media.

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