Word that Lucky Sort is shutting down and that several of its team are joining Twitter’s revenue engineering department suggests this is exactly what the acquisition aims to accomplish.

As it stands, companies use Twitter as a way to track how people are talking about them and maybe, if they’re really advanced, do some sentiment analysis. If they’re willing to pay a third party, Datasift and Gnip are more than happy to broaden marketers’ views to encompass the entirety of Twitter’s data, both real-time and historical. What companies really can’t do, though, is run their own advanced analytics about topics straight from the Twitter platform.

One view of the Lucky Sort dashboard

The value proposition from such a product should be obvious at this point. Facebook, Google and Yahoo all collect a lot of data about how people are using their platforms and what topics are trending, and they all offer it up via a variety of products targeting marketing types and the public at large. If Twitter wants to be taken seriously as a venue for advertising budgets and a platform for measuring the pulse of the nation, people need to be able to ask questions of its data without relying on an intermediary or the occasional Twitter blog post.

As a journalist, I’d love to have access to this type of tool to track trending topics in real time and spot possible stories as they’re happening. The appeal to marketers should be obvious. As IBM’s Erick Brethenoux told me recently, “[Marketers] talk a good game about social data. Very few actually leverage it effectively today.”

At Twitter, though, data is a slightly different beast than at other web companies. Twitter’s value lies largely in real-time data — topics can be peak, crest and all but vanish within a 48-hour window. This situation has hampered some of Twitter’s efforts to surface optimal search results, and it has spurred the decision to buy companies such as Backtype (for its streaming-processing Storm technology) and parallel-processing startup Ubalo.

The latter move, which happened last week, should help Twitter’s development team create new features without worrying about the intricacies of making them run — and run fast — across a cluster of machines. (You can learn a lot more about how companies such as Google, Facebook and Box are rethinking infrastructure to handle their unique data needs at our Structure conference next month in San Francisco.)

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In his post, entitled “This Is What Happens When Publishers Invest In Long Stories,” FastCo Labs editor Chris Dannen talked about how the site decided to experiment with what he calls “slow live-blogging” — that is, a series of stories that would take shape over time, beginning with a short stub article consisting mostly of a topic paragraph or summary of an issue, and then get added to as new developments arose. Dannen explained that this was a way of blending news with a more feature-like approach.

“Instead of starting with a fresh article every time we want to cover something inside a regular beat, which might require a long catch-up introduction, context, background and so forth, we could just put fresh news at the top and let the reader scroll down to read previous updates.”

Readers stay longer and read more

What happened when this approach started getting rolled out, Dannen says, was fairly dramatic. As he puts it in his post, the results “blew up my assumptions about how to drive traffic.” Among other things, the tech site’s “bounce rate” — that is, the rate at which readers decided to quit reading and go elsewhere — dropped substantially. The average amount of time spent at the site also increased, as did the number of pages per visit that were read by users.

Dannen says it’s too early to tell how permanent these effects will be for Fast Co. Labs, just as it’s impossible to know whether those favorable results stem from the changes they made in their approach to longer stories. But he says that regardless of these caveats, “it sure as hell looks like it’s working,” and that he believes long-form journalism is the future.

It’s not length, it’s engagement

I am a big believer in the value of longer pieces in general, and I think the once-popular myth that people don’t read longform articles online has been largely disproven (although I wonder how many of those who praised the New York Times feature Snow Fall read the whole thing). But it’s also true that editors and publishers often conflate length and quality — as Caroline O’Donovan pointed out in a (short) post on Fast Co.’s experience at the Nieman Journalism Lab.

I think Fast Company’s results actually show something very different from the appeal of longform articles per se: since these posts began with “stub” articles and then grew over time, as more news or analysis emerged about the topic itself, I think they show the value of engaging readers by following a story over time and providing some kind of comprehensive background and context, instead of just bombarding them with a stream of news briefs.

That approach may result in longer stories, but I think that’s almost a side effect rather than the main attraction. No one is going to read those kinds of posts simply because they are long — but if a site builds a narrative and a point of view and some context over time about an issue (the mobile news-reading app Circa is trying to do this by allowing users to “follow” specific breaking news stories, and then alerting them to updates) then it pays off in engagement.

There are lessons in there not just for new-media players but for traditional media outlets that are trying to find a recipe for success online as well.

Note: This post was updated on May 14 at 12:12 am to correct the spelling of Chris Dannen’s name.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Scholastic

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This idea has come up before, but I was reminded of it when I read a Nieman Journalism Lab post about some research being done by Lee Humphreys, looking at the way that communication — and particularly personal communication, through letters and diaries and other pre-digital tools of expression. Although this doesn’t seem to have much to do with how we use ultra-modern services like Twitter or Facebook, there is a lot more to it than you might think.

Media has always been personal and social

As Humphreys describes it, her research shows that if you look at human communication over a longer period than just the past generation or two, it becomes obvious that one-way, broadcast-style “mass media” isn’t the norm at all — instead, the norm is interpersonal or multi-directional communication that shares a lot more with social media such as blogs, Twitter and Facebook. Rather than creating a new communication style, we are actually returning to one.

“Humphreys said one of the early conclusions from her research is the possibility that the mass media of the 20th century was in fact a blip, a historical aberration, and that, through platforms like Twitter, we are gradually returning to a communication network that indulges, without guilt, the individual’s desire to record his existence.”

For example, Humphreys says that the idea of diaries or journals as private things — which their owners hide underneath a mattress or keep in a secret place under lock and key — is a fairly new one. As recently as the late 19th century, it was common for people to read each other’s journals as a way of catching up with what they had been doing, and in many cases this was done with the author of the journal taking part in the discussion. In that sense, journals were a mix of private and public, in much the same way that social media is.

Although the Nieman Lab post doesn’t mention it, there was also the idea of a “commonplace book,” which was a kind of paper version of a blog, a place where people would keep snatches of text or ideas that they came across, and then share that with others. Famous writers such as John Milton and Ralph Waldo Emerson kept commonplace books, and the phenomenon is seen by many as a prelude to what would become the “remix culture” of today.

The era of mass media is over

The idea that mass media was a kind of historical accident has been raised by others as well, including Tom Standage of The Economist — both in his upcoming book, called “Writing on the Wall,” and in a series of pieces in the magazine about the nature of digital media. The latter described how the interconnected qualities of social media and “networked journalism” mirrored the way that media used to function before newspapers were invented, when the local tavern or coffee house was the center of the information ecosystem. The title of his book, Standage says, also refers to:

“The ominous implications of the rebirth of social media for mass-media companies that arose in the industrial era, predicated on the high cost of delivering information to large audiences. The conclusion of the book is that the mass-media era was a historical anomaly… indeed, it might better be termed the ‘mass-media parenthesis.’”

If this is in fact what we are experiencing — that is, the unbundling or dismantling of a mass-media infrastructure that was constructed to serve the needs of readers (and advertisers) at a specific time in history — then what can we expect? Among other things, probably further downsizing and layoffs and bankruptcies of media companies whose size and cost structure and print focus no longer corresponds to the needs of the marketplace.

And on the positive side, we are also likely to see the growth of new entities that take advantage of the networked, social and smaller-scale nature of the media ecosystem — startups like Circa, for example, or algorithmic players like Prismatic, along with larger entities like The Huffington Post and BuzzFeed. In a very real sense, it is both the best of times and the worst of times.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Shutterstock / Feng Yu and Flickr user Rosaura Ochoa

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There’s no question that some of the reaction to the company’s job posting has strained the bounds of credulity: media gadfly and failed media entrepreneur Michael Wolff, for example, wrote about how the person who became Twitter’s head of news and journalism would have a job “more important than Jeff Zucker’s at CNN,” one that would be like “running a network news division in the 1970s or 80s, the biggest job that there has ever been in news.”

“Given the choice between being the executive editor of the New York Times or being the first Twitter news chief, you’d be well advised to think twice.”

Twitter says it isn’t a media operation

Wolff’s description is more than a little hyperbolic — but at the same time, not entirely untrue. Emily Bell, head of the Tow Center at Columbia University and former head of digital operations at The Guardian, described Twitter recently as “the most significant invention for journalism since the telephone,” and her opinion is shared by many in the media and outside it. For all its flaws, the service that started as a simple messaging app with a weird name has become a critical piece of the real-time information and journalistic infrastructure.

In his interview with PBS MediaShift, Luckie — who got his start doing social media for the Washington Post and was hired by Twitter last year to be part of their growing media-outreach team — downplayed the company’s media ambitions, saying the service wants to be a partner for media companies, and has no intentions of hiring reporters or editors, creating content or doing any of the other things that traditional media entities typically do.

“Twitter doesn’t have ambitions to be a news operation. Because Twitter is so central to what a lot of newsrooms are doing, naturally there’s a lot of hype around this position. No, Twitter has no editorial team. We’re not out there curating news, or saying, “here’s the source that you have to go to.” We’re not writing stories. We’re simply providing a platform for other people to do so.”

But I think Luckie’s response — while perhaps being technically true — misses the much larger point about what we mean when we say “digital-media entity,” and the increasingly powerful role that Twitter and other tools and services are playing in that ecosystem. In a nutshell, much of the power that used to reside with the creators of content has been moving to those who have platforms to disseminate it.

Where does the power lie in media?

The reality is that hiring journalists and creating content, as valuable as those things are (and I would like to stipulate that they are hugely valuable, before any traditional media fans get out the tar and feathers) is only part of what constitutes a media entity in the digital age. The other factor that is almost as valuable — and perhaps even more so, depending on your perspective — is the ability to aggregate, filter, distribute and monetize that content.

For a long time, traditional media entities like newspapers and TV networks owned both of these aspects of the media ecosystem, but that is no longer the case. Now, the most powerful platforms for distributing — and potentially monetizing — journalism and other kinds of content are not made of paper or TV tubes or coaxial cable, and they are not owned by family-run media conglomerates. They are companies like Twitter and YouTube and Facebook.

It’s true that Twitter in particular has focused on selling itself as a partner for media companies, rather than a competitor, which is one of the reasons why CEO Dick Costolo has tried hard to resist any attempt to paint the service as a media entity. Instead — as with Luckie’s interview — the company would much rather describe how it works hand-in-hand with media outlets, the benefits that accrue from having a strong Twitter presence, etc.

Twitter is a partner, but also a competitor

At the same time, however, blog pioneer and digital-media entrepreneur Dave Winer has a point when he repeatedly warns media companies that Twitter is not their friend: in a very real sense, as I’ve tried to argue before, Twitter has built a powerful media company without having to create any of its own content — and every TV network “crawl” that features tweets, and every newspaper story that mentions a reporter’s Twitter handle subtly reinforces that position.

Even the use of Twitter Cards or “expanded tweets” is what I’ve described as a double-edged sword for media companies: it promotes their content, but it also shows an excerpt that might be enough to satisfy many readers — in exactly the same way that Google does with Google News, something that many media companies have criticized and even required payment for.

I am in full agreement with Emily Bell and others who say Twitter is one of the best tools for journalism and media that we have ever seen, and there is no question that it has changed the media environment for the better in a whole range of ways. But let’s not kid ourselves about whether it is a media company or not — it obviously is, in almost all of the ways that really matter, and other media players need to be as clear-eyed about that as possible.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Shutterstock / noporn and Flickr users Socialsidekick

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Branch launched publicly about eight months ago with the idea of creating a public space for limited conversations among a few people. While it’s fostered some interesting discussions so far (“Is there a bubble?” “What have you learned about visiting Las Vegas?” “How much should a writer be paid, if anything?“), the company is clearly still figuring out how to get conversations going on the site.

I recently spoke with people from Branch and Hyatt, one of the first companies that’s been using Branch for marketing purposes, and it was clear from our conversation that Branch could have a real future in giving companies a place to talk to with consumers in a way that’s both fairly public and transparent but also limited in terms of the investment required by the companies. In other words, some of the aspects of Branch that make it unappealing to users could actually work in its favor when it comes to courting large businesses as customers — and potentially making money on the site.

Branch wasn’t created by one of the former Twitter founders like Medium was, but instead joined the Obvious Corp back in March of 2012. We wrote about the company in July and talked with CEO Josh Miller, who explained the idea behind the product and how he wanted to create the types of conversations people have with friends around a dinner table, but transport those conversations online to be shared and viewed publicly.

But as my colleague Mathew Ingram noted at the time, that closed nature of Branch conversations that are then posted online are reminiscent of blogs without comments — they seem odd to those of use who’ve become used to the spontaneous, collaborative qualities of traditional social media:

“The discussion also seems oddly sterile for anyone who has gotten used to the somewhat chaotic nature of a Twitter debate — or even in blog comments. And because it is less open, there is less of an opportunity for flames or irrelevant comments, but there is also less opportunity for a smart comment from a stranger.”

Yet the closed nature of the discussions and the greater assurance of quality control are obvious perks for a company like Hyatt that wants to hear what frequent travelers think of hotels, and wants to share that feedback publicly but doesn’t necessarily want to maintain a lengthy Facebook feed about the topic. Not to mention, users would probably get annoyed if Hyatt retweeted a lot of people tweeting about hotels, explained Dan Moriarty, the director of digital strategy for Hyatt.

But when I asked Moriarty why he doesn’t just send out a survey asking people what they think of hotels, he explained that the company has learned the value of sharing public feedback with users and the company gets more out of the experience in the long run by appearing more transparent.

“I think we’re over that worry,” he said about the possibility that users would post negative things publicly about Hyatt on a company Branch thread. “I think we’ve done a similar thing on Facebook or the website we started for the campaign, so we’ve worked through the pain of worrying about what people would say about us in social spaces.”

He noted that with a Branch conversation, Hyatt can pick influential travel or hotel bloggers and ask them about hotels, and then once the Branch is over, they can keep sharing the conversation and make sure other users see how the company took that feedback into account. So a conversation hosted with 20 people can get shared out to thousands of others. You could certainly argue that it’s a lot less transparent and truly open for a company to hand-pick people for a Branch conversation than respond to angry customers on Twitter, but you can see the appeal from the company’s perspective, and there’s no reason a company couldn’t do both.

“When you look at Branch… it’s just like-minded people opting into a conversation on things they care about,” he said. “So we definitely get a higher-quality of responses that are more thought through.”

Libby Brittain, the director of editorial development for Branch, said the company is still new, and they’re not sure what a money-making strategy with large corporate partners would look like, but it’s something they’ll evaluate.

“For publishers or brands, they’ve been told to be conversational for years,” she said. “But sometimes they really struggle to deliver on that promise with their customers or clients. I’ve been pleasantly surprised how this has worked.”

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This isn’t a new idea, but it was revitalized by Buzzfeed’s Katie Notopoulos in early April, who suggested people pick a teen and find out what kids are up to on Twitter these days. The hashtag took off, and if you haven’t searched for the results recently, you should.

My teen hates school because you have to wear pants there. I love my teen. #followateen—
Choire Sicha (@Choire) April 12, 2013

#followateen update 2: he's upset about being placed into remedial english next semester. He also spelled remedial wrong. Good luck, teen!—
Brandon (@BrandonTCX8) December 30, 2011

Not sure I understand the #followateen hashtag. Are people really following random teens? How do you find one to follow?—
Matt Yglesias (@mattyglesias) April 30, 2013

(Sometimes the teens even catch on.)

My teen says she's pretty sure my deer tweet is about her, and she's pretty sure she doesn't know me. #followateen—
Meaghan O'Connell (@meaghano) April 13, 2013

Aside from making fun of random teenagers, the growth of the hashtag can actually teach us a good deal about teens, social media, and our weird relationships with the internet. Here are five things I actually learned from #followateen:

Life is a lot harder for teenagers in 2013

When Timeline came out last year, I went back and deleted a lot of old wall posts, and I was shocked by the volume of bad photos and inane thoughts my friends and I posted. (i.e., “Do you have a copy of the math homework?” or “OMG lacrosse practice was so hard today.”) At the time, I thought that teenagers had probably learned from my generation’s early adoption and over-sharing, and that today’s teens had stopped posting as many inane, personal moments online. Surely they’d come to realize that everything they post on the internet is public and searchable forever.

Hahahaha. No.

Scrolling through posts from teens on Twitter this week, it became clear that they have not stopped posting personal, intimate details of their lives online for anyone to search, and if anything, they’re posting even more. As someone who went through high school missing one of my front teeth (don’t ask), I cringe for the future selves of these teens who will wish they’d posted a little less for the public to see. And in my (pretty recent) day, we didn’t even have Instagram or Tumblr.

PROMMMMM TOMORROWWW CANTTT WAITTTTT 😁😘😍😙—
May29th™ (@TiiAHBHOO) May 03, 2013

I have 6 school days left in my senior year and I just got my first detention ever for leaving gym class early. Ha. #whatajoke—
ʝαє∂єи вαяℓσω (@jaebarlow) May 03, 2013

im grounded, so i guess i will just make some vines—
jason orcutt (@jason_orcutt) May 03, 2013

#followateen is the future

You can lament those selfies and poor grammar on Twitter all you want, but how teens are using social media like Twitter today is likely going to have an impact on what we’ll all be using ten years from now. Companies like Facebook and Twitter are struggling to build advertising networks and continue to add new users, but data has shown that many of those new users are actually coming from older generations, as kids are being drawn to new sites like Snapchat, Vine, Wanelo, Tumblr, and Instagram.

You and I don’t use Twitter the same way

When I log on Twitter, I find people talking about the latest tech news, debating the proper way to report corrections to tweets, and LOLing at internet trends like #followateen. I bet the average age of the people I follow is 30. But searching for teen-esque hashtags and scrolling through the resulting posts was an incredible reminder that Twitter is entirely what you make of it, and that my experience on the network probably looks nothing like yours.

It’s easy to forget when everyone becomes so accustomed to his or her personal feed that this is true. I would guess that there’s far less disparity in people’s different Facebook and Instagram experiences, because those social networks are much more dictated by the design of the sites and the types of content people can post. But on Twitter, you create your own adventure.

Twitter is totally creepy, whether or not you #followateen

Yes, it can be super creepy to #followateen on Twitter and treat that teen like a zoo specimen for observation. But Helena Fitzgerald of The New Inquiry points out that, really, following a teen and reporting back on the hilariousness of their lives is no different than most of our Twitter relationships, where we follow people and retweet them and view their tweets as news; especially when most of them never follow us back. Humans are curious about other people by nature, and Twitter plays up that curiosity in ways that can be creepy but also completely entertaining.

Stupidity on the internet is certainly not confined to kids

Lest the adults get too full of themselves and their superiority over the teens, the emergence of the #followanadult hashtag on Friday serves as incredible reminder that adults can be just as predictable and boring online as the teens are.

Growns who think teen tweets are dumb (#followateen) should see their fellow adults'. Today we dare to #followanadult. Join us won't you?—
Rookie (@RookieMag) May 03, 2013

#followanadult my adult is posting articles about divorce, punctuated by wiz khalifa lyrics.—
m.h. (@zefzefmeredeath) May 03, 2013

my adult gets a text, email and phone call from Walgreens when his prescription is ready. He thinks this may be overkill. #followanadult—
shannon (@shansperl) May 03, 2013

@tavitulle My adult's corporate employer is planning an office-wide Harlem Shake parody. #followanadult—
Kirsten Reach (@KirstenReach) May 03, 2013

my adult is out of kombucha #followanadult—
Tavi Gevinson (@tavitulle) May 03, 2013

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Recently, researchers at the Children’s Hospital in Boston analyzed aggregated data on users’ Facebook activity and interests to examine the connection between online social environments and obesity prevalence. They found that areas with higher percentages of people with interests related to healthy activities and fitness had lower obesity rates, while populations with a greater percentage of people who had liked or commented on television was an indicator of higher obesity rates.

Interestingly, the study found that social data about sports in general was not correlated with obesity because people may be merely watching sports or following it, not taking an active role in it.

The researchers, who published their findings in the journal PLOS ONE, not only determined that Facebook data could track obesity prevalence, they suggested that social networks could be used to explore additional conditions and deliver health interventions and public health campaigns.

“I’d hope that people would look to this data source to understand how it can improve our understanding of chronic diseases and population-level conditions,” Rumi Chunara, an instructor at Harvard Medical School and an author of the study, told me.

Chunara’s study isn’t the only one to test Facebook’s value as a tool for public health research. A study published earlier this year found that hospitals with more Facebook “likes” have lower mortality rates and higher patient satisfaction scores. And, citing a search for the word “Facebook” on PubMed (a public database of life sciences research), a recent Wired article reported that there have been about 400 academic papers published in the last four years that include the social networking giant.

Traditional public health research often consists of phone surveys that can require considerable amounts of money and time, but Chunara said a major advantage of using Facebook data is that you can reach a wide swath of people quickly and at a low cost. Facebook also enables researchers to drill down to specific neighborhoods and that kind of fine-grained data can be difficult to come by, she added.

Additionally, Facebook can provide real-time data, as well as the opportunity to explore how interactions with friends and contacts and health messaging could influence user behavior, the study said.

Still, despite Facebook’s advantages when it comes to public health research, it’s important to bear in mind the limitations of web and social data. As a February Nature article on the flaws in Google’s flu-tracking techniques highlighted, social data doesn’t always mean what we think it does. For example, some researchers think that media hype about the flu this past season could have led to a volume of web searches for flu-related terms that was disproportionate to the actual threat.

But Chunara pointed out that there can be biases and issues with more traditional data sets as well. “Every data set has challenges and you have to definitely approach [them] carefully [so as] not be misled,” she said.

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I’ve written about photo-tagging startups in the past that attempt to add multimedia to points on images on the web, but Pict, a new company announcing funding on Thursday, has a particular focus on integrating catalog information into a retailer’s photos, and when viewed in Facebook’s timeline the photos will be totally interactive without the consumer having to leave Facebook.

The company went through Angelpad as a company called Dropt in 2012. Dropt let designers create digital lookbooks that could be shared more easily than the traditional paper or PDF versions, but the founders realized there was an even greater opportunity when it comes to digital fashion sales. Fashion designer Steven Alan became one of the company’s first outside investors when it prepared to relaunch as Pict.

As Pict is announcing $1.4 million in funding and opening up its registration more widely this week (although you still have to request an invite.) The company works to let companies from large retailers down to individual Etsy sellers can tag and share photos of their products across the web.

“It’s really similar to tagging photos on Facebook,” CEO Brent Locks explained. “You can snap a photo on your phone, type in the names of products in the phone, and we pull in all of the relevant metadata from your uploaded catalog.”

While there are a good number of startups that allow you to tag images to re-direct back to the seller, Pict is unique in that it just focuses on product details — not adding maps and videos and tweets on top of a photo — and it has a mobile app, which allows sellers to take photos from a smartphone and post to social media on the go.

“It doesn’t require any kind of learning curve,” Locks said. “That’s the key that really differentiates us.”

The company has brought in $1.4 million in funding so far, and while it’s not a huge amount of money in the realm of startups, the company does have notable investors like Kirsten Green’s Forerunner Ventures, a successful e-commerce investor who put money in companies like Birchbox, Hotel Tonight, Threadflip, Wanelo, Warby Parker and others. Other Pict investors include Lowercase Capital, Opus Capital, Angelpad, 500 Startups, Gary Vaynerchuk, Scott Belsky, Steven Alan, Seth Berman, and others.

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The Pew report highlights changes in social media over the first four years of Barack Obama’s presidency, showing how people are more likely to post to sites like Twitter and Facebook. However, these dramatic increases aren’t all that surprising. Twitter was barely a mainstream source for news in 2008, and Facebook wasn’t much older at that point. Now both sites have become much more accepted as major advertising and communications platforms, so the increased participation there makes sense.

However, it’s worth noting how people use these platforms around civic engagement, because these types of participation could impact the business models of companies like Twitter and Facebook as they grow. It’s also worth considering how social participation corresponds with income and education levels, and how it translates into life offline.

Here were some of the most interesting stats from the report, titled “Civic Engagement in the Digital Age,” which will become available on Pew’s site later Wednesday (Update: it’s now available on the site here.):

• Increased activity: More Americans used social networks for political activity (39 percent of all adults) in the 2012 race than used social media at all in 2008 (only 26 percent were using social media at the time.)
• Offline engagement: Those 39 percent of people who are politically active on social networks aren’t just limiting their activity to Facebook — they’re also really engaged offline as well. Sixty-three percent of the people who post political activity online then do something like attending a meeting in person, compared to the national average of 48 percent of people who take offline political action. They’re also more likely to contact their representative online than the average public.
• What they’re posting: In 2012, 17 percent of adults posted political stories to social media (up from 3 percent in 2008), and 12 percent friended or followed a candidate in 2012 (up from 3 percent in 2008.) Since more candidates now have active social accounts, this makes sense.
• Sparking an interest: It’s encouraging to note that 43 percent of people using social media said they were inspired to go learn more about something they saw on these channels. What exactly they went on to learn and where they learned it is not noted, but it does show that a Facebook post could spark greater civic interest.
• Demographics: Wealthy, better-educated individuals are more likely to become politically engaged both online and offline, although the disparity of participation between low-income and high-income groups was less pronounced on social media than in other capacities. However, the researchers said it doesn’t look like social media will be the political equalizer people thought it might be.
• The remaining power of offline: Americans are still three times more likely to discuss politics offline (in person or over the phone) than they are online, reminding users that political discourse hasn’t moved entirely to Facebook. And the same is true for political donations, 60 percent of which took place offline.

The Pew report was conducted in July and August of 2012 and interviewed 2,253 adults over the age of 18. The interviews took place on both landline phones and cell phones and in English and Spanish. The study’s margin of error is plus or minus 2.4 percentage points.

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The companies announced the collaboration on Wednesday, and it marks yet another example highlighting several trends we’ve seen from Twitter recently: a clear indication that the company is becoming a media entity, a strong interest in working with television companies, and a commitment to the strong interest in music that already exists on the platform.

“Through this partnership with Twitter, Fuse and Trident will enjoy elevated access to Twitter data surrounding the music conversation happening in real time,” Joel Lunenfeld, vice president of brand strategy at Twitter stated for the press release on the announcement.

Trending 10 will be a show that highlights the ten most popular music entertainment stories of the day, and it will air both live on television and in segments online that can be shared via social media.

Twitter has forged a number of television partnerships recently, including ones with the BBC, Comedy Central, and Turner Broadcast around March Madness. There were also reports that the company is looking to do deals with Viacom and NBC. As with this deal around the Trending 10 show, working with television networks could give advertisers the opportunity to cross-promote on both the live broadcast and corresponding social conversations.

And now that Twitter has rolled out its official #Music app, the Trending 10 show demonstrates how much money the company can make around music and entertainment. Twitter confirmed that the content on Trending 10 will come from the social conversations happening on the platform around music, which also power the content on the #Music app. Music artists are some of the most popular figures on Twitter, so building out advertising and promotion opportunities around those artists and Twitter makes sense.

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