Many of the biggest stories in the connected consumer space occurred mostly offstage in 2012, from Apple’s new media services to policymakers in Washington. Overall, the past 12 months have laid important groundwork for significant advances in the connected consumer space. The year 2013 should be eventful. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
It’s official: you can now download all your old tweets. What does mean? In the short, a trip down memory lane but, in the long term, a rich cultural treasure. Read more »
In an acknowledgement of the growing importance of the “second screen” for TV watchers, Nielsen is unveiling a new set of ratings that will measure a given show’s popularity on Twitter. Read more »
A report from the New York Times said Twitter offered Instagram $525 million to acquire the photo-sharing startup before the company went and agreed to a sale by Facebook. Potential legal issues might rest on whether Twitter’s offer was ever considered a formal one. Read more »
Twitter added some new features to its promoted tweets on Thursday, making updates that will help brands and marketers better target audiences with in-stream advertising. For Twitter, this year is all about monetization, so the more accurate it can be with its advertising, the better. Read more »
As our compute infrastructure becomes more distributed it’s much harder to keep everything synced. But with users demanding immediate access to their files, photos and whatnot all around the world, solutions like Google’s Spanner DB and Twitters photo blobstore are a solution. Read more »
What are Twitter’s core design, product and engineering capabilities — stuff they are really good at. What is Twitter’s core competency? Those are tough questions for the company to ask itself and answer — for it would help define and set expectations and strategy that is lasting. Read more »
Twitter is finally rolling out header profile pictures for all users beginning on Wednesday, forcing over the change that will put large, horizontal photos on profile pages and make Twitter look much more like Facebook as the two sites continue to compete for user attention. Read more »
Users will stop seeing Instagram photos appear in their Twitter streams at all, now that the full effect of Instagram removing Twitter support takes hold. Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom announced last week that the company would stop showing photo in Twitter, heating up the photo battle. Read more »
Twitter has been lauded for its capacity to crowdsource and uncover the “Truth.” Mathias Crawford, a Fellow at Stanford University, says Twitter’s self-correcting skills are vastly overstated and flawed. The company’s influential power could stand to be regulated, he argues. Read more »
Instagram says it is removing the ability for Twitter to embed photos because it wants users to go to its own website instead of Twitter’s to see that content. Other media companies should probably also be asking themselves similar questions about their relationship with Twitter. Read more »
Prismatic, a San Francisco-based startup that uses machine-learning algorithms to recommend news and other content to users based on their social activity, has raised a $15-million Series A round from a star-studded group of investors including Accel Partners and Russian investor Yuri Milner. Read more »
Instagram has disabled its Twitter cards, according to Twitter. That means images are no longer displaying properly in Twitter feeds. The move is yet another example of the ongoing tensions between the two social networks. Read more »
PeopleBrowsr, a company that provides marketing analytics based on the full stream of data from Twitter called the firehose, is suing Twitter for access to that stream. While Twitter is closing down who has access to the firehose, it shows where the company is headed. Read more »
After critics accused its new Jerusalem bureau chief of making inappropriate comments about the Middle East on Twitter and Facebook, the New York Times has appointed a senior editor review her posts — but this robs social media of the power it has when used for journalism. Read more »
A study of Black Friday cyber-shopping said that social media advertising was a big bust with few people buying things in response to an ad from Facebook. The story is very different if you use other metrics to define “responded.” Read more »
New forms of media are often disruptive to existing forms, but Twitter CEO Dick Costolo says that his network is complementary to traditional forms like television, because it adds the kind of real-time discussion we associate with the town square or the “pulse of the planet.” Read more »
Archify isn’t the first service to promise a personal search engine but, with smart touches such as Gmail integration and the recording of social streams, it has a decent chance of being the one that succeeds. Read more »
Critics of Apple’s social features have argued that it should buy Twitter, but former Apple engineer Patrick Gibson says the real value in such a deal would be that Twitter might be able to help Apple build web services that actually work. Read more »
Twitter has been restricting the ways in which external services can use its API, and has also said that it plans to launch curation tools for journalists — both of which could potentially affect Storify’s future. But co-founder Burt Herman says the company isn’t afraid. Read more »
Big data tools such as Cassandra and Hadoop are transforming how data is stored and exploited at scale. But without similarly capable search technologies, enterprise adopters face challenges when it comes to gaining insights from that data. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
In the past, information flow during a military campaign was mostly controlled by the armies involved, but now that everyone has the ability to publish and distribute data including photos and videos, it changes the nature of attacks like the latest Israeli campaign against Hamas. Read more »
Being falsely accused of a crime like child abuse is a traumatic experience that has become worse with social media. Two recent incidents in the US and UK highlight the problems — and show America’s approach to libel works better in the age of Twitter. Read more »
Social media chatter claiming incorrectly that a British politician was a pedophile has proven a far-reaching scandal in the UK — and one of the rare times that the network has self-corrected a lie. Is this a new dawn? Don’t get your hopes up. Read more »
Using Twitter on an Android smartphone or tablet? You’ll want to check out Echofon; my favorite Twitter client for iOS and OS X. Why? Aside from all the basic Twitter features, Echofon for Android syncs your Twitter activity so you never read a tweet twice. Read more »
Israel is waging war on Hamas, but it is also waging an information war using Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and other tools. How firmly do these networks support the principle of free speech, and how do they decide what content to permit and what to remove? Read more »
How does it change the way we perceive a war when the armies involved become media entities — publishing their own live news reports, uploading photos and videos and even live-tweeting their attacks as they happen? The Israeli army has started doing just that. Read more »
Some prominent users of Facebook such as billionaire sports-team owner Mark Cuban are complaining that the social network wants to charge them to reach their users with marketing messages — but shouldn’t it be fairly obvious that this was part of Facebook’s plan all along? Read more »
When a friend or loved one dies, their online identity often continues for some time after their death, thanks to Facebook and Twitter and other networks. Is being reminded of them every time we sign into those services a good thing or a bad thing? Read more »
DataSift raised another $15 million in venture capital, bringing its total investment to nearly $30 million. In this video from Structure: Europe, DataSift Founder and CTO Nick Halstead describes how the company handles the firehose of social media data it receives. Read more »
A big brain computer tracks Twitter’s global heartbeat during the 2012 elections and Hurricane Sandy in a research project created by two Illinois academics proving that real-time analysis of unstructured data is possible if you only have enough cores, cache and networking I/O. Read more »
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 »
