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9 Humorous Tweets About the NBA Breakup

Mon, 14 Nov 2011 22:39:57 +0000

After four months in a lockout, the NBA rejected the NBA Players Association’s latest proposal Monday — and decided to completely disband the union. The players now face an antitrust lawsuit and the possibility of losing the 2011-12 NBA season altogether. According to the Washington Post , the proposal called for a 50-50 division of players’ income and a 72-game season that would begin on Dec. 15. Since the NBA and the union failed to reach an agreement, NBA players will now begin to lose out on enormous paychecks. In an ESPN interview, Commissioner David Stern warned of a “nuclear winter of the NBA” and promised “years of litigation” for the players. The story is now so popular that Twitter users created the hashtag #XBA . Check out the gallery to see how some Twitter users are poking fun at the situation. Click here to view this gallery. Image courtesy of iStockphoto , Pinopic More About: NBA , sports , Twitter For more Social Media coverage: Follow Mashable Social Media on Twitter Become a Fan on Facebook Subscribe to the Social Media channel Download our free apps for Android , Mac , iPhone and iPad

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9 Humorous Tweets About the NBA Breakup

Twitter Can Predict Who’s Winning the GOP Presidential Race [STUDY]

Mon, 14 Nov 2011 21:08:08 +0000

Political candidates do better in the polls when they gain more Twitter followers, new research reveals. National polls happen all the time but it’s possible to predict when certain candidates will climb in the rankings based the rate they are followed. Zach Green, CEO of Twitter election researcher 140elect, wrote in a blog post Friday that he anticipated this trend, but now has the stats to prove it. “A lot of people were surprised [Newt] Gingrich is now in second place, but we’ve seen that coming since Sep. 7,” Green told Mashable . “Twitter indicates he’ll continue to pick up.” Gingrich (visualized below) gained a slew of new followers when he announced his candidacy on May 11 and on Sept. 7 after an impressive GOP debate performance. Both events led to poll gains. The candidate’s Twitter momentum has steadily increased over the last two months, which Green predicts will lead to continued poll gains. There are similar trends for the other candidates. Rick Perry’s Aug. 13 candidacy announcement led to his greatest spike in followers. He then rose in polls for the following two weeks. Green notes that although Perry is now talked about a great deal on Twitter, he is often mocked and isn’t gaining new followers at the same rate. It is more important to be followed than to be discussed, especially if the discussion is negative. Michele Bachmann’s rate of new followers has been in decline since Aug. 15. She’s been falling in the polls ever since. Mitt Romney’s three largest Twitter spikes — after his June 2 announcement, the Sep. 22 debate and the Oct. 11 debate — were all followed by growth in the polls. However, his recent Twitter decline preceded his Nov. 11 fall in polls. Green expects to see current front-runner Herman Cain lose his lead following his sexual harassment allegations, which effected his likability and standing with women. Though he was on the rise following three of the GOP debates, Cain has lost his Twitter momentum. Green estimates Cain will drop to approximately 17% popularity in the polls. Statistics analyst and data visualizer Lori Williams with Tableau Software combined the 140elect Twitter data with information from HuffPost Pollster, resulting in the above visualization. What do you think of the findings? Are Twitter and polls a case of cause-and-effect or just coincidence? BONUS: 10 Unforgettable On-Air Political Bloopers Rick Perry: “Oops” 2012 presidential candidate Rick Perry drew a massive blank Wednesday night during CNBC’s “Your Money, Your Vote” GOP debate. On stage in Michigan, Perry attempted to rattle off three federal government agencies he would eliminate, but failed to remember number three: “Commerce, education and the … uh, um, what’s the third one there. Let’s see … ” The mental block lasted about 40 more seconds before Perry uttered, “Oops.” Click here to view this gallery. More About: campaign , Politics , primaries , study , Twitter

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Twitter Can Predict Who’s Winning the GOP Presidential Race [STUDY]

Sell Simply Wants You To Buy, Sell, And Donate Direct On Twitter (From Any Device)

Mon, 14 Nov 2011 20:50:03 +0000

Brands are increasingly turning to Facebook both as a place to advertise and as a complementary platform by which to build their online presence — and begin conducting social commerce. There are a number of solutions, for example, that allow big and small operations alike to operate retail storefronts on Facebook, sell their wares, and, to a degree, manage their transactions. But what about that other popular social network, Twitter? The “micro-blogging” platform has certainly become a vehicle for celebrities and brands looking to hawk their products, stir up brand awareness, and interact with their customers, so the question becomes: Why can’t Twitter, too, offer some of the same eCommerce functionality as Facebook? There are a number of reasons for this, but for starters, Twitter has been largely focused on doing one thing well above all others: Building the best realtime communication platform the Internets has to offer. There’s also the fact that Twitter has privileged a “consistent user experience” and hasn’t always had the best relationship with third-party developers . Thus, brands have typically used Twitter as a somewhat indirect broadcast platform, listing items for sale, but only doing so in a way that is intended to lure customers away from Twitter to their own eCommerce platforms. (Facebook has also struggled to keep commerce and transactions happening on its platform, rather than suffering from redirection to retailers’ homepages.) But Chris Teso sees a big opportunity for direct eCommerce on Twitter, which is why, in July, he launched Sell Simply — a simple way to enable consumers and brands to buy, sell, and transact on Twitter. Essentially, Sell Simply turns Twitter into a eMarketplace, allowing users to buy and sell anything over Twitter by replying “buy” to any listing Tweet. Users can list an item for sale on Sell Simply, or import their items from other commerce platforms, like Etsy, Ebay, Craigslist, ArtFire, or Bonanza, and automatically tweet those items out for sale. All users have to do is connect their Sell Simply accounts with Twitter and PayPal, so when someone responds to that tweet with “buy”, Sell Simply facilitates the transaction through PayPal, enabling users to buy and sell an item with one tweet. (Re-tweets, too, are transactionable.) Beyond allowing consumers and brands to sell directly to their customers on Twitter, the startup also offers its users the opportunity to create their own storefront. Through Sell Simply’s “Simple Shop”, users can aggregate all the listings for items being sold on Twitter so that users can find them all in one place. They can also add descriptions, tags, photos, and edit a number of other fields for each listing. What’s more, the platform has a fully automated shipping calculator, which allows sellers, for example, to set their own shipping options in prices so that shopping costs can be included in the listing price, or can be set for “local pickup only”, etc. And, as mentioned above, Sell Simply has a Chrome extension to make it easy for those already selling items on Etsy, Ebay and more to import their listings. To make the process of buying and selling direct on Twitter device agnostic, Sell Simply has launched Chirp , which now allows users to pay anywhere with any device. To make a Chirp payment, all users have to do is send a tweet that says something like “@SellSimply #pay @ThePayee $200 for [said item]“ . Users can make payments that are as little as $1 or as high as $2,000. (And this is how Sell Simply makes money: The startup charges a 2 percent transaction fee on every one of those purchases.) This allows brands and sellers to collect money in under 1 minute, direct to their PayPal accounts. Detailed PayPal receipts are then automatically sent to the buyer via direct message so that they have an extra way of making sure that the transaction has been completed. And, in terms of security, since all transactions take place through PayPal, customers have no liability for unauthorized purchases when they meet PayPal’s requirements, and, in turn, can take advantage of refunds for incorrect orders or items that never arrive. Since launching in July, the platform has racked up over one thousand members listing over 10,000 items for sale on Twitter, and Teso says that 75 percent of Sell Simply’s members have connected their PayPal and Twitter accounts to the platform, which he sees as encouraging evidence that people are ready to take that leap of faith and begin using Twitter as a direct sales platform. So far, the average transaction price has been $35 and the most common items being sold are vintage clothing and photography, (as many users are coming from Etsy), but he expects the merchandise to diversify as more people begin connecting to the platform. As for the road ahead, Teso plans to launch a “T-commerce” platform designed to expand Sell Simply’s possible uses for brands, with features that will include integration with back office e-commerce workflow, analytics, and a recommendation engine that will suggest items based on what a user Tweets about, for example. For brands interested in this kind of functionality, Teso said, there will be a licensing fee. Obviously, for brands, the value proposition both for Sell Simply’s current offerings and the marketplace features that will be launching by the end of the year could be huge. If you’re a brand, Twitter is the perfect platform on which to broadcast flash sales and time-sensitive deals, and Sell Simply’s buy-with-one-tweet service will make that even easier. And for non-profits, Sell Simply uses the same formula for transactions to turn Twitter into a donations platform as well, allowing people to donate their charities of choice with one tweet. Just as brands hope that using Facebook as a social commerce platform can help create scale so that a larger audience will see cool products or sales because users post those items on their wall or share them with friends, Teso said that he sees a similar opportunity for eCommerce on Twitter. If one happens to be selling their bike on Twitter through Sell Simply, there’s a good chance that a user’s friends will re-tweet the listing, and their followers may follow suit. If those people then, in turn, re-tweet to their followers, well, you get the point. Suddenly your listing might be reaching the eyeballs of someone in a fifth degree of separation, to which they can reply and instantaneously purchase the item. And with Chirp, that can all happen while you’re on the go. It’s like Square, but you don’t need an extra device (a Square) — or a credit card. Pretty cool. Check out Sell Simply at home here and let us know what you think .

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Sell Simply Wants You To Buy, Sell, And Donate Direct On Twitter (From Any Device)

Despite Inaccuracy, Vitrue’s Twitter Tool Integrates Klout Scores

Mon, 14 Nov 2011 19:15:44 +0000

“Klout is sort of a pass/fail. It’s almost not relevant whether someone’s a 70, 90, or 40, because it’s different than a 10.” says brand presence management platform Vitrue’s Director of Product John Nolt. Despite these suspicions about the exact accuracy of the influence scoring system, Vitrue today launches a Twitter moderation tool with a deep Klout integration. The tool allows brands to see the Klout scores of people replying to and mentioning them so they can prioritize response to high scoring influencers. So while our writer Alexia Tsotsis claims that “ nobody gives a damn about your Klout score “, Vitrue thinks its brand clients will. “As long as it has some basis in reality, then it’s useful”, Nolt told me. When I asked Klout’s biz dev director Don Hoang why its system was unable to identify Alexia as having less real world influence than TechCrunch founder Mike Arrington, he gave me the cop out answer “We believe the philosophy that everyone has clout.” The company will need a better response than that if it wants its APIs picked up by more brand presence management and customer rewards systems. Vitrue was previously focused on Facebook Page management. It has provided publishing and wall moderation software as well as application suites to clients such as American Express, McDonalds, AT&T, Disney, and YouTube. Vitrue has also offered Twitter publishing for a few years, but will now help brands keep track of responses to their updates. On its expansion to providing more Twitter services, Nolt explained with a mixed zoological metaphor that “Facebook is the 800 million user gorilla, but they’re not the only fish in the sea.” Considering that brands often cross-publish their content to both Facebook and Twitter, providing moderation services for both will help Vitrue prevent its clients straying to other platforms. For busy brands strapped for community management resources, the Vitrue/Klout tool’s ability to distinguish common trolls from well-known critics could save them from PR crises. However, discontent can quickly snowball in the Twittersphere, so brands should still try to be as comprehensive as possible in dealing with public customer service complaints. I’ve followed Vitrue for a while now and it typically makes smart partnerships and acquisitions. Klout might be the best online reputation gauge, but it’s not totally dependable yet. Until Klout gets more accurate, Vitrue should consider replacing the exact scores in its Twitter tool with a colored threat-level system. Otherwise, it will need to work closely with clients to make sure they take Klout scores as general guides rather than gospel.

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Despite Inaccuracy, Vitrue’s Twitter Tool Integrates Klout Scores

Nine Homebrew Helicopters That May or May Not Actually Fly [Video]

Sat, 12 Nov 2011 04:20:00 +0000

Flying a helicopter is just slightly less difficult than building one from scratch. Didn’t stop these guys from giving it a shot—both in the building and the flying. Our friends at Oobject. com have assembled nine of the best homemade whirley-birds. More »

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Nine Homebrew Helicopters That May or May Not Actually Fly [Video]

Real-Time World War II Is the Best Thing to Ever Come Out of Twitter [Twitter]

Fri, 11 Nov 2011 22:20:00 +0000

A 24-year-old Oxford history graduate is doing something wonderful for all of you right now: narrate World War II in Twitter, in real time. It may not be as academic as a John Keegan book, but so far it’s excellent. More »

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Real-Time World War II Is the Best Thing to Ever Come Out of Twitter [Twitter]

How Hashtagging the Web Could Improve Our Collective Intelligence

Fri, 11 Nov 2011 16:25:47 +0000

Laura Larsell is the information ontologist at Trapit , a content discovery, personalization and curation platform currently in beta. Laura holds an M.A. in library sciences from the University of Texas at Austin. I rolled my eyes when the Library of Congress announced in the spring of 2010 that it would be archiving Twitter . Great, I thought — drunken tweets about burritos preserved for eternal posterity. But the Library of Congress, as it turns out, was more forward thinking than I could have imagined. Twitter data, presumed to represent the pulse — and sometimes the future — of popular consciousness, now commands big bucks from hedge funds that in turn use Twitter data to make investment predictions. Even scientists are tapping into Twitter data for research purposes . Why all the fuss over tweets? Twitter hosts valuable, communal conversation in real-time. And Twitter trends become more powerful the more users contribute to the dialogue. Finally, Twitter allows the chatter of millions to be parsed into channels (hashtags) of real-time conversation that covers widely varying topics. Jokes, rumors, political movements, pop culture fanaticisms, the collective screaming of teenagers — they all bubble to the surface and shift and change like an oil slick, much like a collective human consciousness. While Twitter generates mass interest and curates collective thought, until usage stats rise significantly, its trends cannot represent the true pulse of world conversation. That needs to change. Applying Twitter Logic to the Web Twitter captures an admittedly small slice of the collective world consciousness — in the U.S. only 78.2% of households have access to the Internet, and only 13% of online Americans actively use Twitter . It is also a platform as much about stats and bot spammers as it is about honest conversation. Despite the clutter, Twitter continues to generate an abundance of sociologically interesting data every day. Researchers from Cornell University recently used Twitter data to look for and examine trends in mood over time. They determined that collective mood patterns fluctuate in predictable ways over the course of the day and year. While this conclusion may seem obvious, before Twitter came along, documenting this type of pattern would have required a massive survey and multiple studies. One thing that makes Twitter so powerful is its use of a standard language: hashtags. Any hashtagged tweet is automatically linked to every other tweet that shares the same tag. This allows for consistent dialogue and measurement. However, the Internet as a whole is not a very consistent medium. Patterns emerge in specific areas of the web, but no uniform underlying structure exists to merge these patterns. Content may go viral or score a high page rank, but it doesn’t easily connect to related topics or encourage a larger conversation. It is a frustrating vestige of print culture that my web curation should be limited by my search ability. Furthermore, what happens to long form digital conversation in the era of Twitter? Consider especially that long form conversations include more invested and potentially expert perspectives. These perspectives are different from the collective consciousness, and yet, are not easily parsed into mainstream channels. The Watermelon Story A big part of what I do every day is train an algorithm to tag documents in the manner of my choosing. The software is in beta, and is presently only culling from a selection of web content, but it does pretty well with simple concepts. Early on, I set the machine to find content relevant to the subject/tag “watermelon.” It’s a limited data set, but this is what I’ve found so far: People write about watermelons consistently throughout the summer, most frequently in mid-summer. Again, this may seem an obvious conclusion, but proving it would have taken an incredible amount of time and effort on my part. So what do people write about watermelons online? Recipes involving or featuring watermelons are by far the most popular watermelon content, and the most popular serving suggestions feature various kinds of boozy drinks and popsicles. The second most popular posts are how-tos that guide readers through the watermelon selection process (knock on it, listen for the right sound). More niche discussions about watermelon include analyses of racial stereotypes , a story about Palestinian prisoners’ daily fruit allowance , and a report on a new variety of cold weather watermelon grown in Turkey. What conclusions can we draw from this sampling of watermelon content? Over time I’ll be able to draw quantitative conclusions about the state of watermelon journalism on the web. Watermelon may not be aggregated often (there are no watermelon sections of the newspaper), however, the ability to easily track more important ideas involving watermelon (like racial stereotypes) over time could prove illuminating. Content Organization = Collective Knowledge Twitter can gather direct, mass conversation into subject categories like #watermelon, but the conversation is limited by the short form nature of the platform. If longer form methods of online communication could be aggregated into a similar form of direct conversation, it would serve both spectators and authors alike. For that to happen, citation must be standardized. Current citation methods like hashtags are rarely, if ever, exhaustive, and they often take on the subjective viewpoint of the author or sharer. Imagine the level of constructive debate and creativity that we might achieve when we organize and bucket all web content into Twitter-like categories. Imagine the kinds of things we might learn about our collective culture. Images courtesy of Flickr, misspixels , D Sharon Pruitt More About: algorithm , content curation , contributor , data , features , trending , Twitter , web

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How Hashtagging the Web Could Improve Our Collective Intelligence

Twitter Ordered to Give Up WikiLeaks Data

Fri, 11 Nov 2011 14:43:34 +0000

A federal judge on Thursday ordered Twitter to give up information about three account holders under investigation for possible connections to WikiLeaks. The decision rejected an appeal by the three account holders that argued their IP addresses should be considered private. Those account holders — Jacob Appelbaum, Rop Gonggrijp and Birgitta Jonsdottir — have addressed the situation on Twitter. Gonggrijp , a Dutch citizen, used his feed to direct users to a blog post arguing that the decision is a blow to Internet privacy. “The consequences of this decision for me are extremely limited: there’s not a whole lot you can learn from records that Twitter has on me that you can’t learn from reading my blog,” he wrote. “There are bigger principles at stake though, and this is not a good ruling for online privacy.” Jonsdottir’s feed led readers to an Electronic Frontier Foundation article on the subject with her quote: “With this decision, the court is telling all users of online tools hosted in the U.S. that the U.S. government will have secret access to their data.” Appelbaum , a U.S. citizen, stated: “Today is one of those ‘losing faith in the justice system’ kind of days.” The case began in January when the U.S. government subpoenaed Twitter to hand over private messages between WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and others within the organization. The EFF, the American Civil Liberties Union and attorneys representing WikiLeaks fought the subpoena, but in March, a federal judge granted the U.S. government access to the accounts. That led to another round of appeals, which Judge Liam O’Grady, from the United States District Court in Alexandria, Va., rejected on Thursday. O’Grady’s 60-page opinion stated that Twitter users “voluntarily” hand over their IP addresses when they sign up for an account and agree to Twitter’s terms and conditions. Twitter’s privacy policy states that it “may disclose information about an account if Twitter believes it is reasonably necessary to comply with a law, regulation or legal request.” Representatives from Twitter could not be reached for comment on the decision. Do you think Twitter should be required to hand over personal information about its users? Image courtesy of Flickr, shawncampbell More About: privacy , trending , Twitter , wikileaks For more Social Media coverage: Follow Mashable Social Media on Twitter Become a Fan on Facebook Subscribe to the Social Media channel Download our free apps for Android , Mac , iPhone and iPad

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Twitter Ordered to Give Up WikiLeaks Data

It’s Bigger Than Ashton

Fri, 11 Nov 2011 10:02:23 +0000

If you weren’t paying attention to anything but important news today you might not have noticed that Ashton Kutcher had turned over his tweeting privileges to the social media division of company Katalyst Media. “But why?,” you ask, because it’s late and you’re wasting time on the Internet even though you’re super busy or should be sleeping . Well because Kutcher, who has about eight million more followers than you or I ever will, tweeted out something without thinking last night and, because they’re a bunch of maladjusted ugly troll people, the media pounced on him — because he’s pretty. And more importantly because what he said was really really stupid; he wondered why Penn State coach Joe Paterno was fired , when the reason he was fired was like, everywhere on Twitter. Dude, where’s my excuse? We’re all trigger happy when it comes to social media. I tweet and text the wrong people insane shit at all hours of the night just because I have the technology – true confession ( IHTM ). And herein lies the trouble with Twitter; You (and Rep. Anthony Weiner ) think it’s like texting, not realizing that your intelligible only in context tweet/text/whatever is now broadcast to an audience of 40K or 8 million of your closest followers. This explains Ashton’s admittedly ignorant tweet, and this other tweet of his , and some of my tweets and some of your tweets if you’re being honest with yourself. We’re human! Pobody’s nerfect. Earlier today I asked our new fancy Facebook sociologist writer Josh Constine, who went to Stanford so you know he’s smart because I got rejected from there, “Like what’s up with that?” about this whole mess. He said, “It’s bigger than Ashton,” explaining that because the act of tweeting was so much like texting it was more prone to human error then let’s say the act of posting to Facebook or LinkedIn. For the record I’ve never booty LinkedIn messaged anyone. But wait, before this gets out of hand, let’s all take a second to reflect on the Huffington Post’s seminal piece “Fired Over Twitter: 13 Tweets That Got People CANNED” or something. Bish please, that “canned” is in ALL CAPS so you know it’s IMPORTANT. Despite the clear risk of unfettered communication, by relinquishing editorial control over his feed to a collective process Ashton is playing it way safe. He basically ran back to the comfortable confines of old media, an act which was very “un-Internet” of him, I guess. “As of immediately I will stop tweeting until I find a way to properly manage this feed,” he wrote, “I feel awful about this error. Won’t happen again.” His solution was to hand Katalyst Media the keys to his social media kingdom, so it can vet his tweets or something, which sounds so sad. I’d rather have someone mess up every three months than be boring. I’ve never particularly been a fan of Kutcher, but I’m a pretty big fan of self-expression, even if you screw up big time. The most brilliant people are totally hated yo. Ashton, it’s not your fault that Twitter, and society, wasn’t prepared for such a disparate “one to many” ratio. So even if you were stupid and pressed send too soon, there is no Facebook or Twitter post you can’t recover from. So do it, please. You owe all those people who pressed ‘Follow’ under a certain pretense at least that. Image: @Aplusk

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It’s Bigger Than Ashton

Ashton’s Biggest Defender? His Assistant [Twitter]

Fri, 11 Nov 2011 02:20:00 +0000

The cool thing about Twitter is that it gives everyone a voice. Nobody knows you’re a dog on Twitter. But then again, nobody knows you’re Ashton Kutcher’s personal assistant, either. More »

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Ashton’s Biggest Defender? His Assistant [Twitter]