By the time the first ballot is opened at the Academy Awards next Sunday, millions of people will be chatting about the awards show on the Internet. And ABC will be ready.
Original post from Peter Yared, vice president of apps at Webtrends.
"This is the first of two articles on likely changes to Twitter. This article focuses on changes to Twitter’s consumer-facing side and the second article focuses on Twitter monetization.
Twitter reportedly acquired TweetDeck today, and that’s likely to be the first of many changes. There is a broad consensus that Twitter had stalled out in terms of product innovation, which even creator Jack Dorsey noted upon his return to Twitter as head of product. With Dorsey’s return, we should expect more changes, and very quickly.
BusinessInsider recently suggested that Twitter only has 21 million active users, and a lot more people who read of those users’ tweets. While at first blush this number may look really bad, it is actually an indicator that Twitter has matured. Twitter is a microblogging platform, and has followed the same trajectory as blogs. At first, everyone blogged. Now only a few blogs really matter.
Consumers want Twitter to be their source of information. Lady Gaga on Facebook has 35 million fans, and on Twitter she has 10 million followers. The numbers don’t tell the whole story: The 10 million Twitter followers actually care what Lady Gaga has to say every day, while a large portion of the Lady Gaga Facebook fans simply added Lady Gaga to their profile as one of their musical preferences, which Facebook later automagically turned into becoming a fan of the Lady Gaga Facebook Page.
As Twitter becomes the go-to source of information for news, celebrities and more, it’s differentiated from Facebook, which is very focused on what your friends are posting. With this shift in mind, below are some features Twitter could quickly add via targeted acquisitions that could bring back the company’s mojo, scale users, and add multiple revenue streams."
Yared details the following:
1. Add a news view
2. Offer news streams for events and locations
3. Show photos, videos and other media inline
4. Inline comment threads
5. Improve search
6. More Twitter widgets for websites
Description from mashable.com:
"The research and development department of The New York Times has recently been pondering the life cycle of the paper’s news stories in social media — specifically, on Twitter. Cascade is a project that visually represents what happens when readers tweet about articles.
Even now, however, Cascade is more than just a nifty data visualization. Some journalists think it also gives us new ways of to think about and optimize for sharing and engagement on the social web, especially since it helps identify the most influential sharers, the more shareable terms, and more.
Its creators write on the project’s website that Cascade “links browsing behavior on a site to sharing activity to construct a detailed picture of how information propagates through the social media space. While initially applied to New York Times stories and information, the tool and its underlying logic may be applied to any publisher or brand interested in understanding how its messages are shared.”
From wired.com/underwire
"...A small but mighty online force has swelled in hopes of getting nerdy action-comedy Chuck renewed for a fifth season. The latest in a series of online efforts to get NBC to commit to another chapter of the show, the We Give a Chuck campaign has been flooding Twitter with appeals to the show’s advertisers.
“The Nielsens are basically just a tool to tell a network and advertisers that people are watching the commercials aired during a show,” said Kris Schneider, one of the co-founders of We Give a Chuck, in an e-mail to Wired.com. “We decided that as fans we could tell them the exact same thing using Twitter. And unlike the Nielsens, which only seem to measure if a TV is on, we could show that not only were we watching, we were paying attention.”
The gambit is fairly simple: During airings of the show, fans send tweets to advertisers, like: “Just rewatched the last episode of #Chuck while drinking my daily @drpepper! Thanks for the Chuck support @pepsi!” The posts are then appended with the hashtag #NotANielsenFamily...."
Foursquare popularized the notion of a person wanting to know if their other friends are at Starbucks [or some other location]. With Hashable you are checking in with a person as opposed to location. We are the inventors of people check-ins.
By the time the first ballot is opened at the Academy Awards next Sunday, millions of people will be chatting about the awards show on the Internet. And ABC will be ready.
Trying to exploit viewers’ two-screen behavior, the television network has built a companion Web site with behind-the-scenes video streams, so Oscar winners will be seen accepting an award on the TV set, then seen celebrating backstage on the stream.
Experiments like this one are a sudden priority in television land. As more and more people chat in real time about their favorite shows — on Facebook, Twitter and a phalanx of smaller sites — television networks are trying to figure out how to capitalize.
It’s as if people are gathered around the online water cooler — and the television executives are nervously hovering nearby, hoping viewers keep talking and, by extension, watching their shows.
Read the full article on NYTimes.com