Twitter a truly global tool with 72% of accounts outside of the U.S.

Twitter is growing in popularity across the world, with U.S. accounts now representing just slightly more than one quarter (28.1 percent) of the total Twitter population, according to new data.

With 33.3 million accounts, Brazil now outranks Japan (29.9 million accounts) as the second most Twittering country, but Japanese remains the second most used language on Twitter after English, according to Paris-based social media research company Semiocast.

Semiocast said it analyzed the explicit and implicit … Continue Reading

British tourists detained, barred from U.S. after tweet about “destroying America”

Two British tourists were detained and barred from entering the U.S. after the Department of Homeland Security flagged one of them for joking to “destroy America” and to dig up Marilyn Monroe’s grave on Twitter.

British citizens Leigh Van Bryan (pictured, middle) and his friend Emily Bunting recently flew to Los Angeles for a holiday trip and instead were interrogated for five hours and locked up over night, according to The Sun newspaper.

Bryan told … Continue Reading

State of the Union proves “Spilled Milk” is something to tweet about

When it comes to significant events that are shared across the country (and sometimes the world), Twitter is getting increasingly good at making sense of the real-time data collected from tweets. Take for example last night’s State of the Union address, which racked up 766,681 tweets during the full 95-minute event.

Twitter has previously reported moments of unusually high activity, such as pop singer Beyonce’s pregnancy announcement during MTV Video Music Awards, a tense U.S. … Continue Reading

Tweets are free speech, even threatening ones, judge rules

Does posting thousands of threatening messages to Twitter targeted at single person constitute online stalking? Legally, the answer is now officially no.

Judge Roger W. Titus ruled, in the case of the U.S. versus William Lawrence Cassidy, that harassing messages posted to Twitter or blog sites are the digital equivalent of soapbox rants, and are thus protected forms of free speech.

In the now-dismissed case, the government had accused the defendant Cassidy of causing “substantial … Continue Reading

Tweets Per Second record shattered by Japanese animated movie, Twitter says

Twitter has announced that a recent Japanese television program has triggered a new record for the highest tweets per second.

As you might guess, the “tweet’s per second” (TPS) measurement is determined by measuring the number of times the world mentions a specific subjected over the course of a single second in time. With 25,088 TPS, the new record holder goes to the Dec. 9 screening of Castle in the Sky, an animated Japanese … Continue Reading

How tweets about courthouse coffee that “sucks” overturned a death row verdict

An Arkansas man has had his death penalty conviction overturned because one juror during his case was tweeting and another juror fell asleep.

Twenty-six year old Erickson Dimas-Martinez was found guilty in 2010 of robbing and murdering a 17-year-old boy outside of a party in 2006. During his trial, one juror fell asleep, and another posted to his Twitter account regarding the case. While the tweets did not divulge specific details of the case, the … Continue Reading

Twitter captures user activity during 11/11/11 at 11:11:11 (video)

Twitter today released a new video visualizing all the tweets that mention the momentous occasion that took place last Friday: 11:11:11 on 11/11/11.

“Each ’1′ is a location that moves with the conversation on Twitter. Their scale varies depending on the volume of Tweets posted from the location they represent. You can see the main wave move from right to left, and then a second one that occurred at 11 p.m. around the world,” Twitter … Continue Reading

The life and death of tweets, according to a week’s worth of Klout data

Why did that all-important, life-changing tweet you feverishly posted lose steam after just a few minutes? Odds are, it’s because you’re just not influential enough.

Klout, the startup that measures a social media users digital influence, analyzed a week’s worth of retweet data and researched the correlation between the life of tweets — as determined by the spread of retweets — and Klout scores. The startup specifically looked at the half-life of tweets (pictured below). … Continue Reading

Google Realtime goes dark after Twitter agreement expires

Google has taken its powerful Realtime search product offline after a 2009 agreement to display up-to-the-minute Twitter results expired.

The shutdown of Realtime comes just as Google is in the process of rolling out Google+, its new social networking initiative that competes with Twitter. Google said it planned to relaunch Realtime search after retooling it and adding in Google+ results.

“Since October of 2009, we have had an agreement with Twitter to include their updates … Continue Reading

Hacked Fox News Twitter account claimed Obama had been assassinated

Fox News on Monday said that its Fox News Politics Twitter account had been hacked after the account falsely posted that President Obama had been shot and killed while campaigning in Iowa. President Obama is celebrating July 4 at a barbecue with military families at the White House.

One of several Obama-related tweets in the early morning hours of July 4 read:

“BREAKING NEWS: President @BarackObama assassinated, 2 gunshot wounds have proved too much. It’s … Continue Reading

Obama’s Twitter account: Now with 100 percent more president

Barack Obama’s presidential re-election campaign announced today that the president himself would be updating his Facebook and Twitter accounts heading into 2012.

“We’re turning a page on the President’s Facebook account. From now on, Obama 2012 staff will use this account to keep you up to date not just on what the President’s doing every day, but on how millions of supporters around the country are building this campaign,” members of Obama’s campaign wrote via … Continue Reading

Why do Republicans tweet so much more than Democrats?

Representative Anthony Weiner’s embarrassing tweet has had a chilling effect on congressional Twitter use, an analysis by Tweetcongress.org shows.

But there’s another mystery contained in TweetCongress’s infographic: Why do Republican representatives use Twitter so much more than their Democratic counterparts?

Over a period of several weeks, TweetCongress recorded 4,537 tweets by 168 Democratic members of Congress. In the same period, the site counted 10,446 tweets by 232 Republicans.

That’s 2.3 times as much Twitter activity … Continue Reading

The map of how bin Laden news spread through the Twittersphere

The news about Osama bin Laden’s death spread through the world like wildfire thanks to Twitter, Facebook, news sites and other social media.

The map above shows just how fast it all happened in the first 12 hours after the first tweets about the killing of the world’s most-wanted terrorist, starting around 7:30 pm Pacific time on Sunday. Sysomos said that its social media monitoring tool measured the spread.

Sheldon Levine of Sysomos said that … Continue Reading

Microsoft's Bing sees Twitter backlash for Japan quake campaign

Here’s a great example of how a seemingly noble social media donation campaign can go awry: Microsoft tweeted two hours ago on the Bing search engine’s Twitter account that it would donate up to $100,000 to help victims of Japan’s earthquake — but only if Twitter users retweeted its original post to broadcast it to their followers, at $1 per retweet.

While many Twitter users are retweeting without complaint, others are pointing out that this … Continue Reading

Big media, not popular bloggers, dominate the conversation on Twitter

Who determines the big topics of conversation on social media such as Twitter? It’s isn’t the loudest bloggers with large followings of virtual fans.

Rather, mainstream media tends to play the biggest role in the top “trending” topics on Twitter, or those that appear in the top ten search terms on the service at any given point in time, according to a study by Hewlett-Packard’s research labs.

“You might expect the most prolific tweeters or … Continue Reading

Can we really trust the cloud?

Software architects like to shorthand the spaghetti of interconnected networks that make up the Internet as “the cloud” — an amorphous entity, somewhere distant, that you don’t need to fuss over.

But events around the world have brought cloud advocates back to Earth. From Egypt and Canada to Capitol Hill and beyond, we’ve been reminded that what we call the cloud is just a bunch of computers, in buildings, tied together by fiber-optic cables, and … Continue Reading

Will tweets make Techmeme even more addictive for tech news junkies?

Techmeme, the news aggregator that’s usually my first stop on the Web, just announced that it’s adding a new kind of headline to the mix — tweets posted on Twitter.

For Techmeme, the move seems like an obvious extension of the site’s existing Twitter-based news tip system. This should bring in a fresh, fast source of news. Tweets will also be incorporated in the discussion and commentary sections under each headline. And Techmeme usually tries … Continue Reading

Twitter: Make that almost San Francisco

Twitter, the popular messaging site, may be growing out of its startup phase with a possible headquarters move to Brisbane, California, according to brokerage sources in the San Francisco Business Times.

The company appears to have more than 175 million users, has sent over 25 billion tweets, and 100 million accounts added in 2010, according to statistics from Royal Pingdom. What do these numbers have to do with moving headquarters? Twitter is growing and with … Continue Reading

Justin Bieber, World Cup, Haiti, iPad top 2010 trends on Facebook and Twitter

In the footsteps of Google, which posts a yearly zeitgeist of the most searched terms, Facebook and Twitter have decided to unpack some of their trends of the year from tweets and status updates.

To measure trends in Facebook’s status updates, data scientist Lars Backstrom looked at words or phrases in terms of the ones that grew most in status updates compared to last year. And the result? “Highs and lows of world events that … Continue Reading

Twitter adds instant notifications via SMS, push messages on iPhone/iPad

A much craved-for feature by mobile users, microblogging platform Twitter has finally taken notice and added push notifications for mentions to your username (dubbed @mentions) in its iPhone and iPad apps, as well as through SMS.

Here’s how it works: whenever someone you follow mentions you with your username, Twitter’s iPhone and iPad apps will open up with a push notification. Alternatively, if you’re not an iPhone user, you can turn on text message notifications … Continue Reading