Or, at least, where they’re the most open about displaying their antisocial views.

The picture doesn’t look good for the Eastern states, although admittedly the bulk of the population is there as well. Areas in Virginia, North Carolina, Texas, and Alabama show up bright red on the map, as do areas in more central states Indiana, Iowa, and Minnesota.

The map is part of a larger project, called the Geography of Hate, by Humboldt State professor Dr. Monica Stephens. The data that forms the map comes from an analysis of every tweet posted between June 2012 and April 2013 that contained at least one of 10 designated “hate words,” including dyke, fag, chink, gook, wetback, and cripple.

Source: Hate Map

California seems relatively hate-free

But while the original list of tweets was generated by a machine, every single one of the 150,000 tweets containing one of the target words was individually examined by undergraduate students. As the project description states:

Because algorithmic sentiment analysis would automatically classify any tweet containing “hate words” as “negative,” this project relied upon the HSU students to read the entirety of tweet and classify it as positive, neutral or negative based on a predefined rubric. Only those tweets that were identified by human readers as negative were used in this analysis.

To protect the identity of potentially racist, homophobic, or otherwise bigoted Twitter users, the tweets were aggregated up to the county level, and counties with high levels of hate speech were colored red on the map. Areas with moderate levels — though still higher than the national average — are varying shades of blue, and unshaded areas were below the national average.

Smaller towns seem to have a higher incidence of hate speech — in Virginia, for example, Palmyra is more hateful on Twitter than Richmond. And in Louisiana, New Orleans and Baton Rouge are less hateful than smaller towns nearby.

Image credits: Geography of Hate

“Facebook won the MySpace battle because of better and more immediate interaction with people,” Eric Covino says. “The more they get away from that, the bigger the concern.”

Covino is the founder and CEO of CreativeSignals, an online marketing firm that buys Facebook ads, among other things. And he’s not impressed with the new of the impending autoplaying video ads that Facebook is rumored to be adding in the next few months.

Source: John Koetsier

Facebook’s clean, uncluttered new News Feed.

As soon as July, according to some reports, Facebook will be rolling out 15-second video ads right in your news feed. You’ll only see one video ad from one company a day, but the positioning right in your news feed — and the fact that they may be autoplay ads– makes it a risky move. That’s very different than Facebook’s existing video ad proposition, as Wired notes, which is on brands’ own product pages.

The rationale, however, is the pot of goal at the end of the digital rainbow.

“They’re looking to push out millions of dollars of ads,” Covino sayw. “The price per spot is definitely north of a million.”

The challenge, for Covino, boils down to user experience. MySpace bit the dust because of a horrible user experience cluttered with ads. Facebook, which just added retargeted ads in the middle of your news feed, initially had just one ad per page. The social network moved to four in 2011, then to six, and has tested up to 10.

The pressure, especially now that Facebook is a publicly-traded company, is to increase revenue. And there’s also pressure from advertisers, who want new and better ways of splashing their messages in front of social media users.

“With both Facebook and Twitter, you have these tremendously large user groups with advertisers salivating over them,” Covino told me. “I’m worried about the user experience … they keep interrupting people.”

Facebook, of course, is not unaware of these problems, and they test almost everything they do with small groups of Facebook users before migrating the changes slowly to others. So if there is a significant user backlash, Facebook will know, and it will be able to course-correct.

Source: Jolie O'Dell/VentureBeat

Mark Zuckerberg announcing the updated News Feed

The question, however, is whether the tension between cash and user experience will be resolved in a way that solves both problems.

Covino’s not so sure.

“The core problem of all this is that you have to overcome the psychology of what your users think your service is,” he says.

In other words, people come to Facebook to connect with friends, not necessarily with brands. That is probably largely true, but people are also connecting strongly with companies on Facebook — especially local community businesses. In fact, Facebook trumpeted just a month ago that its users have made more than two billion connections to local businesses, view their Facebook pages 645 million times a week, and comment on them 13 million times a week.

And Facebook fans have never been more valuable to brands — BMW fans are worth $1,613, Starbucks fans $177, and Coke fans are worth $70 to their respective brands.

The core question, to Covino, is how long they’ll stay that way.

“All these things are great, and they sound great, but can that money overcome psychology?” he wonders. “I’m extremely skeptical.”

CEO Noah Pepper announced the acquisition this afternoon on the Lucky Sort’s website. The company has been building a visualization and data navigation engine called TopicWatch, which can discover real-time patterns in streams of data, and took in $500,000 in seed funding from Neu Venture Capital in early 2012.

The startup had operated in stealth mode, but it caught the attention of investors and the press when it raised seed funds from a roster of “big data” experts, including chaos theory physicist Dr. Norman Packard.

Pretty clearly, there’s a strong Twitter tie-in, as Twitter is nothing more than a live stream of data, continuously updated by millions of people. Where Twitter will use the technology was not fully disclosed, but Pepper did offer a hint.

Several of us will be moving to San Francisco to join Twitter’s revenue engineering department, so if you’re in the neighborhood and want to talk about text mining or data visualization, give us a shout.

Twitter has been beefing up its ad tools in the past few months, releasing new functionality for keyword targeting, self-service tools for interest, platform, fan, and gender targeting, and more. And as it ramps up for a possible IPO this year, it needs to give advertisers even better tools for placing, targeting, and evaluating their Twitter ad spend. It’s likely that Lucky Sort technologies will be helpful for that purpose.

In any case, the existing Lucky Sort toolset will be shut down, Pepper stated:

We’ll be helping current customers transition off our system in the coming months such that we can focus fully on our future at Twitter.

Twitter has been acquiring small companies at a fairly rapid pace lately, having just acquired big data startup Ubalo. And in 2012, Twitter was the fourth-most acquisitive company, buying a total of 10 startups and ranking just behind Facebook, Google, and Groupon.

Here is Lucky Sort’s full announcement:

Lucky Sort acquired by Twitter!

Two years ago I started Lucky Sort with several friends. Our goal was to make huge document sets easier to analyze, summarize and visualize by building elegant and user friendly tools for text analysis.

Today I’m very excited to announce that our journey has entered a new phase: Lucky Sort has been acquired by Twitter!

Several of us will be moving to San Francisco to join Twitter’s revenue engineering department, so if you’re in the neighborhood and want to talk about text mining or data visualization give us a shout.

We’ll be helping current customers transition off our system in the coming months such that we can focus fully on our future at Twitter.

In building Lucky Sort we had an enormous amount of support from friends, employees, advisors and investors. It has been uplifting to have so many people help us and it highlighted just how much business is a social endeavour.

Best,

Noah Pepper
Chief Executive Officer
Lucky Sort

Ubalo announced the acquisition on its website, saying that the company was founded to focus on making large-scale computing easier and that after fruitful collaborations with Twitter’s infrastructure team, the two agreed to come together.

The startup was working on simple ways of scaling code beyond single machines. Using the Ubalo infrastructure, developers could write code for multiple machines with no additional overhead, using the same tools, languages, and libraries that they would ordinarily use for single-computers applications. Case studies that the team published include reducing image processing tasks from eight hours to five minutes using 100 processor cores on Amazon S3 and using Ubalo to generate 8GBs of data by drawing one billion samples from a set of data and computing sample averages, all in just .7 seconds.

Ubalo achieved this by creating modular “pods” that run calculations in replicatable environs you set up once and can run anywhere as well as APIs and messaging protocols to keep all the calculations in sync, and data management techniques to access, manage, and store gigabyte-sized data files.

The startup’s name, Ubalo, means “counting,” according to the site, and it had just four employees including the founders.

Here’s the team’s announcement:

We’ve got some exciting news: The Ubalo team is joining Twitter. In early 2011, we started Ubalo to make large-scale computing easier and more accessible to a technical audience, and we’ve had a great time working with our partners and customers on a number of interesting products. When we met the infrastructure folks at Twitter, we realized that it’s a company with brilliant people, strong momentum, exciting challenges and a promising future. We quickly became enthusiastic about the possibility of collaborating with them and the impact we could have there.

A few days ago, Twitter agreed to acquire our technology and we agreed to join their staff. We look forward to working with Twitter in the years to come.

Thanks for your support and interest in Ubalo!

— Jacob Mattingley (@jem_nz) and Ian Downes (@ndwns), May 9, 2013

It seems to be more than simply an acqui-hire, as Jacob Mattingly, whose Twitter account says “I like making complex things simpler,” tweeted that his startup’s intellectual property was acquired. Cofounder Ian Downes apparently just started using Twitter today and has only one tweet — a retweet of Twitter Engineering’s tweet — to his credit.

Twitter, of course, can always use top-notch expertise on its infrastructure teams. The company’s days of fail-whale adventures seem to be in the past, but with a continuously growing network of users and new services like Twitter #Music, among others, there’s a strong need for ongoing talent acquisition.

Ubalo was based in Palo Alto, Calif., and was funded by Harrison Metal.

“We may be witnessing the rise of Twitter’s recently acquired Vine,” Compete.com’s Conor O’Mahony said in an email.

Source: Compete.com

Fast movers for April 2013

Vine, which bills itself as “the best way to see and share life in motion,” was acquired by Twitter for $30 million in October of 2012, when it had only three employees. The site is essentially a combination of a video-based Instagram and Twitter, as users upload short 6-second videos and share them with friends.

Two million unique visitors is not huge, of course, although it is significant. But it’s important to note that many users who access Vine solely via mobile will not be counted, and that this is a momentum signal, not a sign that Vine is already at Twitter- or Facebook-style reach.

Vine, which has had some challenges lately due to copyright violations and hardcore porn appearing as an editor’s pick, is ideally suited to grow fast simply due to the fact that Twitter owns it … and can feature it more prominently in users’ tweet streams whenever it wishes. Twitter has already signaled with Twitter #Music that it intends to go full-media and extend what has largely been a textual medium into music and other media.

Other top sites included MLB.com — as baseball season hits — and Boston.com, for reasons too obvious and painful to mention. Java.com and Adobe.com hit the fast mover’s list simply due to new software updates.

photo credit: mclcbooks via photopin cc

We’re coming close to the one year anniversary of my first article that made the front page of Bitmob. It was about my bromance with Garrus Vakarian in the Mass Effect trilogy. At the time, I was excited to share my favorite moments from Mass Effect 3. The article was the deciding factor in my wanting to begin a career in games journalism, but it’s also my most cherished article because it came from the heart of an innocent gamer. I hadn’t then been exposed to the greater gaming community.

A lot has happened since last April. I’m sure I don’t need to recap all the events for you; this isn’t that kind of retrospective. I’m more concerned about the video game community itself.

A year ago, I was pretty naive about our community. I thought it was filled with a bunch of passionate gamers who liked discussing their favorite hobby over the Internet. Bitmob itself was a great place — maybe too great. It truly was a shelter from the legions of trolls that infest the Internet. Eventually, the more I invested in Twitter, the uglier the conversations became, the more websites I visited, and the more bickering that went on.

Why would anyone want to be a part of this industry? I’ve asked myself this question a lot recently. Everywhere I turn, I see arguments about violence, sexism, and bigotry. I wish I could go back to last April, when I decided to write about video games. I would tell my former self to just enjoy the hobby and not try for a career in it.

I always feel awkward when someone asks me what I want to do for a living. Whenever I reply, “I want to write about video games,” I feel an awkward chill run down my spine. Recently, I realized that chill isn’t because most people view video games as childish but because I’m ashamed to associate with our community. Video games are no longer a children’s toy, but gamers sure as hell still act like children.

Last year, Electronic Arts was voted the most evil company in America, and it looks like it will be receiving that title once again. Really? How about the companies that skyrocket prices on pharmaceuticals or create a monopoly off blood diamonds? There is a laundry list of companies out there that treat humans and the environment like garbage, yet a software publisher is voted the most evil company in America because a bunch of gamers didn’t like the ending of Mass Effect 3. No wonder I’m ashamed to associate with this crowd. It’s pathetic; it’s disgusting.

I know I’m coming off as pessimistic, but this is coming from anger. I’m angry that women are treated terribly from all angles in this community. I’m tired of seeing the trolls get more attention than those who are actually trying to add value to conversations. However, every once and awhile something great happens — something that revitalizes my love for video games. Two recent dates come to mind: February 20 and March 26, or the reveal of the PlayStation 4 and the release of BioShock Infinite, respectively.

On the day of the PS4 reveal, Twitter was vibrant and optimistic. Everyone was sharing their favorite PlayStation memories, and there were great discussions about predictions and what Sony needed to reveal. From the early hours of the morning to late at night, after the two-hour presentation, it was a great day to be a gamer — not because a new console was announced but because everyone put down their weapons for a day and shook hands in excitement.

On March 26, an amazing video game came out: BioShock Infinite. The Internet was abuzz once again. Everyone was enjoying common experiences in Columbia. A week later, great conversations are still being had — another example of trolls and white knights alike dropping their issues and sharing something together.

These significant events show how great our community can be. Sadly, it seems it can only sustain such greatness for a single day.

A lot has happened since last April. I’ve made great friends and played some fantastic games, but that feels overshadowed by a colossal community filled with pettiness. As long as the web is the main method of discourse for this industry, it will never get better.

I wish I had some answers, but I don’t. Remember, my first article was written only a year ago. I have no influence in this industry, but maybe one day I will, and I’ll have some answers then. Until that day comes, I think we should all ask ourselves one simple question: why would anyone want to be a part of this industry?

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Well, duh.

Facebook fans are the holy grail of small business, according to a recent study. In fact, 41 percent would take the two million fans, almost double the number that would prefer a celebrity endorsement or a million-dollar Super Bowl ad.

The data comes from a study of 500 small businesses by Staples which asked, in part: If a genie granted you one wish to market your company, what would you want?

Source: Staples

Which of the following would you select?

Perhaps most interestingly, small business owners prefer Facebook fans to Twitter followers by almost a four to one ratio. Only 12 percent of the owners picked two million Twitter followers, suggesting that Twitter followers are only 25 percent as valuable as Facebook followers and fans. That makes sense, given recent data that engaged Facebook fans are worth hundreds of dollars each in lifetime value, with some — for brands like Zara and Levis — being worth $300-400.

Compare that to a Super Bowl ad that makes a momentary buzz and then is gone, or Twitter followers who are much less likely to actually see any communications from the brand, and the value is clear.

“The results showed that these savvy business owners are not only utilizing social media in advanced ways but that the understanding of the philosophies behind why social media works and how it can help business were advanced,” a Staples representative said.

Further evidence of that?

Engaging customers via social edged out boosting sales when business owners — who spend 5.5 hours per week on social media marketing — were asked why they invest time, energy, and money in social. That’s a big difference from even a year ago, when increasing sales was the most important reason for most businesses to jump on the Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest bandwagons.

Which doesn’t mean, of course, that small businesses don’t want to profit from social and don’t want to increase their sales. It does mean, however, that they realize the relationship matters more than any one specific purchase, and that nurturing the relationship first will lead to great lifetime value of the customer.

One other interesting point as Twitter ramps up its advertising products, having recently launched more small-business-friendly ad options: LinkedIn is actually the second most frequently used social channel, and Pinterest ranks higher when business owners list social sites that are helpful.

Interestingly, given that many small businesses still today do not have a website (three out of five in this survey did not), 61 percent felt their blogs were their most helpful social media channel.

Image credits: Staples

I had to smile though when I updated the app.

Not only did the app’s marketing pic showcase Twitter’s current brand messaging around watching, getting, and reading, all of which are higher on the priority list than, God forbid, actually tweeting, but the app itself is designed for consumption, not creation. Watch the world unfold, indeed, while you consume media.

Here’s the Twitter app user interface (at right). Please tell me, at first glance, where you go to tweet.

I’m not a regular Twitter app user, preferring to simply use the web or a mobile app, and it took me a few seconds to find (it’s that tiny little icon at the bottom left corner).

The big, noticeable icons are all at the the top: my account, my home stream, mentions, messages, and more.

In any case the updates add better multimedia integration — you can click and add photos in multiple ways — and support for retina displays. With a presumably straight face, Twitter says with this update, “Tweets will be clearer and sharper, creating a more vivid experience.”

In addition, the app now supports 14 more languages, including Dutch, French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Malay, Portuguese, Russian, Simplified Chinese, Spanish, Traditional Chinese, and Turkish.

The update is available in the Mac App Store, where the app has to date received 3.5 stars.

The deal is for “special access” to advertising slots, as well as research data and new, as-yet-unannounced advertising products, in return for which Starcom has committed to spend $200 million — or more — of its clients’ money. Full financial details were not released, but I would assume that a deal of this magnitude also includes significant financial incentives, AKA discounts.

Twitter has been unveiling new advertising products such as demographic targeting tools and keyword targeting options with furious rapidity in the past weeks, as well as Twitter #Music. That seems to indicate the company is focusing on monetization … and, if the Silicon Valley buzz is to be believed, a 2013 IPO.

In any case, Twitter is certainly focused on advertisers and advertising. But even with all its recently-announced products, it’s still early days, and the upside is difficult to estimate.

“We’re in really uncharted territory here,” said Eric Covino, president of digital marketing firm Creative Signals. “You have these tremendously large user groups with advertisers salivating over them … but they’re still in their infancy in terms of advertising.”

In any case, this is not Starcom’s first rodeo. The company has been experimenting, testing, and learning on Twitter for a year and a half, Starcom CEO Laura Desmond said. Which means that it believes Twitter ads are driving real, measurable ROI for its clients.

Covino is a little skeptical.

“All these millions of dollars have to overcome basic psychology,” he says. “Twitter has publicly announced that they look at themselves as a media company, not a social media service. But its users think Twitter is social media.”

In other news, Twitter and Starcom are also apparently building a “social TV” lab together, so perhaps Twitter #TV will soon be joining Twitter #Music.

Image credit: Starcom; Hat tip: AllThingsD

That’s the theory behind Twitter’s new ad tool, keyword targeting in timelines.

Available today globally, the new targeting mechanism will allow advertisers to tailor which audience they choose to market to by the content of the tweets those people write. Twitter says this is important for advertisers, since it lets marketers reach the right audience at the right time, in the right context.

And they’re right, to a degree.

Twitter’s optimistic scenario is a user tweeting about a great song from their favorite band. As it happens in contrived examples, this band just happens to be playing a nearby venue that very night, which means that promoters can run geotargeted Twitter ad campaigns against local users who have tweeted that band’s name, and thereby inform this particular user that her favorite group is in town.

There’s no doubt that there’s huge value in this new targeting option. And, as AllThingsD notes, Twitter has included negative sentiment filtering, which is critical, because no advertiser wants to target people who are tweeting about Wu-Tang Clan, only to find that they were tweeting that Wu-Tang Clan sucks, or something similar.

But it’s also challenging, because many tweets are difficult to register commercial intent for.

If I tweet about my wife’s illness, are you going to target me with a random medicine? Or if you tweet about a great dinner you’re just about to eat, will you really be receptive to ads about a Greek restaurant just down the road? Twitter says it’s helping advertisers target “signals of intent,” and that might sound like Google-ish search keyword targeting, but it’s not clear that the link is quite as obvious as an intentional, directed search.

But it is yet another tool in the Twitter advertiser toolbox, and with all the others, will add up to better results. Twitter says that it has tested the feature with Walgreens and Microsoft, among others, and “users were significantly more likely to engage with Promoted Tweets using keyword targeting in timeline than other forms of targeting in the timeline.”

Which sounds like Twitter ad products are synergistic: 1 + 1 = 3, not 2. And in fact, GoPro achieve engagement rates as high as 11 percent, Twitter says, using the new feature. That’s startlingly high.

And, doubtless, music to advertisers ears.

photo credit: mkandlez via photopin cc

Here’s what big technology companies are doing in response:

Twitter

Twitter is the news of first resort, the place where the news often breaks, and this event is no exception. The Boston Police Department is staying on top of the news with its Twitter account, @Boston_Police. And if any have video of the bombings or the period of time immediately preceding the attacks, please contact BPD — they want to see it:

BostonPolice looking for video of the finish line #tweetfromthebeat via @cherylfiandaca

— Boston Police Dept. (@Boston_Police) April 15, 2013

Twitter is monitoring the situation and has deleted at least one account that was trading on the resulting confusion and people’s desire to help: @_BostonMarathon, which was promising to donate $1 for every retweet. It racked up almost 65,000 before being deleted.

The top hashtags in the U.S. today are almost all attack-related:

• #prayforboston
• JFK Library
• Saudi National
• Person Finder
• BPD
• CNN
• Muslims

Twitter’s official @Twitter account is staying quiet, but I’ve asked the company for a comment on what it’s doing behind the scenes.

YouTube

YouTube has set up a dedicated page about the explosions via its YouTube Spotlight account/service, which aggregates videos on similar issues and has over four million subscribers.

This particular spotlight brings together 23 videos (and counting) from and about the event, including video of the explosions, the aftermath, and eyewitness accounts. President Barack Obama’s statement to the press will be shown live there as well.

Google

Google set up a Google project page in Google Person Finder, which helps people look for and find loved ones who might be missing in an emergency like this one, specifically for the Boston Marathon Explosions.

Currently, it’s tracking about 2500 records — and rising fast.

Facebook

Facebook is not doing anything specifically about the Boston Marathon, but its recently-added Graph Search makes it easy to look for all your friends in Boston.

Currently, none of my friends do, but VentureBeat writer Rocky Agrawal posted that he discovered via Faceook that a friend and her family are safe. And the image at the top of this page is courtesy of VentureBeat executive editor Dylan Tweney, who was also checking on his friends in Boston via Facebook Graph Search.

The Boston Marathon organization has been updating its Facebook page since earlier this afternoon when it confirmed that two bombs had exploded, canceling the post-race party, and telling runners that the post-race area is still under lockdown.

This is a developing story; please add any updates to the comments, and I will get them in here as soon as possible.

In addition: There have already been multiple instances of false information circulating on social media and other sites — most notably that a Saudi was already being held in custody in connection with the attacks. We’re being as careful as we can be with information. Be careful what you believe.

(That is not a Star Trek reference, by the way. It’s the new Kenyan president, Uhuru Kenyatta.)

I know all this, because Twitter brought Twitter Trends to 160 new locations today.

Twitter Trends gives anyone the ability to see what people are talking about right now — anywhere in the world. Anywhere, that is, that Twitter has introduced the feature.

After bringing Twitter Trends to 100 new cities in December of last year, Twitter has now introduced Trends in 160 new locations, including Belgium, Greece, Kenya, Norway, Poland, Portugal, and Ukraine … plus an additional 130 new cities.

That brings the total number of Twitter Trend countries to 42. Most of them have also tailored trends for individual cities — 62 U.S. cities are included.

And the 140-character social network is not finished yet. Twitter software engineer Royce Cheng-Yue writes:

To make Trends more convenient and relevant for people around the world, we’re constantly working to bring Trends to more locations –– be on the lookout for even more in the future.

photo credit: hownowdesign via photopin cc

Update: This story originally featured an image that we used without proper attribution. We have removed it and apologize to the artist.

Microsoft game director Adam Orth, who insulted fans on Twitter when they voiced concerns about rumors the next Xbox will require an always-on Internet connection, has left the company.

Apparently, he said the wrong things on Twitter and it spiraled out of control, resulting in a major embarassment for Microsoft. We hear that he voluntarily resigned and deeply regrets what happened. His comments set off a storm of criticism about Microsoft and what its intentions on its next game console might be.

“Sorry, I don’t get the drama around having an ‘always on’ console,” Orth wrote on Twitter. “Every device now is ‘always on.’ That’s the world we live in.”

Orth was reportedly in the midst of a discussion with a friend of his, Manveer Heir, a senior game designer at BioWare, when he made the public comments. Orth and Manveer are close friends who were evidently making fun of each, but the observers didn’t catch on that the conversation had a lot of sarcasm in it. Orth then got in a flame war with gamers over his opinion and dissed small towns such as Janesville, WI and Blacksburg, VA, asking “why on earth would I live there?”

We don’t know what conversations took place after that with his employer, but Orth is no longer with Microsoft. Orth was a game director at Microsoft Game Studios, but he was not working on the next-generation Xbox, according to our sources.

“We do not comment on private personnel matters,” a Microsoft spokesperson told GamesBeat when we reached out on this issue.

Microsoft issued a statement last week about the comments, which referred to him rather coldly as “this person.”

“We apologize for the inappropriate comments made by an employee on Twitter yesterday. This person is not a spokesperson for Microsoft, and his personal views do not reflect the customer centric approach we take to our products or how we would communicate directly with our loyal consumers. We are very sorry if this offended anyone, however we have not made any announcements about our product roadmap, and have no further comment on this matter.”

Orth may have commented on this development on Twitter, but it’s impossible to tell unless you’re a confirmed follower of his: He has locked the account, and it is no longer available. In the same breath, apparently, he deleted his LinkedIn account. We hear that he had to do this because he received numerous death threats. That part is quite regretable.

I guess he has learned the value of discretion on social media. But, as it often is, the lesson appears to have been learned the hard way.

Dean Takahashi contributed to the reporting for this report.

Simple-selling-and-payments platform Ribbon just launched a neat update, enabling Twitter users to take orders and payments via Twitter itself — no other website required. Ribbon used Twitter’s new expanded tweet capabilities — Twitter Cards — so that Twitter users could complete a purchase without ever leaving the social network.

Unfortunately, Twitter shut down the service almost 90 minutes after it went live. I chatted with Ribbon cofounder and CEO Hany Rashwan briefly on the phone, and he told me that there was no warning:

“We had no notice before being shut down,” Rashwan said. “But we are in active contact with Twitter.”

Rashwan also posted about the situation on the Ribbon blog:

At around 12:24 PM PST, with no heads up, our integration of Twitter Cards was taken down, and now Ribbon links go back to Ribbon.co without the in-stream buying experience.

Before we released this, we made sure to validate our Twitter Card implementation (screenshot below), and all lights were green. We’ve had discussions with Twitter in the past, and are eager to find a way to work together. This is clearly something that’s good for not only Twitter, but also for Twitter users all over the world.

We look forward to seeing what happens in the future regarding this.

It was just a week or so ago that Twitter announced new versions of Twitter Cards, giving developers the capability to add mobile deep-linking right into another app as well as expanded tweets for galleries and, yes, products.

From there it was a fairly simple step, Ribbon must have thought, to add commerce. Rashwan says that the Ribbon in-stream purchase cards validated on Twitter’s card validator, and presents photographic evidence:

But, of course, technical validation is a long step away from strategic acceptance or even partnership. And the very fact that Twitter has included card types for products is a sign that the company has a strategic purpose in mind that probably involves monetization.

Ribbon’s implementation looks like it would have short-circuited that, since while the commerce would have happened on Twitter’s platform, the monetization would not have impacted Twitter’s bank account.

I’ve contacted Twitter for an update, and will post more details when I have them.

photo credit: Thomas Hawk via photopin cc

Today, Bloomberg announced that it will be the first financial information platform to integrate real-time Twitter feeds directly into investors’ data workflows. Two days ago, the SEC had said that, yes, Reed Hastings could communicate to the public via social media after staff at the securities watchdog had recommended he be charged for revealing material company information via Facebook.

With new capabilities come new requirements, Bloomberg says:

“When important news is shared on Twitter, traders and investors need to be able to access it, and validate its importance in order to incorporate that information into their decision making process,” Jean-Paul Zammitt, the head of sales and product development, said in a statement.

But it won’t just be a firehose of tweets in your Bloomberg terminal, the company says. Rather, tweets will be classified by company, asset class, person, and topic. And they’ll be integrated with Bloomberg’s existing financial services data stream, so there’s no switching views or checking different systems. Users can also create custom alerts to monitor “unusual bursts of social media chatter about a company.”

Whether this is helpful for notoriously rapid-fire day traders or harmful remains to be seen. But you can bet that legendary long-term value investor Warren Buffet won’t be checking the tweetstream before making his investments.

At least some are sold.

“It is extremely valuable to our business to be able to access this information on the Bloomberg Professional service in the same manner we use it for other market related applications and analytics,” said Karl Braasch, a fund manager and cofounder of Bristlecone Capital Partners.

photo credit: Christopher Chan via photopin cc

In the olden days, a tweet may have been just 140 characters. But in the shiny new modern world, tweets can be expanded with brief previews of the linked content: videos, images, stories. That’s what Twitter calls a “Twitter Card,” and Twitter announced yesterday that the social network is adding new types and new features, especially for mobile.

Along the way, Twitter is making the app-centric paradigm less siloed and more connected. And giving mobile app developer a major new marketing opportunity.

The new Twitter features include mobile app deep-linking, which enables a Twitter user to click into an app to view content that is linked to from a tweet. That’s a big step, because now content can be shared from within an app to Twitter by one user, then seen on Twitter and viewed within an app again by another user. In a sense, that makes apps more accessible, more connected … more weblike.

But if a user doesn’t have the app, they’ll be given an option to download it, right from within the tweet.

That’s a huge bonus for app developers, as it massively shortcuts the user acquisition funnel. Developers and marketers can now add users directly via Twitter, simply by adding a few lines of code to any content shared from their app to the social network. The catch, of course, is that you have to build an app that is inherently social, which facilitates and even encourages sharing.

“I’m very excited about Twitter Cards,” Craig Palli, a VP at Fiksu, the mobile app marketing platform, said. “Twitter combines expansive global reach and real time intent within its social graph … as people search, explore and generate content within the Twitter ecosystem, it’s an ideal time to identify precisely which consumers could have a high propensity to convert into loyal users, and present them with a contextually-relevant mobile app.”

It’s also a major bonus for apps with existing users, as venture capitalist and Twitter investor Fred Wilson mentioned this morning:

It is particularly helpful for e-commerce apps where sending someone to a mobile web page where they are not logged in pales in comparison to sending them to a mobile app where they are logged in with their payment credentials stored and ready to be used in a transaction.

For many ecommerce and marketplace businesses, this will be a huge help in delivering transactions instead of page views. I am sure there are a host of other application types where getting a logged in user instead of a logged out user will be super helpful.

In addition, Twitter has added new card types for expanded tweets: apps, products, and galleries.

The app card, naturally, showcases information about your app, mainly details from the iOS app store or Google Play; the product card shows an image and description of your product, along with two customizable fields that could include price or ratings; and the gallery card reveals right within the tweet that multiple images are being showcased, not just one.

The product card is massive for e-commerce companies, who can now showcase their products, with critical buying information, right on Twitter. More card types will be coming, Twitter says.

It’s also worth noting that as Twitter builds up inventory of what will be essentially meta-tagged tweets, organized by commercial intent, app connections, and more, it will have very interesting opportunities to aggregate these and start to monetize them — particularly the product cards.

And finally, after significantly angering developers last year who were building on Twitter’s platform with Twitter content, Twitter is extending a massive olive branch to developers who can build on Twitter’s platform with their own content.

Image credit: The Design Work

The new site includes a short Twitter 101 overview for those to whom “tweet” and “hashtag” are still Greek. And an overview of what Twitter’s 200 million active users actually do while posting 400 million tweets a day. There’s also an overview on how to write good tweets: They should be conversational, funny, shareable, and exceptional.

There’s been a definite acceleration in Twitter monetization efforts. The company released new self-service ad tools just two weeks ago that allow small business advertisers to finely target their campaigns by geography, gender, device, and interests. And Twitter’s new Ads API for larger clients and agencies has been live for just over a month.

One interesting thing about Twitter’s new business user intro video is how the social network now sees itself as a “global dialogue where people talk about their deepest interests … including your business.”

Whether your company is one of people’s deepest interests may be of some debate. But the new Pope was announced via Twitter, so why not your business?

Here’s Twitter’s new intro video for business:

Image credit: Twitter

Clearly, however, not anymore.

“Seventy-one percent of consumers say they post hashtags from their mobile devices,” RadiumOne VP Kamal Kaur told me yesterday. “I’ve even caught myself hashtagging in my emails.”

Hashtags help communicate ideas and feelings, the 500-person study says, help Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest users redirect their friends and followers to related content and help unrelated people participate in a larger social conversation. The hashtag was born in strictly geeky circumstances on IRC (Internet Relay Chat, a form of group messaging that arose in 1988) and made its way to Twitter in 2007 with now-Google employee Chris Messina’s tweet:

how do you feel about using # (pound) for groups. As in #barcamp [msg]?

— Chris Messina™ (@chrismessina) August 23, 2007

But with almost three quarters of this study’s respondents — 70 percent of whom were women, and 44 percent of whom were middle-aged — using hashtags, they’re definitely not something that’s confined to young, geeky, and, shall we say it, male culture.

Interestingly, social media users seem to use hashtags much more preferentially on mobile devices than on laptops or desktops, something that may be due to the built-in capabilities for doing so in many social media apps, Kaur said. Of respondents who say they use hashtags, 70.5 percent used them mainly on mobile, and 29.5 percent used them mainly on their desktop device.

Perhaps the reason for the high use is, simply, that they work.

“Fifty percent of respondents said they would explore new content through hashtags,” Kaur said. “People even use hashtags in Facebook, even though you can’t search by them yet there.”

People who see a hashtag tend to click on it, explore it, use it in their own posts, or even check out the person or brand that tweeted it. That’s something that people who want to share their content more widely, including online marketers, should keep in mind.

photo credit: mikecogh via photopin cc

Developed by Flickr to enable up to 10 code releases each and every day, DevOps is a continuous deployment methodology that uses high levels of automation to bring development — coding engineers — closer to operations, the team that builds and runs the servers that deliver the software to users.

According to a new report by IT automation provider Puppet Labs, 63 percent of companies are now using at least some DevOps methodology. Companies that do, ship code a staggering 30 times more often than companies that don’t and accomplish that rapid turnover with 50 percent fewer errors.

Not surprisingly, the deploy rate — how often companies actually update live production code — increases as the length of time of DevOps implementation increases, and the change lead time decreases. In addition, the change failure rate decreases.

How?

Puppet Labs’ report says that version control, which allows instant rollback and quick pinpointing of changes that could have adverse effects, and automation, which helps companies create and run a set of repeated and automatic steps for each and every code deployment, result in the achievement of what might be seen as two diametrically-opposed goals: quick reaction time and lower error rate.

More details, visually, in the infographic:

photo credit: Leonardo Rizzi via photopin cc

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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Update: SendGrid is now under DDOS attack

BREAKING: SendGrid has now fired Adria Richards

Update Mar 27: Adria Richards’ statement

Richards was sitting in the audience immediately in front of two developers. After someone made a comment about forking a software repository, the two allegedly began making jokes about forking in a sexual manner and “big dongles.” After listening for some time, Richards got fed up, took a picture of the two, and posted it to Twitter:

Not cool.Jokes about forking repo’s in a sexual way and “big” dongles.Right behind me #pycon twitter.com/adriarichards/…

— Adria Richards (@adriarichards) March 17, 2013

One of those two developers is Alex Reid, an engineer at PlayHaven, the mobile gaming monetization and marketing company. The other developer, whose name is not yet known but goes by mr-hank on Hacker News, was fired by PlayHaven for the incident (PlayHaven confirmed this today). He posted about what happened from his perspective on Hacker News and denied that any sexual comments were made about forking:

While I did make a big dongle joke about a fictional piece hardware that identified as male, no sexual jokes were made about forking. My friends and I had decided forking someone’s repo is a new form of flattery, the highest form being implementation, and we were excited about one of the presenters projects; a friend said “I would fork that guys repo.” The sexual context was applied by Adria, and not us.

He added that, in his opinion, this was not a fair fight. And that as a result of Richards’ tweet, he — a father of three — was fired from his job:

My second comment is this, Adria has an audience and is a successful person of the media. Just check out her web page linked in her twitter account, her hard work and social activism speaks for itself. With that great power and reach comes responsibility. As a result of the picture she took I was let go from my job today. Which sucks because I have 3 kids and I really liked that job.

She gave me no warning, she smiled while she snapped the pic and sealed my fate.

Richards explained her perspective on her blog, But You’re a Girl, saying she took the comments for as long as she could, but when she saw a picture of a little girl onstage, she felt she needed to make a stand for her and all the women who have not considered technology as a career path “because the ass clowns behind me would make it impossible for her to do so.”

As the conversation violated PyCon’s rules of conduct, and as she was personally offended, she decided to make the developers’ behavior public. As a result of her tweets, PyCon staff talked to her, identified the men, and escorted them out of the room. Within days, apparently, one of the developers lost his job — although there is now a Care2 online petition asking PlayHaven to give “the mistreated employee their job back.”

The upshot?

A storm of opinion and controversy has erupted on Richards’ blog and Twitter accounts about whether her actions were appropriate or not, and much of it has turned misogynistic and nasty. Developers and others, both male and female, have expressed differing opinions, with some supporting Richards and others condemning her for being too harsh. One has even posted a 10-minute video on Tumblr attacking her. A Pastebin record of the incident from the developers’ perspective is currently a top-four link on Hacker News.

One woman developer, @snipeyhead, went so far as to say that Richards’ actions actually make things worse for women:

@sandys1 Honestly, I feel like this kind of crazy shit makes it harder for women to manage in tech

— snipe ツ (@snipeyhead) March 21, 2013

While standing by her actions, Richards has tweeted that she did not think the developer should lose his job. It’s fairly clear that getting him fired was not her intention. And it’s also pretty obvious that the PyCon code of conduct, which presumably all attendees had the opportunity at least glance at and agree to, prohibits conversations like the one the developers were engaged in:

All communication should be appropriate for a professional audience including people of many different backgrounds. Sexual language and imagery is not appropriate for any conference venue, including talks.

Be kind to others. Do not insult or put down other attendees. Behave professionally. Remember that harassment and sexist, racist, or exclusionary jokes are not appropriate for PyCon.

Attendees violating these rules may be asked to leave the conference without a refund at the sole discretion of the conference organizers.

Still, it’s a tough situation for the developer in question — and perhaps for other developers who must now be concerned about their language and conduct not only in the office but away from the job. Perhaps that’s a good thing, to a certain extent, but it’s also a chilling effect and a limitation on the idea freedom of speech (even though the 1st Amendment only protects against government censorship).

Which freedom, by the way, Richards has used to publicly made sexual references in a joking manner herself, just a few days prior to this incident:

@skwashd you should put something in your pants next time…like a bunch of socks inside one…large…sock.TSA agent faint

— Adria Richards (@adriarichards) March 14, 2013

I’ve tried to reach out to Richards via Twitter but have not heard back. Likely, she’s not checking her Twitter messages, as many of them appear to be insulting … or even criminal, with one going so far as to threaten rape and another so vile that I cannot embed it here that essentially threatens both rape and murder. (I’ve flagged that tweet for Twitter to consider and hopefully remove, by the way, and you might wish to do the same.) A Ruby on Rails developer forwarded it to me, who added a very sad note:

I can’t imagine my daughter wanting to get into an industry that has these sorts of things happen. So evil.

VentureBeat will continue to try to get a comment from Richards.

SendGrid, too, has been drawn into the conversation, with some male developers I’ve spoken to (who do not want to be named) saying that they’re less likely to use SendGrid as a result. Richards tweeted that SendGrid did support her, however.

There’s no neat knot to tie up on this one. Essentially, too many men and women in America — and in technology — have different ideas about what is appropriate and what is not. There’s no question that women face huge challenges in technology, and there’s also no question that the Twitter and blog comment response from the wider community has gone way over the top.

Frankly, it would be great to bring Richards and the now-unemployed developer together to discuss what has happened and how we can move forward from here. If you’re him, please contact me about this issue.

photo credit: Liam Wilde via photopin cc

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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With the new additions, Twitter’s ad targeting mechanisms now include:

1. Interest: 350 fine-grained interest categories such as car racing or bird-watching.
2. Platform: Apps and web access on specific families of devices, such as iOS or Android.
3. Fans of specific Twitter handles: People who are similar to those who follow @ESPN, for example.
4. Gender: Choose male or female, which Twitter guesses but does not guarantee.

Twitter is very carefully not saying that advertisers can specifically target @JustinBieber’s followers per se. Rather, the 140-character social news network is saying that you can target users who are similar to those who follow certain accounts.

That’s a smart distinction, because otherwise owners of popular Twitter handles could start to feel used, or even demand a piece of the action. But realistically, it’s going to help markets craft a very specific demographic to target on Twitter, and probably get a significant fraction of any particular Twitter users’s followers as well.

The new platform targeting mechanisms are huge, too.

Now app developers, for instance, can target iPhone and iPad users for their iOS apps or Android smartphone owners for their Android apps. In addition, advertisers can specify if they want only desktop and laptop computers, or BlackBerry users, or anyone on other mobile devices (Windows Phone, anyone?).

Gender targeting is a little tougher. Users don’t specify their sex on Twitter, so Twitter extrapolates gender by contextual signals like usernames, real names, and even the accounts Twitter users follow. According to Twitter, those signals are 90 percent accurate in determining gender reliably.

Twitter’s self-service platform has been in the hands of a small number of beta testers since last year, and these features were among the most requested, Twitter product manager Ravi Narasimhan said. The new features are going live to a larger but still limited audience now: U.S.-based businesses on a by-invitation basis only.

To access the new features, switch to Advanced in your Twitter ad dashboard if you’re already a customer, or request access at the Twitter Ads self-service site.

Twitter has just debuted the capability to add line breaks in your tweets. Brace yourself for the coming explosion of ASCII art on Twitter.

One comfort?

The line breaks will only show up on Twitter.com, not on mobile devices. And not even in embedded tweets, as you can tell from this announcement tweet straight from the horse’s mouth:

Guess what you can doView line breaks on Twitter webLet the fun begin.

— Twitter (@twitter) March 13, 2013

But there’s one more thing to brace yourself for. …

A horde of idiots doing exactly what I did when I first saw the news from Twitter: Creating inane tweets that say essentially nothing but explore the new and amazing freedom of line breakage in Twitter. Very exciting, isn’t it?

Source: @johnkoetsier

A tweet with line breaks

One concern about this new-found freedom besides the obvious?

Twitter’s stated objective in last year’s API restrictions that infuriated developers was to “deliver a consistent user experience.” In fact, the company switched its existing display guidelines to display requirements in an effort to make a tweet on Twitter.com look the same as a tweet in HootSuite or any other Twitter client.

But with this update of Twitter’s own making, tweets which look interesting and sensible on Twitter.com will look completely stupid and odd (see Twitter’s own embedded tweet above) on any other platform.

Is that part of the plan?

photo credit: degra™ via photopin cc

The standalone iPhone app is apparently built on technology Twitter acquired last year when it bought We Are Hunted, a music discovery platform. It will suggest artists and songs to listen to, and it personalizes music based on the Twitter accounts you are following.

This tweet, by We Are Hunted “founder and coder” Stephen Phillips, is apparently a test of the new app:

Test#NowPlaying @whoisgambles – Safe Side ♪ soundcloud.com/whoisgambles/g…

— Stephen Phillips (@huntedguy) February 2, 2013

We Are Hunted produces one of the most popular Spotify apps and has partnerships with Winamp, Supersonic, as well as We Are Hunted apps on iPad, iPhone, and Android, so it is not a stretch to assume that a Twitter-focused app could be available shortly.

In case this sounds a little out of left field, this could very well be part of Twitter’s ongoing evolution into a media company as it aligns itself closer with the entertainment industries – something that has resulted in controversy in the past, such as when Twitter appeared to muzzle a U.K. journalist who tweeted negative comments about Twitter partner NBC during the London 2012 Olympics.

This media app is oriented towards consumption, which seems to be the default mode for many Twitter users. But other Twitter offshoots, like Vine, are for producing and sharing video-based messages and vignettes.

We Are Hunted’s website

The core question is: Do Twitter users, who are currently sharing and consuming short text messages, pictures, and links to media like music and videos, want a service from Twitter that helps them find and listen to new music?

That remains to be seen.

A request for comment from Twitter has gone unanswered so far, and the official Twitter media account, @twittermedia, has not tweeted since March 9.

photo credit: Hani Amir via photopin cc

Some WordPress users have noticed the test, which WordPress is running in conjunction with iReach, a service of PR Newswire. The pitch is simple: “Get more views and traffic.”

“Automattic is testing the interest level that WordPress users have in iReach,” a representative told me, adding that the test has been ongoing for some time and is “designed to test various options for users who have asked us for ways to promote their blog posts to a larger audience.”

The pitch shows up after a user publishes a post on a WordPress.com-hosted blog:

Clicking the “Read how” link brings you to this page, where WordPress says you can “get more readers as early as tomorrow,” and that iReach will create more visibility for your blog across an “unparalleled network of 1,000-plus websites and search engines.”

Source: John Koetsier

WordPress and iReach testing promoted posts

The WordPress representative that I contacted said that WordPress runs a number of tests like these at any give time with both actual and potential partners, so there is no certainty that this will become an actual supported product anytime soon.

But with the fast-growing blogging community Tumblr having just announced its mobile monetization plan, which is fairly similar to this, it stands to reason that WordPress.com will offer a similar functionality at some time soon. At which point it will join Twitter with promoted tweets and Facebook with promoted posts.

Everyone, it seems, wants promotion.

And there’s plenty of room to promote within the WordPress.com empire. Hundreds of thousands of bloggers publish almost 40 million new posts a month, and 387 million people view more than 3.6 billion pages on WordPress.com alone, every month. In addition, with Jetpack, Automattic’s tool for bringing some of the major benefits of WordPress.com hosted blogs to self-hosted WordPress blogs, there’s an even greater scope for native-advertising style promotion.

One caveat: iReach is a subsidiary of PR Newswire, and the initial launch seems a little confused.

It’s partially — but not entirely — focused on press releases, which is of course PR Newswire’s core business. The pitch contains “content release,” which sounds similar to a press release, but also says “syndicate your blog post” and “distribute your content.”

That can probably all be chalked up to it’s just a test, but seems a little odd nevertheless.

photo credit: Peregrino Will Reign via photopin cc

You pay, that is, while others view.

In an interview with Bloomberg, Tumblr VP Derek Gottfrid said the blogging network has already tested the product internally, will roll it out in the first half of 2013, and is currently looking for advertisers who want to sign up. No word yet, however, on exactly how promoted posts will actually be promoted, or what tools bloggers will have to decide who they get promoted to.

The new revenue will, Gottfrid thinks, drive the 162-employee and 100-million-blog company into profitability this year. Which seems to be a likely goal, even if only a fraction of its 16 billion total page views transition over to the ego-driven monetization model.

Tumblr, which became the ninth most popular site on the U.S. web in 2012, significantly improved its mobile apps late in the year, including its iPhone app and a new iPad app. But the company did not introduce any form of monetization at that time. This new native advertising model will ensure that traditional banner ads don’t clutter the mobile experience, but will present posts to users who might not have intended to see them.

One interesting note that Tumblr’s sales head Lee Brown let slip: Tumblr’s average advertising sale is just under $100,000 … meaning that major brands and enterprises are behind much of the site’s current revenue.

This is once again expanding the native ads landscape. We have Twitter with promoted tweets (which it just started selling via ad partners), Facebook with promoted posts, and now Tumblr with, perhaps, trending Tumbls.

All that’s needed is for Pinterest to introduce promoted pins, which I confidently expect sometime in 2013.

One question: where are WordPress.com and Automattic? (Update March 6: testing native ads too.)

photo credit: matt coats via photopin cc

And … do you give back to the social community that you’re hoping to profit from?

These are the types of questions Sprout Social’s new #BePresent project is focused on answering — and answering for free. Starting today, brands can go to Sprout Social’s MustBePresent website and get a free checkup on how well they respond to fans and followers.

Source: Sprout Social

Sprout Social’s new engagement report shows how you rank compared to your competition.

“This is a way for brands to measure themselves against their competition,” Sprout Social CEO Justyn Howard told me yesterday. ”There has been a lot of conversation about brands needing to be responsive, but there hasn’t been an efficient way … to be measured against each other.”

The report engine charts 45 billion social signals, Sprout Social says, to arrive at not only a score for your company, brand, or organization but also a comparison of your score with your industry’s average score.

Which also means, of course, that your data will be used as part of other companies’ benchmarks. But Sprout Social anonymizes the data, Howard told me, to ensure that your brand’s privacy is maintained.

The result is the kind of report that you might see created specifically by analysts or social research firms, but it is now available anytime, specifically for your company and industry, for free.

The Twitter part, that is.

“Any brand can go to mustbepresent.com, plug in a Twitter handle, and get a comprehensive report,” Howard said.

Of course, Sprout Social also does Facebook analytics and more, but those features and functionality, including analyzing multiple profiles — a dedicated support account, for instance — are reserved for Sprout Social clients.

Howard is careful to say that this is not a panacea report that will diagnose all of a company’s social media problems. And it’s a not a leaderboard or a badge to put on your site. It’s simply a way to check, objectively, how well you’re engaging your audience in social: something that you and your team can use to improve.

And it will help you to be a good social citizen, says Howard:

“Brands need to be aware that as valuable as social is as a marketing channel, it’s important to be responsive and return some of the value back to the ecosystem.”

photo credit: JefferyTurner via photopin cc

Pew Research took a long look at what Twitterati say about major social and political issues and compared it to what opinion polls say. The differences are significant.

“At times the Twitter conversation is more liberal than survey responses, while at other times it is more conservative,” the research firm said when announcing the results. “Often it is the overall negativity that stands out.”

For example, Twitter users were 46 percent positive about California’s February 2012 same-sex marriage ruling, and only 8 percent negative. Public opinion polls, however, which are both anonymous and run with at least some attempt at scientific sampling, were only 33 percent positive — and 44 percent negative. And while Twitter Nation was 77 percent happy that President Barack Obama was re-elected, America was only 52 percent unhappy, and 45 percent unhappy.

In addition, during the October presidential debates 66 percent of Americans polled thought GOP candidate Mitt Romney had done a better job, but 59 percent of Twitter users thought Obama had won.

Why the difference?

Pew says that Twitter users are only a small slice of the overall population. Only about three percent of U.S. adults tweet or retweet news, and only 13 percent say they read Twitter updates. This small slice, according to Pew, skews young and skews Democrat … and skews the overall reaction to public events.

The upshot on Twitter polls?

“While this provides an interesting look into how communities of interest respond to different circumstances, it does not reliably correlate with the overall reaction of adults nationwide,” the Pew report says.

photo credit: woodleywonderworks via photopin cc

According to digital ad firm RadiumOne, Twitter and Facebook users would select Hugh Jackman as best actor for Les Mis — shockingly, not Wolverine — and Jennifer Lawrence as Best Actress for Silver Linings Playbook.

Twitter users would pick teen vamp Twilight thriller Breaking Dawn Part 2 as Best Picture, with almost 1.3 million followers, but their second place would go to Paranormal Activity 4, with less than 10 percent as many followers at 117,192. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey would slot into number three position, with 86,389 followers.

Facebook users would also pick the Twilight movie as Best Picture.

The film received a massive 38 million likes, almost five times as many as first loser — and a much better movie, if I do say so myself — The Hunger Games. And Facebook would select TED, a movie about a teddy bear that comes to life, in third place.

(Perhaps there’s a good reason why social media doesn’t pick the Oscars.)

Here’s all the data in visual form:

photo credit: Dave_B_ via photopin cc

We’ve become aware that a hacker accessed our system this week. As soon as we learned of the attack, we patched the vulnerability and closed the access that the hacker had. Our ongoing investigation indicates that the hacker had access to the support information that three of our customers store on our system. We believe that the hacker downloaded email addresses of users who contacted those three customers for support, as well as support email subject lines. We notified our affected customers immediately and are working with them to assist in their response.

Zendesk manages backoffice features like customer support and help desk operations via a cloud service it delivers to hundreds of clients serving over 65 million people, the company says on its website. Only Twitter, Pinterest, and Tumblr clients were affected, the company says, but those sites comprise literally hundreds of millions of users.

Since most end users never touch Zendesk directly, most users’ first awareness that there might be a problem with their personal informtion will come via an email from one of the affected services. I received an email from Tumblr this evening at 11:05PM PST, saying that my information may have been exposed.

Assuming Zendesk knows exactly how deep the penetration went, there is probably not a lot to worry about. The attackers gained access to email addresses and the subject lines of support emails, but there’s no indication they accessed any passwords or other data.

In other words: don’t panic.

Here’s the email that Tumblr sent out to affected users:

Important information regarding your security and privacy

For the last 2.5 years, we’ve used a popular service called Zendesk to store, organize, and answer emails to Tumblr Support. We’ve learned that a security breach at Zendesk has affected Tumblr and two other companies. We are sending this notification to all email addresses that we believe may have been affected by this breach.

This has potentially exposed records of subject lines and, in some cases, email addresses of messages sent to Tumblr Support. While much of this information is innocuous, please take some time today to consider the following:

• The subject lines of your emails to Tumblr Support may have included the address of your blog which could potentially allow your blog to be unwillingly associated with your email address.
• Any other information included in the subject lines of emails you’ve sent to Tumblr Support may be exposed. We recommend you review any correspondence you’ve addressed tosupport@tumblr.com, abuse@tumblr.com, dmca@tumblr.com,legal@tumblr.com, enquiries@tumblr.com, orlawenforcement@tumblr.com.
• Tumblr will never ask you for your password by email. Emails are easy to fake, and you should be suspicious of unexpected emails you receive.

Your safety is our highest priority. We’re working with law enforcement and Zendesk to better understand this attack. Please monitor your email and Tumblr accounts for suspicious behavior, and notify us immediately if you have any concerns.

This is an breaking story, check for updates on Friday.

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Why now?

Jeep’s Twitter account recently told the world that the iconic brand had been “sold to Cadillac.” And Burger King’s account started mysteriously promoting McDonalds. Two high-profile hacks in less than a week means, apparently, that Twitter had to take some action.

The hacks were due to phishing attacks, or sending out emails that look legitimate but, sadly, are not.

“There’s no shortage of bad actors sending emails that appear to come from a Twitter.com address in order to trick you into giving away key details about your Twitter account, or other personal information,” Twitter’s “postmaster” Josh Aberant posted this morning on the company’s blog.

Twitter sends out a lot of emails. If you opt into email notifications for new follows, mentions, and direct messages (little hint: don’t), you potentially get hundreds of emails a week. The problem is: how do you know the email in your inbox is from Twitter?

To make that determination easier, Twitter has adopted DMARC technology, an email authentication protocol initially developed by PayPal in 2007. Essentially, it helps receiving mailservers know, with a reasonable level of assurance, that an email’s reported sender is accurate, not spoofed, and not forged. Which then allows the mailserver to delete forged email before it ever reaches your inbox.

Facebook already uses DMARC and is listed as one of the founding contributors to the open specification, as is LinkedIn. Other organizations that use DMARC include Google (Gmail), Microsoft (Hotmail/Outlook), Yahoo (Yahoo Mail), AOL, and Comcast.

A note for emailers:

If you don’t use Gmail or one of the other email providers listed above, you may not be protected. It might be a good time to ask your mail service provider if they support DMARC.

photo credit: Stian Eikeland via photopin cc