140 Characters on Your TV

By Brad

Here’s an innovative new way to increase viewership of television repeats: Using popular micro-blogging service Twitter to entice eyeballs. Via PC World:

Fox is juicing its repeats of the TV series Fringe with a new Twitter twist. The network will introduce this week “tweet-peats”—an on-screen scroll of Twitter messages from cast and producers that will appear during the episodes.

This has the potential to be insanely popular—not to mention a nice source of revenue for TV networks.

Twitter Growing, Losing Famous Members

By Brad

Twitter—the popular 140-character-limit service—had over 40 million unique visitors in the month of June, an increase of 19% from the previous month.

Unfortunately, as the New York Times reports, a number of NFL coaches aren’t too keen on the idea of their players Twittering with abandon, and have banned its use during the season.

Tweeting Your Way Into Court

By Brad

Here’s something to keep your eye on: A woman in Chicago complained via Twitter about her former apartment, and is now being sued by the property management company—to the tune of $50,000—for sullying the company’s name.

Spreading Like a Virtual Wildfire

By Brad

When news broke yesterday of music legend Michael Jackson’s death, social networking sites exploded with updates. How big was the explosion? The LA Times reports:

As the news of Michael Jackson’s fate unfolded, sites around the Web felt the strain of spiking interest.

On Twitter, the volume of Jackson-related messages – up to 5,000 per minute at peak – put such a demand on the site that it slowed considerably.

Facebook also saw a major jump—to the tune of triple the number of usual “status updates” in the hours after Jackson’s death.

Tweets from the Symposium

By Brad

Here are some of the many twitter updates made during yesterday’s Broadband Symposium using the #iia hash:

You too can follow IIA on twitter at twitter.com/IIABroadband.

Symposium Coverage Roundup

By IIA

Yesterday’s Broadband Symposium —featuring such speakers as West Virginia Governor Joe Manchin, NBA All-Star Chris Bosh, and rural broadband success story Becky Collins (aka “Granny B”)—was a big success. Many thanks to everyone involved, from planning to participating to Twittering during the event.

If you missed the Symposium, video is available here. And here’s some of the media coverage of the event:

From Network World

The broadband forum came as two U.S. agencies, the U.S. National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) and the Rural Utilities Service (RUS), get ready to distribute US$7.2 billion for broadband deployment beginning later this year. The IIA pushes for broadband to continue to be a top priority in the U.S. government.

Several speakers at the broadband forum, including professional basketball player Chris Bosh and West Virginia Governor Joe Manchin, made their cases for why universal broadband availability is important in the U.S.

From the West Virginia Gazette:

As money from the federal economic stimulus package arrives in West Virginia, Gov. Joe Manchin is making high-speed Internet access a priority across the state.

“If you come to me for water and sewer money, you better be putting wire in that ditch,” Manchin said Wednesday in Washington after accepting an award from the Internet Innovation Alliance, a group that seeks to increase broadband Internet access in the U.S. “I’m not going to be digging that ditch up twice.”

From Broadband Census:

The effort to increase broadband adoption has mainly focused on increasing broadband access and availability to drive demand, this may not be enough to increase broadband adoption.

That was the message that non-profit representatives and a consulting firm agreed upon in a panel discussion, titled “Making Broadband Affordable for All Americans,” and hosted by the Internet Innovation Alliance at the Washington Newseum on Wednesday.

Speaking of Twitter…

By Brad

IIA now has a Twitter feed!

You can follow us at twitter.com/IIABroadband.

Tweeting Dissent

By Brad

With Iran plunged into post-election turmoil, and the Iranian government cracking down on reporting from within the nation, Twitter has emerged as the go-to source for news from the streets. As the New York Times reports:

On Twitter, reports and links to photos from a peaceful mass march through Tehran on Monday, along with accounts of street fighting and casualties around the country, have become the most popular topic on the service worldwide, according to Twitter’s published statistics.

In fact, the Twitter traffic has become so large that Twitter itself was forced to change the date of a scheduled downtime for maintenance. And according to Reuters, it was the U.S. State Department that encouraged them to do so.

Facebook From Your Sofa

By Brad

As broadband makes the leap from computers to televisions, social networking sites are finding room to expand. Case in point: Microsoft’s announcement yesterday that its popular video game console Xbox 360 will soon offer Facebook and Twitter access, allowing gamers to tweet and update their status while their shoot aliens and crash cars.

Learning, 140 Characters at a Time

By Brad

Cellphones and other distractions have long been the scourge of educators. But one professor at the University of Texas at Dallas is embracing, of all things, Twitter.  Read Write Web has the scoop:

Teachers are always trying to combat student apathy and University of Texas at Dallas History Professor, Monica Rankin, has found an interesting way to do it using Twitter in the classroom.

Rankin uses a weekly hashtag to organize comments, questions and feedback posted by students to Twitter during class. Some of the students have downloaded Tweetdeck to their computers, others post by SMS or by writing questions on a piece of paper. Rankin then projects a giant image of live Tweets in the front of the class for discussion and suggests that students refer back to the messages later when studying.

New Advertising Frontiers

By Brad

Ad Age has a great story on a small pizza joint, a twitter feed, and a boom in business:

Naked Pizza, a New Orleans healthful-pizza shop that’s hoping to go national—Mark Cuban is a backer—has been marketing itself via the microblogging service. And recently it has started to track Twitter-spurred sales at the register. In a test run April 23, an exclusive-to-Twitter promotion brought in 15% of the day’s business.

“Every phone call was tracked, every order was measured by where it came from, and it told us very quickly that Twitter is useful,” said Jeff Leach, the restaurant’s co-founder. “Sure, there’s the brand marketing and getting-to-know-you stuff. ... But we wanted to know: Can it make the cash register ring?”

Given Twitter’s reach, ease of use (just 140 characters—no need to sweat ad copy!), and unbeatable price (free) it could very well turn into an advertising gold mine for businesses.

Tweeting Under the Knife

By Brad

This whole Twitter thing may be getting a wee bit out of hand:

Here’s a Twitter first: On Monday, officials at the Children’s Medical Center Dallas and UT Southwestern will tweet live from the operating room while 3-year-old John Gilbreath receives a kidney transplant from his firefighter dad, Chris Gilbreath.

It marks the first time a hospital has tweeted from a pediatric kidney transplant surgery.

Fueling Hysteria, 140 Characters at a Time

By Brad

Yesterday we posted about the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention turning to Twitter to keep people informed about the spread of “Swine Flu.” But as Foreign Policy points out, the popular micro-blogging service is also spreading misinformation:

Who knew that swine flu could also infect Twitter? Yet this is what appears to have happened in the last 24 hours, with thousands of Twitter users turning to their favorite service to query each other about this nascent and potentially lethal threat as well as to share news and latest developments from Mexico, Texas, Kansas and New York (you can check most recent Twitter updates on the subject by searching for “swine flu” and “#swineflu”). And despite all the recent Twitter-enthusiasm about this platform’s unique power to alert millions of people in decentralized and previously unavailable ways, there are quite a few reasons to be concerned about Twitter’s role in facilitating an unnecessary global panic about swine flu.

Preventing Hysteria, 140 Characters at a Time

By Brad

With all the media attention on the so-called “Swine Flu,” the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have turned to Twitter to keep the public informed:

Dept. of Procrastination

By Brad

While college researchers are busy controlling Twitter with their brains, a new company is busy making it easier for people to waste time at work. Introducing Spreadtweet, a Twitter client that looks like a typical Excel spreadsheet.

(Via the New York Times “Bits” blog.)

Mind Control

By Brad

Read Write Web reports on a cool—and a tad creepy—breakthrough out of the University Wisconsin-Madison:

[B]iomedical engineering doctoral student Adam Wilson has successfully tested a “brain wave monitor” to Twitter publishing interface, allowing him to compose a message merely by thinking and publish it to the arguably too-popular microblogging service.

Either the gates of Hell have begun to open or this is a grad student who really knows how to publicize his work by riding the bandwagon of popular culture. Both are probably true.

Are the days of keyboards numbered? Probably not—at least not soon—but the sci-fi fantasy of controlling computers simply by thinking may not be fantasy after all.

Sabotaging Fiber

By Brad

Yesterday, vandals in California chopped fiber-optic cables, essentially cutting off thousands of AT&T customers from not just their Internet service, but landline and cell phone services as well. The San Francisco Chronicle reports:

The sabotage essentially froze operations in parts of the three counties at hospitals, stores, banks and police and fire departments that rely on 911 calls, computerized medical records, ATMs and credit and debit cards.

The full extent of the havoc might not be known for days, emergency officials said as they finished repairing the damage late Thursday.

Whatever the final toll, one thing is certain: Whoever did this is in a world of trouble if he, she or they get caught.

To help initiate that “world of trouble,” AT&T is offering a $100,000 reward for information on the vandals. As for communicating with customers during the outage, the company embraced the latest rage in social networking. From CNet:

It seems that Twitter was one of the main ways that phone company AT&T has been communicating with customers and updating the public about the fiber cut that caused thousands of people in Silicon Valley and the San Francisco Bay Area to go without broadband, phone, and wireless service for most of Thursday.

Janine Popick, CEO of VerticalResponse, whose company has been affected by the outage, said the only way she has stayed on top of the situation has been through Twitter.

“All of my real time updates have been coming from the AT&T Twitter feed,” she said.

Indeed, she isn’t alone. Nearly 2,400 people have been keeping tabs on the situation via AT&T’s Twitter feed.

Rumor of the Day

By Brad

TechCrunch is reporting that word of Google possibly buying Twitter is making the rounds.

Why would the search giant want to purchase the 140-character leader? Clues may be found in another TechCrunch article posted in March:

More and more people are starting to use Twitter to talk about brands in real time as they interact with them. And those brands want to know all about it, whether to respond individually (The W Hotel pestered me until I told them to just leave me alone), or simply gather the information to see what they’re doing right and what they’re doing wrong.

And all of it is discoverable at search.twitter.com, the search engine that Twitter acquired last summer.

People searching for news. Brands searching for feedback. That’s valuable stuff.

Responding to the rumor, Twitter posted a carefully worded blog post:

It should come as no surprise that Twitter engages in discussions with other companies regularly and on a variety of subjects.

Our goal is to build a profitable, independent company and we’re just getting started.

Update: The site All Things Digital is saying the rumor is bogus:

In fact, Twitter and Google (GOOG) have simply been engaged in “some product-related discussions,” according to one source, around real-time search and the search giant better crawling the microblogging service.

Said a source close to Twitter: “There was a discussion with [Google executive Marissa Mayer’s] group about real-time search and about product stuff. It was a couple weeks ago. It was very preliminary…and that was that.”

More importantly, said another source about the idea of an imminent acquisition or serious or even early talks: “Seriously, no negotiations, no deal, nada.”

April Fool’s

By Brad

Diving into this day of pranks—and having fun with print media’s current woes—British newspaper The Guardian announced to its readers that it was abandoning print in favor of reporting news via social networking fad Twitter. From the paper’s site:

Consolidating its position at the cutting edge of new media technology, the Guardian today announces that it will become the first newspaper in the world to be published exclusively via Twitter, the sensationally popular social networking service that has transformed online communication.

The move, described as “epochal” by media commentators, will see all Guardian content tailored to fit the format of Twitter’s brief text messages, known as “tweets”, which are limited to 140 characters each. Boosted by the involvement of celebrity “twitterers”, such as Madonna, Britney Spears and Stephen Fry, Twitter’s profile has surged in recent months, attracting more than 5m users who send, read and reply to tweets via the web or their mobile phones.

Here’s a report from the paper’s archive, in tweet mode:

OMG first successful transatlantic air flight wow, pretty cool! Boring day otherwise *sigh*

140 Characters to a Possible Mistrial

By Brad

Hot on the heels of a MySpace update derailing a criminal prosecution comes another possible social networking mishap, this time involving Twitter:

Depending on who you ask, microblogging service Twitter is either an inane distraction for people who are too excited about their lunch, a powerful and ubiquitous communication and publishing platform, or a dangerous tool that leads to breaches of security. If you ask Stoam Holdings, a building materials company in Little Rock, Arkansas, Twitter posts are also reason for a mistrial.

Russell Wright and his construction company, Stoam Holdings, recently lost a $12 million dollar lawsuit brought by investors. If Wright and his lawyer get their way, however, one juror’s Twitter posts before, during, and after the proceedings may be cause for a mistrial. Johnathan Powell, a Wal-Mart photo department manager who served on the jury, posted various inane details of his experience to Twitter throughout the day via SMS from his cell phone. While most of the updates were harmless, the appeal filed by Drew Ledbetter, Wright’s lawyer, hinges on Twitter post timestamps and whether some of Powell’s posts betray bias before the jury finished deliberating.

Remember folks, just because you can update what you’re doing in real time doesn’t mean you always should.