Tag archive: tweets

Announced earlier this week, the Swedish tourism agency lobbied and convinced Sweden's government to turn over access to the official @Sweden Twitter account to citizens. Called the 'Curators of Sweden' project, the official Twitter account is turned over to a new citizen each week. That person can alter the current avatar and tweet about anything they want for seven days. However, the citizen is encouraged to tweet about… Read More

In a joint initiative with Tourism Calgary, the Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra Chorus recently decided to take to engage with its 1100+ twitter followers, asking for their help on a special project. “How do you warm up in the cold?” the tweet began. “Tweet us your ideas and our CPO Chorus will sing your tweets on video.” Now, out of 1100 followers, you’d have thought the CPO Chorus would’ve received at least a few hundred responses. But only 20… Read More

Since the launch of the leaderless Occupy Wall Street movement approximately seven weeks ago, tracking ongoing events in New York City has been difficult due to the limited media coverage as well as the massive size of the protest. The events on Wall Street have also spawned additional protests in several major U.S. cities including Denver, Austin, Dallas, Houston, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Atlanta, Baltimore, Chicago, St. Louis and… Read More

Funnyman and Twitter user Steve Martin has decided to publish a book of his tweets. Whether anyone wants to buy a book of tweets that can be easily viewed online is another matter, but the good news is that profits from any sales will be going to charity.  Martin announced his intention to compile a book of his tweets in, not surprisingly, a tweet.  “Due to absolutely no demand, soon I'm publishing a book of my tweets. Many of your… Read More

A study that analysed millions of tweets over a period of two years has revealed that people are most cheerful soon after waking up. Their mood then worsens as the day continues, before lifting again last thing at night. Sure, most of us probably could’ve guessed this would be the case, but here’s a study that appears to confirm it. Researchers at Cornell University in New York state looked at more than half a billion tweets by 2.54 million… Read More

In addition to rolling out the Web analytics package for selected websites earlier today, officials at Twitter quietly started pushing its form of advertising, otherwise known as promoted tweets, into the feeds of users. Despite previous plans to only insert promoted tweets into feeds of users that follow the brand involved in the promotion, all users will see advertising within the feed regardless of following status. Brands running the… Read More

Minutes after Apple announced that Steve Jobs was stepping down as CEO, people around the world pulled out their iPhones (or some such device) and began tweeting their feelings about the news – in 140 characters or less, naturally. #SteveJobs quickly became a top trending topic. Of the continuing flood of tweets, some are humorous, some plain silly, but most express gratitude for Jobs’ work over the years, as well as concern for his… Read More

On Tuesday, the Seattle police department launched a 12-hour experiment that posted all 911 emergency calls into the official @SeattlePD Twitter feed. This test was intended to give the public a better understanding of the call volume and types of reports that flood into the emergency call centers. The flow of tweets began at 6 a.m. and sent about 40 tweets an hour into the feeds to about 10,000 followers.  By 6 p.m., the account had increased… Read More

Twitter announced to developers on Thursday changes to its API that allow for the filtering of tweets containing links to “possibly sensitive” content, i.e. anything that's potentially NSFW. “Beginning today you may notice a new boolean field in API responses & streams containing tweets: 'possibly_sensitive,'” writes the company on its developers blog. “This new field will only surface when a… Read More

Similar to the level of integration that seen on CNN, ESPN is planning to ramp up Twitter usage both on and off air. In the past, they have used Twitter to follow prominent athletes and figures for breaking news as well as promoting stories on the ESPN site through official Twitter feeds. However, ESPN would like to reach the fans that are watching Twitter feeds while watching a television show like Sportscenter. Tactics include taking a more… Read More

People just can't stop talking about Google+, the search giant's hot new social network. We know we can't. And according to a report by the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism, nobody else can either: For the week of June 26 through July 1, talk about Google+ accounted for 35 percent of all tweeted news links. According to Pew, Twitter members “were mostly excited about the new Facebook… Read More

Reports of Barack Obama's death have been greatly exaggerated. Fox News said that on Monday morning its Twitter feed covering political news was hacked, with tweets posted reporting the death of the president. The tweets stated that Obama had been shot in a restaurant in Iowa while on the campaign trail. On its website, Fox News said that “hackers sent out several malicious and false tweets claiming that President Obama had been… Read More

The situation in Japan seems to be getting a lot worse before it gets better. Though the earthquake and tsunami are long over, radiation leaks and problems continue at the Fukushima Nuclear plant. According to SocialIntensity.org, there have been more than 500 million tweets about the incident in the last month. The moving graphic below shows the intensity of tweets in each country around the world in the days since March 11, 2011, when the… Read More

A few days ago, PopCap announced its new experimental game studio, 4th & Battery. The studio plans to develop and release conceptual games that don't quite make it through PopCap's rigorous development phases. Unpleasant Horse is the first of those games. A play off of Angry Birds, it follows a black flying horse (half cute, half disturbing) that jumps on other ponies backs to stay afloat. Unfortunately for those ponies, the… Read More

A new app fittingly called Creepy is making waves in privacy circles for its creative use of social networks to achieve an unsettling result. The app, actually a software package for Windows and Linux, hooks into social networks like Twitter and Flickr to glean information about a targeted user's location. It's surprisingly effective, even in its early stages, according to the UK-based blog Tinq. Would-be stalkers need only to enter… Read More