Twitter is 5 years old !

Twitter now has 200 million users, including tech luminaries, celebrities and the president of the United States. It started off slowly.  What began as an experiment in “microblogging” — no more than 140 characters — has become a cultural landmark.

What about you ?

Are you on Twitter ?

There is way too much information on Twitter — lately, it defies navigation. In January, there were 2.4 million tweets a day, according to Alessio S. ignorini, a researcher.

Why should we care about information overload at Twitter? Isn’t Twitter about the individual experiences — a Tweeter and her followers — not the totality of millions of Tweeters around the world?

Twitter says it could unveil in the next few weeks — “geolocation” — holds such potential to make the Twitter rapids navigable.

The idea is to take advantage of global positioning systems on cellphones to allow Twitter users to include a precise location with each tweet. Users would be able, right off the bat, to limit their searches to tweets from a particular location.

“Proximity can be this proxy for relevance,” said Ryan Sarver, the director of the Twitter platform, who led a “fairly small team” of programmers who after a few months are close to completing the geolocation project. “We are about delivering the right information to the right people.”

Improvements like geolocation have the potential to make the Internet suddenly relevant to society as it is lived, not just relevant to what happens online. Mr. Sarver imagines features like “local trending topics,” a list of subjects popular in a particular area; or searches for happy hour in a neighborhood of Dallas that will intelligently link tweets about happy hours to the place they were sent from.

Because GPS will provide the ability to become very “granular” with locations, you could mimic through Twitter the banter at the local diner or a barbershop, by limiting a search of tweets to a two-block radius.

There is also the fear of loss of privacy and loss of security as once-local chats become globally public. That is why Mr. Sarver said Twitter would require two “opt in” decisions — at the profile level and again through the application.

For the technological optimists, the cures for information overload, in essence, are better filters and greater context. The more you know about a message — who sent it and

 why — the better you understand it.

Creating navigation tools for digital information is the next big challenge, said Erik Hersman, a co-founder of Ushahidi who has been in contact with Mr. Sarver’s team at Twitter.

Overstimulation and distraction can be beneficial !

This article is quite long but it is really interesting.

Shut out by the near totalitarian powers of the Islamic republic, the mainstream media tracked the stream of consciousness produced by new media. Some of the material is powerful, even indelible.

Particularly haunting is the 40-second YouTube video that shows a young woman, wearing jeans but otherwise dressed conservatively, suddenly falling to the sidewalk, shot in the heart. Her eyes turn to what must be a cell-phone camera, wide and shocked and dying as we stare at her. Men rush to her side and try to stanch the wound, but blood trickles from her mouth as an older man — later described as her father — cries and cries. Hours after the video surfaced, people on Twitter said she had not been part of the demonstration at all. Just a bystander.

By the end of the day, the Tweets had given her a name: Neda, which means “the voice” or “the call” in Farsi.

But who shot her? A soldier? A member of the notorious Basij, the volunteer militia that supports President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad? Were they aiming at her? Could this have been an accident or a random act of violence?

read more about it here

This article deals with the links between political revolutions and communication tools.

Social networking, a distinctly 21st-century phenomenon, has already been credited with aiding protests from the Republic of Georgia to Egypt to Iceland.

Iran : the “Twitter Revolution” ?

Twitter did prove to be a crucial tool in the cat-and-mouse game between the opposition and the government over enlisting world opinion. As the Iranian government restricts journalists’ access to events, the protesters have used Twitter’s agile communication system to direct the public and journalists alike to video, photographs and written material related to the protests. (As has become established custom on Twitter, users have agreed to mark, or “tag,” each of their tweets with the same bit of type — #IranElection — so that users can find them more easily). So maybe there was no Twitter Revolution. But over the last week, we learned a few lessons about the strengths and weaknesses of a technology that is less than three years old and is experiencing explosive growth.

read more about it here

Bon courage à tous les terminales en ce week-end de révisions.

Je vous propose une petite vidéo sympa que j’ai découverte grâce au Twitter de Lilly Allen. Voici donc “Kid British” avec “Our House is Dadless”. Vous reconnaîtrez une autre chanson dans cette chanson : “Our House” de “Madness”, un classique !

Un clip très sympa qui fait plein de clin d’oeils assez drôles aux clichés et aux images traditionnelles sur la Grande-Bretagne.

Bon visionnage !

Chinese censors blocked access to Twitter and other popular online services today , two days before the twentieth anniversary of the democracy protests in Tiananmen Square.

Read more about it here

An interesting article here

MySpace is now losing popularity as Facebook and bebo are the “places to be” .  MySpace suffered a drop in visitor traffic last month and is now less than half the size of its younger rival, Facebook. MySpace’s loss of status as the cool place to be is an object lesson in the notoriously fickle internet, where today’s cultural icon is tomorrow’s passing fad.

MySpace had 124 million monthly unique visitors last month, a decline of 2%, according to the marketing research company comScore. Facebook, by contrast, racked up 276 million unique visitors, an increase of 16.6%.

MySpace is clinging on to a marginal lead over Facebook in America but trails badly in Europe. In Britain, Facebook overtook its competitor in September 2007, the comScore data shows.

Nick Thomas, an analyst at Forrester Research, said: “In the last 12 months Facebook has extended its dominance in every territory in Europe.” However, he added: “I’m not convinced that it’s terminal for MySpace. The battle isn’t over yet.”

from : http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/mar/29/myspace-facebook-bebo-twitter

Check out this funny video about Twitter (no excuses, there are subtitles in French !)