More Valuable for Business: Twitter or Facebook?

Which is more valuable to business - Facebook or Twitter? It's a question that business owners struggle with every day in the quest for building a larger customer base, and retaining the customers they already have. It's a question that won't have the same answer for every business. It's also a question that requires the evaluation of a great deal of variables on a per business basis. 

Do you get more business value from Twitter or from Facebook? Let us know in the comments.

That said, there are always stats that can be looked at to help nudge a business owner in one direction or help the evaluation of some of those variables. While not all stats can be taken as definite, and should always be kept in perspective (many have their own variables), they can still provide value to the evaluation process. 

Bruce Houghton at Hypebot points to the following infographic from Digital Surgeons, breaking down 2010 social demographics of Facebook vs. Twitter:



There is a conversation about Facebook vs. Twitter (in terms of business value) going on over on Quora. Specifically, the initial question asked was, "Which has more value to a business: Facebook or Twitter?" 

Well known industry analyst Jeremiah Owyang with the Altimeter Group says, "A better question would be: 'Which social networks is a company's customers located on?' followed up by "How easy is it for me to reach, influence, offer them products on that social network?'"

"Then you do a comparison of both, and derive your value," he adds. "Change your thinking not to compare apples to oranges but instead apply an analytical approach to problem solving."

TBD.com Senior Community Host Jeff Sonderman added, "One thing to consider is, what kind of value are you talking about? I think Facebook, when used well, builds a stronger connection with a smaller number of people. There is more ongoing dialogue -- both between you and customers, and among your customers themselves."

"Twitter seems more effective at reaching more people than Facebook, especially with something viral, and is more focused on driving traffic to your site through short links," he said. "But you don't get as close a connection with the users there, and you don't have a discrete group that gets to know each other."

Getting to know each other is indeed something worth considering, because trust is a big factor in relevance when it comes to content consumption. You tend to trust people more if you feel like you know them a little. At the very least, knowing someone can help you determine whether you trust them or not. 

Trust on a larger scale is also important when you get into search engine ranking from social sites. Google and Bing both talked about this recently. Michael Gray just wrote an interesting piece on this as well. 

If it's simply traffic you're after, don't forget about StumbleUpon. StatCounter released a report this week, indicating that StumbleUpon is the top source for social media traffic in the U.S. of course, you have to take into account the quality of that traffic as well. For example, technology blog TechCrunch revealed some stats this week indicating that they were indeed getting a significant amount of traffic from StumbleUpon. However, the people coming from StumbleUpon tended not to hang around as long as those coming from some other sources. 

Again, this comes back to what Owyang said: "Apply an analytical approach to problem solving". Use your analytics applications. Adjust your strategy accordingly. Watch developments, stats, and studies in the industry and read what people have to say about social media marketing, but your own analytics will likely reveal a lot more about what you need to pay attention to than what anybody else says. 

From which social network do you get the most bang for your buck? Comment here.

Twitter Adds Bing's Principal Scientist To Employee List

"Principal scientist" is an important-sounding title, and it's hard to imagine any person holding it wouldn't contribute a lot to his or her company.  Unfortunately for Microsoft, it looks like Bing's principal scientist was lured away by Twitter.

Nothing's been confirmed through official channels just yet, but Marshall Kirkpatrick wrote late yesterday with respect to Alek Kolcz, "[W]e noticed tonight that he's been added to the list of staff members on the Twitter website."  And that sort of thing probably doesn't happen by accident too often.

So let's consider what sort of employee Kolcz has been and will be.  He's held the position of principal scientist for almost two years after spending some time as a scientist for Microsoft Live Labs.

As for what sort of work he's done, Kolcz conducts research in the areas of machine learning, data mining, and information retrieval, according to his LinkedIn profile.  His specialties then include spam filtering and content-based personalization, among other things.

Finally, although Kolcz might or might not have had a hand in this, we should remember that Bing and Twitter have worked closely together in the past.

It should be interesting to see what Kolcz manages to accomplish for his new employer.

New Twitter Feature Shows Mutual Connections for Users

Twitter has launched a new feature accessible at Twitter.com that shows connections you may have with other Twitter users. 

If you go to someone's Twitter profile, it will display a section in the right-hand pane (of the new Twitter design), just under the account info (tweets, following, followers, listed) that says "Connections", and displays people that are following that person and people that both you and that person mutually follow. 

It's a simple and subtle feature, but one that could help build relationships on Twitter. As others have pointed out, its' similar to what Facebook does when it displays mutual friends. 

The feature could actually help people use Twitter in a more social manner, as opposed to (or at least in addition to) as a news reader.

Hat tip to Carolyn Penner with Twitter Communications for pointing the feature out (as there has not been an official announcement). 

Self-Served Twitter Promotions

The Twitter brain trust has decided to turn some of their exponentially-growing traffic into a monetary outlet with the upcoming launch of their self-serve ad platform.

Following the Facebook promotion method, Twitter’s ad service will, according to MediaPost.com, allow Twitter users to create two types of self-serving advertisements:

Promoted Tweets and Promoted Accounts.

The Promoted Tweet aspect encourages followers to interact with the message in question, in the form of re-tweeting and other methods.  As for promoted accounts, this campaign will attempt to get more followers for the Twitter user doing the promotion -- essentially, it’s a “hey, follow me” blast -- whose appearance across the Twitter network depends on which user recommends it.

Image courtesy of MediaPost

The appearance of the Promoted Account in a tweet stream depends a great deal on what keywords the user targeted, as well as the Twitter users the account in question is following.  Once a Promoted Account tweet is recommended, Twitter will display it to relevant users -- again, based on keywords and followers.

The user will then be charged for any followers they pick up.  As far as cost, MediaPost has more:

There are several ad payment options: Pay for engagement events (CPE), Pay for impressions (CPM) or Exclusive for daily Promoted Trends. CPE costs the advertiser a minimum of 10 cents each time someone clicks on the link in the tweet, as well as retweets, @replies or favorites for the Promoted Tweet.

As far as Promoted Tweets, users must select from a recently-tweeted message.  Once promoted, these tweets will appear in Twitter streams of those following the account, and will be annotated as such.  They will also appear to users who follow accounts similar to the one doing the promotion.

For instance, if you’re promoting a tweet from an SEO blog, chances are, your tweet will appear to users who follow the Danny Sullivans of the world.  All promoted tweets and accounts will be labeled as such, “Promoted by _____,” which should eliminate any confusion.

Twitter's Valuation Climbs To $4 Billion

For better or for worse, Twitter isn't yet a public company, meaning it doesn't have to deliver earnings reports the way Google and Yahoo have this quarter.  But an unofficial update on the company's financial situation is available, as Sharepost has indicated that Twitter's private valuation has hit $4 billion.

That's quite a milestone.  Consider that AOL's market cap is only $2.58 billion and IAC's market cap is $2.86 billion right now, by comparison, while rumors put LinkedIn's private market valuation at $2.91 billion.

Also, it's important to remember that Twitter itself was just valued at $3.7 billion in mid-December when it raised $200 million from Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers and other investment firms and professional investors.

So Twitter's star is already very much on the rise this year, even as experts predict that the company's ad revenue might triple by the end of 2011 and increase again in 2012.

That puts new-ish CEO Dick Costolo off to a great start.  As he tries to help Twitter earn even more money, wooing advertisers should be much easier with this kind of support.

Google to Improve Social Search with fflick Acquisition?

Update: Apparently the acquisition is more about YouTube. Interesting. Google's official announcement here.

Original Article: TechCrunch is reporting that Google is in the process of acquiring fflick for about $10 million, with the deal expected to close this week. This is still unconfirmed at this point, but unless we hear otherwise, we'll assume it's accurate. 

So what is fflick? It's a site where you can log in with your Twitter account and see what your friends have said about movies. For example, if you want to see what people think about Iron Man 2, you can search for it on fflick, and see all of the tweets your friends have posted mentioning the movie. If you follow any movie review sites, those will be included too, so depending on who you follow, you can have quite a comprehensive, yet personalized experience. It's a pretty good idea. 

While we don't know what Google would do with this for sure, the first thing that comes to mind is to integrate it with Hotpot - the company's recently launched social, local business recommendation engine. The biggest problem with Hotpot, as it stands, is that it requires you to get your friends to use it for it to be very helpful.

Google just released a new feature for Hotpot, which lets you return all recommendations from certain friends. If users could simply tap their Twitter friends while doing these searches, they'd be more likely to get helpful results. 

According to Jason Kincaid, who reported on the acquisition, fflick had always planned to expand beyond movies anyway, with that just being the first vertical. Google could conceivably expand this into all kinds of verticals and ultimately make searching with Google more social in general (as long as the user is on Twitter). 

Could Google have done this without acquiring fflick? Probably, but since they already have a system in place, it could be a time saver more than anything. 

We've reached out to Google for confirmation on the acquisition, and will update accordingly.

Business Wire To Tweet Every Press Release

Business Wire said today it will begin to automatically tweet every press release to specific content categories.

“For those not yet tweeting the links to press releases, this provides added visibility to Twitter's 106 billion accounts and 600 million search queries a day,” said Laura Sturaitis, Executive Vice President, Media Services & Product Strategy.

“We continue to look for community-appropriate ways to socialize and optimize press release content."

Business Wire clients are asked to choose at least one category keyword such as “science,” “business,” “technology,” when uploading their press releases via Business Wire Connect, the company's proprietary interface. Those category keywords then send the press release to Business Wire and EON: Enhanced Online News Twitter feeds.

Users may subscribe to these feeds via the Business Wire news subscription page or directly via Twitter. The Business Wire feeds also contain keywords to help Twitter users find and follow them.

Each press release is assigned a shortened and unique URL for sharing on Twitter and other social networks.

Twitter Ad Revenue Forecast To Triple This Year

Twitter's efforts to generate ad revenue will kick into high gear this year and be quite successful, according to a new report.  eMarketer estimates the company will earn $150 million in 2011, up more than 333 percent from the $45 million it may have earned in 2010.

Obviously, that would represent a huge increase.  Then eMarketer thinks Twitter will achieve a repeat performance of sorts in 2012, upping its ad revenue by about $100 million again to $250 million.

To put that into perspective, eMarketer's report tossed another couple social networking sites into the equation.  "Twitter revenues will still be small compared to those of Facebook, but by next year eMarketer expects Twitter to pull in more ad dollars than Myspace," the report stated.

Debra Aho Williamson, a principal analyst, also reasoned, "If Twitter can grow its user base and convince marketers of its value as a go-to secondary player to Facebook, it will succeed in gaining revenue.  In 2011 it must work overtime to give its early advertisers a positive experience."

So this next year or two could be a very exciting - and profitable - time for Twitter as long as things stay on track.

New-ish CEO Dick Costolo is almost sure to spend a lot of time courting advertisers to guarantee that's the case.

4 Ways to Improve Your Twitter Strategy

A few months ago my friend Dr. Ben Hanna led an extensive statistical study to discover the optimal tweeting strategy by running matched tests of tweets over a period of weeks. He uncovered some very interesting ideas that will help you get more out of every tweet!

Tweet quality versus tweet quantity – The study looked at the relevant importance of tweeting only when you had something really interesting to pass along (quality focus) versus a strategy of tweeting with frequency to make sure your content was always in front of your audience (quantity focus). The study showed tweet quality is MUCH more important than quantity.  Tweets that provided a higher average number of clicks per tweet with a track-able link correlated to higher follower growth.

I guess this finding verifies my hunch. People who tweet on a schedule just strike me as unapproachable and disconnected.  While the study definitely verified the “quality” strategy, you still have to be in the game – average tweets/day during their testing ranged from 2.9 to 11.0.

The first words are critical – At 140 characters, tweets are like headlines and people scan them quickly.  If you want to catch someone’s eye, think like an advertising copy writer and make sure that either the main topic keywords or a number/statistic are found in the first 3-5 words.

The results also recommended against using the standard retweet style (i.e. “RT @markwschaefer: …” to start the tweet), instead shift attribution to the end of the tweet (i.e. “… via @markwschaefer”) so people can concentrate on the first words.

Quality tweets live four days – If you measure the lifespan of a tweet by the number of days on which it receives at least one click, then tweets don’t live very long. On average, tweets with a clickable link received at least one click on four separate days with a range of one day (not a very popular tweet) to 23 days (very popular content).

Optimal time between tweets – In a study examining the number of clicks on business-related tweets, the optimal space between business tweets to attract the most clicks is either 31-60 minutes or 2-3 hours. Tightly packed tweets just don’t appear to attract as much attention as tweets with more space between them. The study really couldn’t explain the bi-modal distribution. The cause of the dip in click activity for tweets between 61 and 120 minutes is uncertain.

I found this research interesting and hope it will help you hit your tweet-spot on Twitter!  Any surprises?  What do you think makes a tweet work?

President Obama To Answer Questions Via YouTube And Twitter

YouTube is inviting users to submit questions to President Obama for an exclusive interview that will take place two days after the 2011 State of the Union Address.

The YouTube Blog offers details. “Go to youtube.com/askobama to submit your question now, or watch the speech on Tuesday night with your webcam or video camera nearby so that you can record and submit your question as soon as it strikes you.”

“This year, you'll also be able to ask your question via Twitter: just include the hashtag #askobama in your tweet. And be sure to have your say in what should be asked by voting on questions submitted by others, too.”

President Obama's answers to a selection of the top-voted questions will be streamed live from the White House on youtube.com/askobama at 2:30 p.m. ET on Thursday January 27.

Users have until Tuesday, January 25 at midnight ET to submit their question. YouTube said video questions are preferred but it will accept text. Video questions should be about 20 seconds and asked directly to the president.

The interview is the first in a series of world leaders in 2011 as part of YouTube World View.  YouTube said within the month it will hold a similar interview with a prominent Republican leader.

Techmeme Now Posting Tweets As Stories

Update: Rivera has elaborated a bit more on the site's use of tweets in a blog post (blogs aren't dead yet):

The tweets Techmeme will now link to fall mainly into two categories. First is the news-breaking variety, which directly offer new factual information, whether a straight-up product announcement (example), a new "rumor" report (example, via), a statement containing a veiled announcement (example), or a kind of inadvertently newsworthy announcement (example, via). Tweets of this sort, if interesting enough, will receive fullTechmeme headlines of their own.

The second type is commentary: reactions, responses, rebuttals, endorsements, or amplifications to news stories. Exceptional tweets of this sort may occasionally receive headlines, but more commonly will show up in Discussion, the smaller headlines collapsed by default on Techmeme. Even a tweet simply intended to share a link, if paired with incisive commentary, could show up on Techmeme.

Original Article: Technology aggregation site Techmeme is now accepting tweets as the basis for stories. Founder Gabe Rivera tweeted as much, which is of course the first tweet to take advantage. 
 

In many ways, the move makes a lot of sense, as tweets are widely seen as sources of breaking news (often from the sources themselves). Much of the coverage often linked to from Techmeme points to tweets anyway, so this strategy ought to cut out the middle man in many cases. 

The first response tweet to Rivera's tweet that's been listed in the conversation on Techmeme declares blogging to be officially dead, but tweeting has always been microblogging, so there's not really a whole lot of difference in terms of what should be getting on Techmeme. It's just that a lot of the posts will be a lot shorter, and I don't anticipate they'll be throwing out long-form blog posts anytime soon. 

It will not be surprising to see the site follow tweet acceptance with the acceptance of upates from other services like Facebook, , Google Buzz, etc. News can break on any of these things (and others).  They've already used Quora posts, as Rivera points out in the blog post mentioned in the update. 

One big advantage of the tweet is the quickness. It takes far less time to tweet than to write an entire blog post, or even take a screenshot of another tweet, so I can see this leading to news getting on TechMeme faster as well.

Turn Your Twitter Message Into A Tweet Ring

Amsterdam based start-up Alphabeth.com has introduced something that every Twitter user surely needs, Tweet Rings.

“Some Tweets should last forever because they mark a special moment in your life or express your personal motto,” the company says.

“Perhaps your favorite message is just so beautiful that you want to carry it with you.” Perhaps.

Users can pick their favorite Twitter message or write their own message on tweet-rings.com. As long as it fits the maximum length of 140 characters per side: for example, place your tweet on one side and the sender, date and time on the other.

Tweet-rings are available in stainless steel, silver and titanium, ranging in price from $120 (euro 89) to $147 (euro 109). Delivery is free to over 50 countries, with a guaranteed 30-day return policy.

This could be the best product for Twitter users since Mattel introduced Puppy Tweets.

What Do Customers Expect From Your Social Media Practices?

Have you noticed members of your community posting customer service related questions on your Facebook Page? Or perhaps you have now revised your customer service and customer relationship management processes to integrate Twitter as part of your programme.

While many businesses start using social networking platforms to build visibility, awareness and create a community online, even if you had not planned to respond to customer service questions, over time you are likely to get questions or in some case complaints posted online – I am sure you have seen that in the Twitter streams of the people you follow.

So what are consumers' expectations about how you will handle these complaints and what they are looking for when connecting to you in social networks?

Some research undertaken by Lightspeed Research and the IAB in the UK incorporating responses from 1000 consumers may give us some clues.

Twitter Launches In Korean

Twitter usage has increased a lot in South Korea over the last year, and it may soon skyrocket.  Late yesterday, Twitter announced that it has launched in Korean, giving South Korea's 48.5 million citizens the opportunity to access the service in their native language.

An official blog post - which you can view in Korean here if you like - explained, "Twitter.com and Twitter's mobile web site are now translated into Korean. . . .  Twitter has also updated the popular Korean versions of Twitter for Android and Twitter for iPhone."

What's more, the post continued, "[W]e want to thank our partner Daum for displaying top Korean Tweets on their homepage and making it easy to find friends from your Hanmail address book; and LG U+ for working with us to make Twitter available via SMS in Korean for their subscribers (shortcode is #1234)."

Considering that the number of Twitter users in South Korea has already jumped tenfold over the past twelve months, these changes are likely to have a major impact.  South Korea's fondness for tech is renowned, so assuming Twitter doesn't bump up against a homegrown service, the adoption rate could be quite high.

That's exciting news for Twitter's investors and supporters.  And the development may also present the average user with the opportunity to learn more about North Korea the next time it makes headlines.

Just don't hold your breath for the next step in Twitter's global expansion.  Although it of course seems certain that Twitter will launch in another language sooner or later, the official blog post only set "the end of this year" as a target by which to branch out again.

Facebook And Twitter Users Are More Active In Groups

The majority (80%) of American Internet users participate in groups, compared with 56 percent of non-Internet users, according to a new report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

Social media users are even more likely to be active: 82% of social network users and 85% of Twitter users are group participants. 

Some of the most intense users of technology for group activity are social media users, such as Facebook and Twitter users, and many groups now conduct a portion of their activity on those sites. In this survey, 62% of online adults use social networking sites and 12% use Twitter.

Groups are moving aggressively into social media spaces to connect with members:

*48% of those who are active in groups say that those groups have a page on a social networking site like Facebook

*42% of those who are active in groups say those groups use text messaging

*30% of those who are active in groups say those groups have their own blog

*16% of those who are active in groups say the groups communicate with members through Twitter

“Use of the internet in general, and social media in particular, has become the lubricant for chatter and outreach for all kinds of groups ranging from spiritual communities to professional societies to ad hoc fan clubs,” said Lee Rainie, Director of the Pew Internet Project and one of the authors of the new report on the findings.

Other Internet impacts:

*46% of the Internet users who are active in groups say the Internet has helped them be active in more groups than would otherwise be the case. 

*24% of those active in groups say they discovered at least some of their groups on the Internet. However, three times that number of active group members (75%) did not discover any of the groups they belong to online.

*23% of Internet users say the technology allows them to spend more time with their groups.

“One of the striking things in these data is how purposeful people are as they become active with groups,” noted Kristen Purcell, the research director at Pew Internet and co-author of the report.

“Many enjoy the social dimensions of involvement, but what they really want is to have impact. Most have felt proud of a group they belong to in the past year and just under half say they accomplished something they couldn’t have accomplished on their own.”
 
 

Twitterers Launch Hashtag Wishing Steve Jobs Well

As reported earlier, Apple CEO Steve Jobs is taking a medical leave of absence from the company. In an email to Apple employees, he said:

"At my request, the board of directors has granted me a medical leave of absence so I can focus on my health. I will continue as CEO and be involved in major strategic decisions for the company."

Now, the Twitter community appears to be banding together to wish Mr. Jobs well, as a new hashtag is starting to gain momentum: #getwellsteve

 

Rumor: Chrome Chief To Stick With Google Despite Twitter Bid

As news stories go, there have been more interesting ones than an employee not switching companies.  However, rumors indicated that Twitter was courting Google's Sundar Pichai, and in order to keep him - which Google has - Google likely had to lay out a significant sum of money.

To set the scene: Sundar Pichai has been with Google for almost seven years.  Currently, he serves as a vice president of product management, and he's also in charge of Chrome and Chrome OS.  So Pichai's very much an important person at the company.

Now, to delve into the (non)recruitment issue, Liz Gannes reported, "Pichai, who is Google's VP of product management in charge of Chrome and Chrome OS, had been Twitter's top pick after longtime VP of product Jason Goldman stepped down last month . . ."

Later, Gannes added, "While I haven't been able to nail down what exactly Google paid to keep Pichai, it was apparently a significant increase to his previous compensation package."

That could translate to hundreds of thousands of dollars, or even several million.  Which is perhaps a win for Google, considering that the company was willing to offer it, but also a sign Twitter's becoming more of a threat when it comes to poaching employees.

It sounds like friends of Pichai's should congratulate him (and ask him to buy the next round), in any event.

Building a Better Twitter Following

The concept of quality over size when it comes to an audience is nothing new, and frankly when it comes to social media, the sermon is getting a little tired. We've heard it plenty of times. 

However, Twitter has been sharing some interesting information on its media blog lately that really drives the point home, providing data to back up the notion that quality over quantity is important when building a healthy Twitter following. 

Twitter's Robin Sloan has an interesting post on the Twitter Media blog, looking at the science of the hashtag - a follow up to his "art of the hashtag" post, which is interesting in its own right. The post looks at a hashtag that gained some big momentum last week - #LessAmbitiousMovies - and looks at how that momentum was achieved. 

To summarize, the hashtag gained momentum when Lizz Winstead, the co-creator of The Daily Show, tweeted a whole bunch of updates using that hashtag and a similar one - #LessAmbitiousFilms - which was actually the original version. She had about 15,000 followers. One of them was science journalist Alexis Mardigal, who had 36,000 and retweeted one of Winstead's tweets. Barracks O'Bama (15,000), a comedy account, also posted a bunch of tweets using the hashtag, and the combination of these accounts led to the skyrocketing of the hashtag as seen in the above chart. 

Now, these accounts have solid follower counts, but they're nothing like the numbers of the big celebrities, which have far wider reach. The smaller spike (point B on the graph) represents when Katy Perry (5.2 million followers) used the hashtag. The spike is not nearly as high.

"No: there was something special about the people who follow Lizz Winstead and Barracks O'Bama. There were fewer than 35,000 of them, but they were more attentive and more engaged—and maybe just funnier, too?—and it was their collective creativity that made #LessAmbitiousMovies briefly ubiquitous," says Sloan. "So add this finding to your hashtag playbook: getting a great hashtag in front of the right audience is more important than getting it in front of a big audience. Katy Perry's 5.2 million followers saw #LessAmbitiousMovies, laughed, and moved on. Lizz Winstead and Barracks O'Bama's crew of 35,000 saw it—and they made it their own." (emphasis added)

Another recent post from Sloan illustrates the building of a following through engagement, using the example of Daniel Tosh, host of the hit Comedy Central show Tosh.0, who was able to attract 17,000 followers in a single day. 

Now, it certainly helps to have a hit television show, no doubt, but he interacted with Twitter users during the show, and was able to get a lot more followers than if he had just asked his audience to follow him on Twitter.

"So often on TV, you'll hear a flat exhortation ('Don't forget to follow me on Twitter!') or see a little graphic at the bottom of the screen—but I think those kinds of call-outs squander the opportunity of airtime," says Sloan. "On Tosh.0, as on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, tweets flow organically into the show. They're woven into segments that showcase the host's interaction with his followers; they demonstrate that following this guy is a lot of fun; and, on Tuesday night, they helped recruit 17,000 new souls who will probably be game to answer his next question."

Having a call to action for people to follow you on Twitter can't be a bad thing, but the real lesson is that finding ways to engage your audience will likely do a lot more to boost your following (and further engagement). Granted, not everybody is going to get the kind of following Tosh has. We're not all celebrities with our own TV shows, but that doesn't mean you can't find more ways to engage with users from your website, your online videos, or within social media channels (like Twitter) themselves. 

In other words, don't just put a "follow us on Twitter" link on your site, go out and participate in the discussion, and find new ways to draw your audience into that discussion.

Amazon Launches Daily Deal App For iPhone

Amazon has introduced a free application for iPhone users called Amazon Deals, which offers daily deals from  Amazon Gold Box.

People can use the app to act on limited-availability discounts and stay up to date with deal notifications.

“With Amazon Deals, no matter where they are, our customers can stay connected and informed on deals in their favorite categories and purchase from their iPhone immediately, before they sell out, so they never have to miss another deal,” said Sam Hall, director of Amazon Mobile.

The Amazon Deals app includes access to customer reviews, product information; sharing via email, Twitter and Facebook.

Amazon’s family of mobile shopping applications includes Price Check by Amazon for iPhone, Amazon Windowshop for iPad and the Amazon App for iPhone, iPad, Blackberry and Android-based devices.

Buick Using Facebook And Twitter For Scavenger Hunt

Buick is launching the “Quest for the Keys” program, a campaign focused on promoting Buick’s lineup, including the Regal, Enclave, Lacrosse and its new Verano.

Quest for keys will launch in seven cites in the coming months, including Miami, Los Angles, Atlanta, Chicago, Minneapolis, New York and Austin, Texas. The program invites users to participate in an interactive scavenger hunt using social media. The scavenger hunt provides clues on social media channels such as Facebook and Twitter, for the first three weeks of the hunt, and ends with one day of offline scavenger play in each of the seven cities.

The final day of game play in each city moves into the streets with strategically placed clues in various sites, requiring many location-based social networking tools such as Foursquare, Gowalla or Facebook Places to guide people in the hunt. In each city, the hunt ends with the discovery of six keys that rewards each finder with $2,000 and enters them into a chance to win a new Buick. A final random drawing will offer three winners the choice of any of the Buick models – a Verano, Regal, LaCrosse or Enclave – and will take place in November, completing the program.  There will also be online play-at-home component using a Facebook trivia game.

The initiative kicks off January 10 at the North American International Auto Show, during the unveiling of the Buick Verano. Consumers who watch the live streaming reveal on Buick’s Facebook page and participate by Tweeting, commenting and reposting the event are automatically entered for a chance to to win the first key awarded as part of the yearlong national sweepstakes.
 

Dailymotion Introduces On-Demand Content Hubs

Online video site Dailymotion has launched on-demand, curated content hubs focused on timely events.

In real time, Dailymotion says its curation team can flag and respond to major news events or trends, such as a Twitter search trend, curate related content and launch a hub around the topic.

“In today’s on-demand environment, viewers are looking for the fastest, easiest ways to discover and share content that is meaningful to them in the moment” said Joy Marcus, General Manager of Dailymotion, US.

“Hubs build on our already successful curated channels strategy, enhancing the content discovery experience on Dailymotion.”

Permanent hubs including movie trailers, celebrity, gaming and music will be continuously updated to reflect trending topics. Temporary hubs for timely events and interests such as 2010 in review, Comic Con and NY Fashion Week  will also be added on an ongoing basis.

Dailymotion’s pre-roll advertising, branded entertainment distribution and sponsored-section integration are available for advertisers across all hubs and channels.

Dailymotion's networks of sites attracts over 15 million unique visitors in the US and 67 million unique monthly visitors globally.

How Will Quora Handle Being Both Twitter and Wikipedia?

You've probably noticed that Quora has been getting a lot of press here in early 2011. As a result, the site is getting a lot of new users. As a result of that, there is growing concern that Quora will have a hard time maintaining the level of quality that led to it getting all the press in the first place. 

Quora is a kind of Q&A site, and that quality comes from the actual people who have been answering the questions (and sometimes from those asking them). The fear is that too many people will start using it, and either the quality answers will get lost in a sea of lesser-quality answers or that the real experts (in many cases execs of high profile companies) will stop using it. 

Some have gone so far as to suggest that Quora could be the next Twitter, simply in terms of being the next big social hit, but aside from the obvious differences between Quora and Twitter in terms of functionality, there are some big differences in how they are run. 

Quora is largely based around strict guidelines in order to maintain quality, whereas with Twitter, pretty much everything goes. Twitter has terms of use, but they're not nearly as restrictive. If I want to tweet, "I had some pancakes today and they were da bomb." or something stupid like that (not that I would), I could do so, and Twitter would be fine with it, because it's all about freedom of expression and whatnot. On Quora, asking a question like "Who ate the bombest pancakes today?" would likely be heavily frowned upon. 

Quora co-founder Charlie Cheever addressed the concerns of potentially diminishing quality at the site today (hat tip to MG Siegler), saying, "We're deeply committed to making Quora a resource full of high quality content, and so we're doing a bunch of different things to maintain that. This isn't an easy problem at all, and the solution isn't going to be one big change that makes everything perfect; it's going to take a lot of little things that add up and make a difference."

There's certainly room for improvement so far, if quality is the name of the game:



"One thing we're trying to do a better job ASAP on is educating the new users that join the site and getting them up to speed on the policies, guidelines, and conventions as quickly as possible. Yesterday, we added a quick tutorial quiz before a user posts his/her first question."

In the coming months, Cheever said Quora will be "heavily investing engineering effort" in:

- Educating new users about site policies and guidelines

- Improving the feed and voting ranking mechanisms

- Changing the core product to accommodate a Quora with many more users and many more questions and answers and topics

- Building special tools to support the efforts of reviewers and admins to improve the site and maintain civility and generally make it more fun to make Quora better

Again, while Twitter and Quora may be very different products, and serve generally different purposes, perhaps a real solution, beyond guidelines and policies for Quora, would be in APIs, third-party apps, and more freedom (granted, they do have APIs, and I'm sure we'll see more apps developed as time goes on). 

Twitter has long been criticized for excessive noise, but part of the beauty of Twitter is that Twitter doesn't tell you how you are supposed to use it. In fact, Twitter thrives on how users decide they want to use it. The "retweet" started as a user phenomenon, and grew to be an official feature of the service, for example. Twitter has APIs, which have allowed developers to create apps that users take advantage of to make the service more useful to them - to fit their specific needs for the service. 

Quora appears to be taking more of a Wikipedia (review and strict policy) approach, and maybe that's the right thing (Wikipedia is a very valuable and popular site for information), but Quora is inherently a more social service than Wikipedia, which could make this model difficult in the long run (and as Cheever noted, it already is difficult). Quora has elements of both Twitter and Wikipedia, not to mention Facebook, Digg, Yahoo Answers, and other existing sites.  Is Quora trying to be too many things at once? Maybe. Maybe not. 

Clearly Quora is onto something, as it has managed to get this far and draw real quality content from users who other people want to follow. This could be one of the most interesting sites to watch over the course of the year. Will it be able to maintain both growth and the integrity that inspired that growth from the get go? 

In the end, as discussed in a previous article, it's really all about the content, so if the interesting content ceases, so will the interest, and likely the growth. Twitter has managed to keep providing interesting content, based on who is tweeting it, even among all the noise. What if tweets on Twitter were edited by the community like Wikipedia? On the flipside, what if Wikipedia had non-stop noise coming in from all angles, like Twitter. We can probably agree that both Twitter and Wikipedia would be less helpful in these cases. The interesting thing is that Quora is somewhat a combination of these two, watching these elements work with or against each other will be something to see.

Twitter Sees New Record Of 6,939 Tweets Per Second

The start of a new year can cause people to think about many things, including family, friends, and personal opportunities.  And Twitter, apparently, as the company announced today that Japanese users set a global record moments after the official end of 2010.

A post on the Twitter Blog indicated this afternoon: "Just four seconds after midnight in Japan on January 1st, Twitterers set an all-time record in the number of Tweets sent per second (TPS).  At that moment, the world sent a staggering 6,939 TPS wishing friends and followers a fond 'Akemashite omedetou gozaimasu' ('Happy New Year!')."

This wasn't a matter of just one or two extra people posting greetings, either.  The blog post explained, "The new record more than doubles the previous one of 3,283 TPS, set during Japan's victory over Denmark in last summer's World Cup."

So it seems that Twitter continues to grow and grow in terms of popularity.  Perhaps in terms of reliability, too, given that we haven't come across any reports of fail whales being sighted on or around January 1st.

One last note: despite failing to set a new record, people in the U.S. didn't forego using Twitter when it came to celebrating the start of 2011.  With regards to activity, Twitter's blog post indicated, "The East coast time zone alone almost amassed the same amount of Tweets at its peak of 3,000 TPS as the entire world did during the peak moment of the World Cup."

Twitter for Mac App Introduced to Mac App Store

Now that the Mac App Store is open, we can expect to see apps start flooding the market. This includes the usual suspects, like Twitter. 

Twitter introduced its new Mac app today, available in the Mac App Store. The company says it's three times faster than its original version that was previously called Tweetie for Mac. 

"Tweetie for Mac was a desktop client that was originally created by atebits developer Loren Brichter prior to our acquisition of atebits last April," explains Twitter's Carolyn Penner. "Twitter for Mac is a new version updated by Loren and team during Twitter’s first Hack Week in October."

"We acquired atebits with a focus on launching our own Twitter iPhone application," adds Penner. "Since then, we've been asked repeatedly for a new version of Tweetie for Mac. We decided that the new version fits well into our goal of ensuring that mainstream users will have the best possible experience on popular platforms."

The Mac App Store launched today with over 1,000 apps. One can only imagine that it won't take long for that number to skyrocket. It will be interesting to compare its popularity with the Chrome Web Store, which has kind of gotten off to a slow start, though Chrome OS - the main reason for its existence - has yet to become available to consumers.

NFL Playoffs: Twitter Style

If you follow American Football, you know that it's playoff time, starting this weekend. Since social media and football go hand in hand quite nicely, Twitter has taken it upon itself to help out fans in keeping up with their favorite teams and players that are involved in the run to the Super Bowl. 

Twitter has created a list of Twitter accounts relevant to the playoffs. "You can follow @drewbrees and the @Official_Saints as they try to repeat as World Champions or @MikeVick of the @eagles as he continues his comeback," says Twitter's Carolyn Penner. "The list also includes folks like @JimIrsay, owner of the @NFLColts, and @PeteCarroll, coach of the @Seahawks."

Users can also receive tweets via SMS on their phones if they don't have Twitter accounts or smartphones. To do this, you can text "follow [username]" to 40404 (in the U.S.). 

As a football fan, I can honestly say that Twitter has played a valuable role in my keeping up with the happenings of the NFL throughout the season. It's nice to be able to whip out the phone and quickly see the latest NFL news from a variety of sources - often before the news makes it to ESPN or NFL Network. 

It's also nice to watch what the players themselves have to say, whether they are gearing for a big game, or just hanging out during the bye week. Twitter has put fans closer to the game in ways that just weren't available in the past. 

So, as the playoffs approach, you can bet that fans will have Twitter close by.

Malware Threats Increased In 2010

In 2010, cyber-criminals created and distributed one-third of all existing viruses, creating 34 percent of all malware that has ever existed, according to PandaLabs annual security report.

PandaLabs did find the speed at which the number of new threats grew has actually decreased compared to 2009. Every year since 2003, new threats grew by at least 100 percent, but in 2010, the increase was 50 percent.

Banker Trojans topped the ranking of new malware that appeared in 2010 (56% of all samples, followed by viruses and worms. Rogueware (fake antivirus software) already comprised 11.6  of all the malware gathered, and has become a category, that despite appearing only four years ago, has created  chaos among users.

The countries leading the list of most infections are Thailand, China and Taiwan, with 60 to 70 percent of infected computers.

 2010 witnessed hackers exploit social media, the positioning of fake websites and zero-day vulnerabilities as its primary methods of infection. Spam also kept its position as one of the main threats in 2010, despite the fact that the dismantling of certain botnets (like the famous Operation Mariposa or Bredolab) prevented many computers from being used as zombies to send spam. This created a positive effect in spam traffic worldwide. Last year, approximately 95 percent of all email traffic globally was spam, but this dropped to an average of 85 percent in 2010.  

The report also found the most important security incidents affecting the most popular social networking sites. Facebook and Twitter were the most affected, but there were also attacks on other sites including LinkedIn and Fotolog. There were several techniques used for tricking users on these sites, such as hijacking Facebook's "Like" button, stealing identities to send out messages from trusted sources, exploiting vulnerabilities in Twitter to run Javascript code and distributing fake apps that redirect users to infected sites.