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Social Media Digest: Foursquare Search, YouTube Growth and FB Apps

Friday, January 20th, 2012

Welcome back to our weekly instalment of what’s hot in the world of social media. In case you missed what happened over the past week, here’s our top 5:

1. Foursquare is rolling out its own search engine, called Explore, as the location-based social network looks to expand its audience. The firm descibed Explore as a product to add “an ‘interesting’ layer to the whole world, tailored just for you. In a statement, the firm explained how the search engine would be tailored to each user:

“Most real-world searches are one-size fits all. You search for pizza, and it gives you the same list of pizza places, whether you like deep dish or thin crust, whether you want a slice or a sit-down meal, or whether your friends would love it or hate it. But not with foursquare Explore, because you are your friends’ (along with 1,500,000,000 more from the foursquare community) help us personalize our recommendations for you. Ever you time you check in, we get better at finding places you’ll like.”

2. A study by Hitwise in December has shown that the UK accounted for 606 million Internet visits to YouTube. The study shows that video sharing sites, citing YouTube and BBC iPlayer as examples, received 936 million visits last month. This figure has been steadily increasing, and in October, we saw a 36% increase in visits to online video sites. But YouTube is clearly ahead of the pack. The site is one of the fastest growing according to Hitwise’s data, and accounted for 65% of visits to video sharing sites in the UK in December 2011.

3. Facebook, following a year of whirlwind growth, overtook Orkut as Brazil’s most-popular social network in December. Orkut is a social network that Google launched in 2004. Its popularity in Brazil, where 60% of Orkut’s users are based, led to it being hosted and managed by Google Brazil from 2008 onwards. Facebook’s user base increased 192% during 2011, according to a comScore report released Tuesday. In December 2010, 12.4 million Brazilians visited Facebook.com. One year later, that number skyrocketed to 36 million Brazilians.

4. A lot of the web went ‘black’ yesterday in response to the US governments prospective anti-piracy laws. Sites like Wikipedia downed tools and stopped visitors from viewing pages in an attempt to raise awareness of what they believe will be dangerous legislation for freedom of speech and freedom of internet use. Google and Craiglist also draped their pages with protests about the legislation. The New York Times has an interesting round-up of the day’s events.

5. Facebook is adding a series of new applications to let users share such things as photos, travel or fashion. The online social network firm unveiled more than 60 new apps that users can share on their Facebook profiles, known as their Timeline. Users can already share the music they are listening to or news articles they are reading. But this latest development expands the number of apps significantly.

Tags: Facebook, Foursquare, Google, social media, SOPA, Twitter, YouTube
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Social Media Digest: Christmas Special

Thursday, December 22nd, 2011

To fit in with the abundance and generosity of the festive season, we have a special bumper ‘Christmas Edition’ of our social media digest for you today. So, pull up a pew, pour yourself your favourite tipple (not too much, now) and enjoy reading through what’s hot in the world of social media:

1. Facebook has begun rolling out functionality that allows Page owners and individual Facebook users to exchange private messages. Unlike on Twitter, where either party can initiate a direct message, Facebook is requiring that the individual initiate the conversation for now at least.

2. It appears no one is safe from hacking as singer Lady Gaga has been the latest victim of a targeted attack on her Twitter and Facebook accounts. Multiple messages, seemingly from the singer, offered “free iPad2’s to each one of you”. Attached links directed more than 100,000 of her followers to a site requesting personal details, possibly as part of a phishing scam. The 25-year-old, Twitter’s most followed user, later tweeted: “Phew. The hacking is over!”

3. Facebook has been told to stop its practice of indefinitely retaining data about which adverts its 500 million users outside the US click on, following a review by the Irish data protection commissioner of its non-US operations. It has also agreed to take immediate steps over data collected from third-party sites when people use their Facebook identity to log in to them. Until now, that data about people’s behaviour was passed back to Facebook and retained indefinitely. Following the review, Facebook can keep the data but it has to make it anonymous.

4. Every day more than 700,000 people sign up for a new Android device, Google’s Android chief, Andy Rubin, said this week. That works out to nearly 5 million new Android users every week, which is about the equivalent of an iPhone 4S opening weekend every seven days. Rubin also clarified that Google’s 700,000 activations per day includes new devices only and not resold ones. “We count each device only once,” Rubin said in a follow-up post on Google+.

5. Two NHS organisations have teamed for a Twitter campaign that will direct patients in London to the right services during the festive season. The 12-day ‘choose well’ tweeting initiative will begin on Christmas day, when both NHS London and NHS South West London – a strategic health authority and a primary care trust cluster – will tweet a rhyme about a seasonal ailment and the best place to get it treated during the holidays. People will be able to keep track of the tweets by following the hashtag #NHSXmas.

6. According to Twitter, the TV screening of the highly popular Anime Castle in the Sky in Japan earlier this month set a new record for the most tweets per second (TPS) on the service. The new high of 25,088 TPS smashes the previous record, which saw “nearly 9,000? tweets per second recorded following the announcement of Beyonce’s pregnancy.

7. Twitter received a $300 million investment from Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal (left) as it pushes through a redesign of its site to attract advertisers. Alwaleed, who leads the 2011 Arab Rich List, and his investment company agreed to buy a “strategic stake” in Twitter, Kingdom Holding said today. A strategic holding means more than 3 percent, Ahmed Halawani, a Kingdom Holding director, said in an interview. That would give the San Francisco-based company a valuation exceeding $10 billion.

8. Instagram has posted its first in a series of 2011 review posts, listing the top locations that people shared with their photos. The top 15 locations showed heavy usage on the West coast, California specifically, with top spots being Disneyland, AT&T Park, and airports in San Francisco and Los Angeles.

9. Paul Rayment, a PR manager based in Leeds, has come up with yet another interesting and unique use for Foursquare. He’s using the check-in service to map out the history of rappers. Starting out with Tupac Shakur (right), Rayment has documented the milestones in the rapper’s life, starting out with his performance at the Apollo Theatre. The tour then takes users through Tupac’s high school years, the location where he signed his record deal with Death Row Records, and of course, as is to be expected, passes through the site of the shooting that took Tupac’s life.

10. Last but not least, we’d personally like to thank all of you who’ve read, retweeted and enjoyed this blog over the past year – we’ll be back in 2012 to continue to keep you updated on all that’s hot in the world of social media. If 2012’s anything like 2011, there’ll be a lot to keep you in the loop about. Please take some time to view our Christmas Card and an update of our work this year.

All the team at Umpf

Tags: Facebook, flickr, Foursquare, Instagram, social media, Twitter, YouTube
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Social Media Digest: Klout Changes, Facebook Farm & YouTube Takedown

Friday, October 28th, 2011

Welcome back to our weekly instalment of what’s hot in the world of social media. In case you missed what happened over the past week, here’s a run-down of our top six:

1. Millions lost sleep this week with news that Klout (the social capital calculator) was changing its algorithm. The company insisted that many scores would go up, but that didn’t stop a small amount of negative reaction hitting social media channels. You can read more about the changes here. Suffice to say, at Umpf Towers we’re not quaking in our boots, but we’ll be working extra hard to break the magic 70 over the next few weeks.

2. This week saw the launch of the world’s first Facebook inspired cooker – or the ‘Facecook’ – as manufacturer Belling are calling it. Put simply, Facebook users have the unique chance for their profile pictures to appear on a specially designed cooker. By liking Belling UK’s Facebook page and liking the Belling Cooker app your profile picture will appear on the cooker’s photo montage. After the closing date for entries has passed, all images will be printed on to a specially created, unique Belling Classic Range Cooker. The cooker will be exhibited at the BBC Good Food show, so head down if you want to have a look.

3. In a small corner of the Baltic Sea, a mere 100km from the Arctic Circle, Facebook has announced it will build a new server farm. The small town of Lulea has been chosen as the location, creating about 70 – 90 jobs in the local area. Sweden’s network of high speed broadband, plus the general cold weather (used to keep the servers below critical temperature) has been cited as two of the reasons why the town was chosen.

4. Traditional English words such as ‘balderdash’ and ‘cripes’ are dying out thanks to the texting generation, linguists have claimed. Some 73% of people believe texts and website Twitter have dramatically changed the use of English, with long words falling out of use. The trends were revealed in a poll of 2,000 adults for the launch of JP Davidson’s book Planet Word. The book is a tie-in to Stephen Fry’s BBC2 series of the same name, charting the history of language from early grunts to tweets. The author said: “Language is always evolving and great descriptive words are being lost – but others emerge.”

5. The UK government asked Google to take down 135 YouTube videos for reasons of national security in the first half of this year, states Google’s biannual Transparency Report, released yesterday. The report also shows that the German government asked for videos that included Nazi memorabilia to be removed, and that US police wanted videos taken down because they showed their officers in acts of brutality. UK content removal requests went up 71 per cent compared to the previous six month period, when the government made no requests at all for content to be taken down on grounds of national security.

6. This week’s video is how to post a company status update on Linkedin, following recent changes to the professional online network: