WebProNews

Tag: tweets

  • Spice Girls, Orbitz, and Jeffrey Dahmer

    Twitter is a wonderful place for one-liners. To be funny on the site, you’ve got to be sharp and practice economy of language. You’ve only got 140 characters to make an impression.

    And what better way to wind-down the work day than with a selection of some of the day’s most entertaining tweets.

    Enjoy!

  • Alex Trebek, Bath Salts, and Animal Comedian Names

    Twitter is a wonderful place for one-liners. To be funny on the site, you’ve got to be sharp and practice economy of language. You’ve only got 140 characters to make an impression.

    And what better way to wind-down the work day than with a selection of some of the day’s most entertaining tweets.

    Enjoy!

  • Vampire Hunters, Gatorade, and Disappointing YouTube Videos

    Twitter is a wonderful place for one-liners. To be funny on the site, you’ve got to be sharp and practice economy of language. You’ve only got 140 characters to make an impression.

    And what better way to wind-down the work day than with a selection of some of the day’s most entertaining tweets.

    Enjoy!

  • Liam Neeson, Lawn Darts, and a Twitter Crash

    Twitter is a wonderful place for one-liners. To be funny on the site, you’ve got to be sharp and practice economy of language. You’ve only got 140 characters to make an impression.

    And what better way to wind-down the work day than with a selection of some of the day’s most entertaining tweets.

    Enjoy!

  • Discover Your City’s Ratio Of Inane To Useful Tweets With Twaddler

    Twitter, like many social networks, log their posts with geographic tags. The company has allowed users to enable tweeting with your location for a while now, and many users routinely send out geotagged tweets. If a user has enable location-based tweets, they will see a location field just under the tweet box.

    While some users are understandably reluctant to add their location to their tweets, millions of other users are doing so on a daily basis. This naturally creates a trove of data that can be used to construct some pretty fun apps, and Twaddler is one of them.

    Twaddler creator Justin Reynen explains his service like this:

    Twaddler live streams geotagged tweets from around a given area, such as your home town, but you don’t have to stay there. You can check out what’s happening in London, New York, Paris, anywhere! Just use the Go To box. Twaddler only displays tweets with a geotag, not just a location, [and] Twaddler uses your location to get an idea of where you are when it starts up. Nothing is stored on a server, Twaddler is completely anonymous.

    The Twaddler interace uses Google Maps to plot the exact location of live incoming tweets to any location in the world. You can check out the flurry of tweets coming from your own city or explore what people are saying all over the world. There’s also a tweet stream attached to the left-hand side, if you don’t want to click all of the little flags:

    Twaddler isn’t the first application to pull from Twitter’s location data to pinpoint tweets in your area, but it’s fun to see everything in the map view and have the stream right next to it.

    I found Twaddler via reddit, and some users have some pretty interesting yet contrasting opinions on how Twaddler could be useful:

    It would be nice to highlight notable locations where a lot of people might be looking to learn of an event going on (like Egypt). This is a great idea your working on with lots of potential uses. Good luck!

    or…

    I had a LOT of fun with this last night. I punched in my local and pretty much twitter spammed anyone posting in my area that was being a dumbass on twitter.

    So there you have it. You could use Twaddler to track tweets in a particular location where something big is going down – or you could use it to troll all of the idiots posting inane tweets about their lunches. It’s up to you.

    Couple this with the fact that Twitter just launched location-specific Twitter trends, and you be a real-time news tracking machine. Or, you know, you could get a glimpse of just how stupid the twitter users in your hometown really are.

  • Twitter to Aggressively Expand Advertising to Over 50 Countries Before the End of 2012

    Twitter has some mighty ambitious plans to bring promoted tweets and other advertising products to over 50 countries by the end of 2012.

    Western Europe and Latin America will be among the first to see their tweeters transformed into revenue for the company.

    Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey spoke at a press conference held during the Cannes International Film Festival Tuesday morning. He addressed Twitter’s future and essentially implied they are still open to a variety of paths.

    Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey comments on Twitter’s future:

    “I’m extremely humbled by how quick and broadly Twitter has taken off an how we’ve done building something independent and timeless – this is a company that will last,”

    “The company has always put itself in a position to choose when it is ready. We do things when we are ready. We have a good understanding about pacing and have the discipline to make the choices ourselves.”

    So, while Twitter may be open to going public or being acquired by a larger organization (possibly Google?), it is making the global expansion of advertising its immediate priority.

    Among the most likely countries to be receiving promoted tweets, trends, and accounts in the very near future are Brazil, Spain, and Germany.

    Twitter hasn’t been taking things slow, they just moved to a new headquarters and hired some new talent. They have also experienced a huge influx of users going mobile, and unlike Facebook, their products are already prime for mobile usage.

    As Twitter sets out on their mission to expand advertising, we can probably also expect to see an increase in the social platform’s user-base. We’ll keep you updated on their advertising expansion progress.

  • Mike Tyson, Hebrew National, and Nutella

    Mike Tyson, Hebrew National, and Nutella

    Twitter is a wonderful place for one-liners. To be funny on the site, you’ve got to be sharp and practice economy of language. You’ve only got 140 characters to make an impression.

    And what better way to wind-down the work day than with a selection of some of the day’s most entertaining tweets.

    Enjoy!

  • Twitter Cuts Out Replies From Verified Accounts’ Timelines

    One of the most endearing qualities a celebrity, brand, or otherwise verified Twitter account can have is user engagement. Sure, it’s interesting to follow them for the humor, the information, or the insight into their day-to-day lives. But if Twitter account is enough of a BFD to be verified, and they still take the time to respond to the little man – well, they’re special.

    This is naturally very exciting for whoever gets the replies. But for everyone else, a celeb’s Twitter feed may become flooded by @ replies, making it unable for you to browse through their actual tweets.

    That problem is now a thing of the past, as Twitter has just announced that verified accounts are now available with or without replies.

    The verified account will be set to “No replies” by default, which means you won’t see any @ replies tweeted by the account. You can easily click over to “All” if you want to see their conversations along with their original tweets.

    From the Twitter blog:

    This simplified profile, which we’re rolling out to verified accounts over the coming weeks, makes it easier to understand what kind of content the user shares on Twitter, and what Tweets you’ll see if you follow them. (Remember that replies on Twitter begin with an @username and are only seen by people who follow both the Tweet author and the @username at the beginning of the Tweet.)

    Of course, this new feature won’t really change anything for the pages of celebs and brands that don’t make a habit of dishing out replies. But for some high-profile Twitter users, copious replies are the norm. For those users, this will most likely prove to be a great new feature.

  • Shia LaBeouf, Google Instant, and Tempur-Pedic

    Twitter is a wonderful place for one-liners. To be funny on the site, you’ve got to be sharp and practice economy of language. You’ve only got 140 characters to make an impression.

    And what better way to wind-down the work day than with a selection of some of the day’s most entertaining tweets.

    Enjoy!

  • Gulf States Persecuting Twitter Users for Politically and Religiously Offensive Messages

    Activists in Bahrain and Kuwait are protesting governments move to crack down on Twitter users who take advantage of the platform to broadcast politically extreme and religiously offensive messages.

    Twitter has been adopted by many activists in the conservative Gulf States as a means of expressing their dissatisfaction with the current leadership and their unchallenged authority.

    While attempts to censor the rapidly growing social media trends have had varying degrees of success, arrests and persecution have become common forms of enforcement for those who violate the dictatorship of the ruling monarchies.

    Human Rights Watch expressed complete disapproval over government detaining individuals for broadcasting ant-religious and anti-government statements, but long jail terms and harsh punishments have become a fixture of the increasingly hostile political environment.

    In one case, the Kuwaiti law enforcement handed down a ten year prison sentence to a man who criticized the government and insulted the kings of Saudi Arabia and Prophet Mohammed.

    Most recently, the Human Right Watch demanded the release of activist Nabeel Rajab, who was imprisoned/detained for tweeting out a demand that the prime minister step down from his position.

    Huge political campaigns and protestor support actions are being organized in the Gulf States by the public and various underground leaders on Twitter. Many of the top tweets are from clerics loyal to Mohamed al-Arefe, a telegenic, conservative Saudi Arabian Islamic scholar, who has grown in popularity from 650,000 followers to 1.8 million followers in just one year.

    Dima Khatib, who has gained fame as one of the region’s biggest Twitter voices in the Arab uprisings, and a correspondent for Qatar’s Al Jazeera, is vocal on the crucial role Twitter has played in the movement.

    Dima Khatib comments on the role of Twitter in the Arab uprising:

    “Twitter has contributed to an expansion of freedom of expression,”

    “But things have cracked wide open – we still don’t know how to respect other points of view yet.”

    For more information on the crack down in the Middle East and North Africa, follow this link to FT.com’s full coverage of the events. Look for more information coming out of these social media protests as Human Rights Watch fights for the peoples freedom of speech in the weeks to come.

    (Lead image courtesy of Article.wn.Com)

  • The U.S. Open, Greek Yogurt, and Moves Like Jagger

    Twitter is a wonderful place for one-liners. To be funny on the site, you’ve got to be sharp and practice economy of language. You’ve only got 140 characters to make an impression.

    And what better way to wind-down the work day than with a selection of some of the day’s most entertaining tweets.

    Enjoy!

  • Twitter Now Shows You Exactly How Many Retweets You Receive

    Are you incredibly popular on Twitter – so popular that it’s commonplace for you to receive over 50 retweets of one of your 140-character brain farts? If not, are you curious to see just how popular the Twitter elite really are? If so, it’s your lucky day.

    And really, it’s great news for all the narcissists out there. Twitter has finally dumped that annoying 50+ retweets indicator and is now showing the exact number of retweets – whether it be 4 or 4,000.

    Previously, the retweet counter was capped at 50. It didn’t matter whether your witty tweet garnered 51 retweets or 551 – it would still simply say “50+.” Of course, users that wanted to know the true retweet tally on some of their top-performing tweets could do so using a variety of third-party services.

    Check it out below:

    Twitter didn’t make a big announcement about this, as it’s a pretty minor change. But it does make sense – I mean, there’s a big difference in 51 retweets and 5,000. And there’s no real reason not to share the exact figures. Well, except now those terrible “1,000 retweets and I’ll do this” tweets might see a bit of a surge.

    The move appears to be retroactive, so you can go see how well one of your tweets from a few months ago actually performed.

    Last week, Twitter unveiled personalized Twitter trends based on users’ location as well as expanded tweets that include more content from a broader range of sites.

    [h/t The Verge]

  • Lindsay Lohan, Hoobastank, and Failed Tech Bands

    Twitter is a wonderful place for one-liners. To be funny on the site, you’ve got to be sharp and practice economy of language. You’ve only got 140 characters to make an impression.

    And what better way to wind-down the work day than with a selection of some of the day’s most entertaining tweets.

    Enjoy!

  • Man With Locked-In Syndrome Tweets Using Eye-Tracking Tech

    In 2005, husband, father, and rugby fan Tony Nicklinson suffered a massive stroke that paralyzed him – almost completely. He now suffers from what is know as “Locked in syndrome,” a condition that leaves nearly every voluntary muscle in the human body paralyzed – except for the eyes. This means that the person is completely awake and aware, but unable to even speak.

    But today, with the help of some special eye-tracking tech, Tony sent out his very first tweets.

    “Hello world,” he says. “I am tony nicklinson. I have locked-in syndrome and this is my first ever tweet.” In all, Tony has been able to send out four tweets since Wednesday evening.

    Channel 4 will air a documentary on Tony on June 18th as part of its “Dispatches” series. According to the episode description, we can expect it to be rather heavy-hitting:

    Tony Nicklinson wants to die, but he cannot kill himself without help, and anyone who helped him would be committing murder.

    On the eve of a historic and controversial legal bid to demand the right to be killed, he tells his story, comes face to face with his critics, and hears from the Greek doctor who saved his life seven years earlier, who says he wouldn’t wish this condition on his worst enemy.

    Locked-in syndrome is a rare but truly terrifying condition that can result from traumatic brain injury, certain diseases, or even an overdose. The condition was made famous by journalist Jean-Dominique Bauby, whose memoir The Diving Bell and the Butterfly was turned into a critically-acclaimed film in 2007.

    Watch Tony send out his first-ever tweet using the eye-tracking technology in this clip from the documentary:

    [h/t Mashable]

  • Kanye West, Flag Day, and Bourbon

    Twitter is a wonderful place for one-liners. To be funny on the site, you’ve got to be sharp and practice economy of language. You’ve only got 140 characters to make an impression.

    And what better way to wind-down the work day than with a selection of some of the day’s most entertaining tweets.

    Enjoy!

  • Twitter Gets Expanded Tweets For More Content

    Twitter announced some new expanded tweet functionality today for users accessing Twitter through twitter.com and mobile.twitter.com. Users will be able to view more content from the tweets themselves, before having to click through to the original site.

    I can’t imagine this will help sites in the traffic department, but it certainly makes for a richer Twitter experience.

    Essentially, the same functionality that has been available in Twitter for videos and photos, is now being applied to content from a broader range of sites. Before, you may have expanded a tweet to view a YouTube video or an Instagram photo, but now you’ll be able to article previews from publications like The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Time, and others, as well as photos from TMZ, BuzzFeed, The WWE, etc.

    BET Awards tweet

    NYT Tweet expanded

    The expanded tweets won’t work for just any site, but only for select partners. Other partners include: DailyMotion, Lifetime, BET, The San Francisco Chronicle, Der SPiegel Online and MSNBC.

    The functionality will soon be applied to Twitter for iPhone and Android.

  • Burger King, Heroin, and Solitaire

    Burger King, Heroin, and Solitaire

    Twitter is a wonderful place for one-liners. To be funny on the site, you’ve got to be sharp and practice economy of language. You’ve only got 140 characters to make an impression.

    And what better way to wind-down the work day than with a selection of some of the day’s most entertaining tweets.

    Enjoy!

  • Twitter Use on the Rise [Pew Internet Study]

    Twitter use as still on the rise as of February 2012. In fact, for internet users age 18-24, the number using Twitter in 2010 (16%) nearly doubled (31%) by February 2012.

    Also of interest is the percentage of the internet population who use Twitter overall. It has also nearly double from 2010 to 2012, coming in at 8% and 15% respectively.

    Pew Internet Research has been tracking Twitter use in their Pew Internet & American Life Project. What the project has uncovered, is a general upward trend in adopting Twitter for daily use overall. Pew has also made the effort to organize the information by age and year in a some clearly illustrated charts for us.

    Take a look at the Bar Graph’s created by Pew:

    pew1

    pew2

    While Twitter use in the United States is on a steady upward climb, the platform is seriously investing in their international reach to bring a wider Twitter user-base and attract more global advertising interest.

    Late last week, Twitter announced the completion of a major reorganization effort and some prestigious new hires which seemed mostly to be centered on pushing international sales and development efforts.

    Also noteworthy in their success, Twitter mobile advertising is growing very fast, and as we all know, mobile is the future of marketing, and huge ad revenues as well. In fact, last financial quarter, they were at times earning more from mobile ads than from web.

    With over 500 million registered users and 140 million daily users, it doesn’t seem like they’ll be slowing down anytime soon. Revenue growth for the company is expected to exceed $269 million this year.

    (Image courtesy of Twitterism.com)

  • Dingos, Snooki, and JNCO Jeans

    Dingos, Snooki, and JNCO Jeans

    Twitter is a wonderful place for one-liners. To be funny on the site, you’ve got to be sharp and practice economy of language. You’ve only got 140 characters to make an impression.

    And what better way to wind-down the work day than with a selection of some of the day’s most entertaining tweets.

    Enjoy!

  • Apple, True Blood, and Yoga Pants

    Twitter is a wonderful place for one-liners. To be funny on the site, you’ve got to be sharp and practice economy of language. You’ve only got 140 characters to make an impression.

    And what better way to wind-down the work day than with a selection of some of the day’s most entertaining tweets.

    Enjoy!

  • Twitter Nascar TV Spot Promotes Hashtag Pages During the Pocono 400

    Yesterday, Twitter grabbed the attentions of Nascar fans when they released their new television ad featuring their corresponding Twitter.com/hashtag/nascar page. The ad ran during the Pocono 400 race and featured driver Brad Keselowski (who placed 24th in the race) snapping a pic with his iPhone.

    What’s interesting (and different) is the hashtag featured in the commercial doesn’t just attach itself to just a keyword, it’s a web address. What viewers saw was TWITTER.COM/#NASCAR, and if you follow that tag/address it leads you to the Nascar-branded hashtag page I mentioned above.

    Take a look at the ad:

    The new hashtag page was announced last week on Twitter’s blog. The idea, as far as the Nascar page goes, is to brings fans closer to the race and give them an insider’s view on what’s happening with the drivers and others closely related to the race.

    Twitter comments on their blog post last Thursday:

    Anyone watching the Pocono 400 on Sunday — even if you’re not a current Twitter user — can visit twitter.com/#NASCAR watch the race unfold from every angle, and get insider access to all the places the cameras can’t take you. For example, teams will update you with information about how their car is performing in the race and what their strategy will be when they come into pit road. You’ll also see photos from the pit and read what the drivers and spotters are saying in the heat of the moment.

    Of course, it’s an excellent idea for Twitter to position themselves as an interface between the Nascar brand and their fans like this. Not only does it help promote a higher degree of engagement for users/fans, it also adds a lot of value to the Twitter brand itself.

    Another great aspect of a Nascar page is the hundreds related brands which can also be positioned in the stream of the conversation. The feed features tweets from Ford Racing, Toyota Racing, Stewart-Haas, ESPN, and many more.

    Check a few more Twitter spots featuring Nascar: