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Tag: Unfollow

  • Gay Marriage Debate Forces Twitter Users to Draw Lines in the Sand

    It appears that gay rights and marriage equality are issues that compel people to speak their minds, no matter what the cost. It’s just one of those topics that people know will cause fervent debate, but it’s simply too important to stay silent.

    After a quick glance down your Twitter stream or your Facebook news feed, this is more than obvious.

    But what you’re about to see is a simple graph that shows exactly how much of a disruption in the normal Twitter flow has been caused by the reinvigorated same-sex marriage debate (thanks the the Supreme Court’s interest in the topic).

    First spotted by SFGate’s Tech Chronicles blog, it looks like the use of the term “unfollow” has seen a surge in the days leading up to the opening arguments in the two same-sex marriage Supreme Court cases.

    Here’s the past week’s worth of mentions on Twitter (provided by Topsy). The yellow is mentions of “unfollow.” You can see the spike occurred near similar spikes for terms like “gay marriage” (blue) and “same-sex” (red).

    It doesn’t take a genius to infer as to why these terms saw a similar surge. For the most part, you see people drawing a line in the sand, saying “hey, I support/oppose gay marriage, and if you don’t like it you can unfollow me.”

    For example:

    Just FYI, the gay marriage support vastly outweighs the gay marriage opposition if you just scan Twitter.

    Then you have the people who have already made the decision to unfollow someone based on one of their tweets:

    Also, people that are warning others that they will be unfollowed if they tweet a certain way:

    And judging by the sheer volume of gay marriage-related tweets I’ve seen in the past couple of days, I can assure you that there is probably a whole lot of unfollowing going on.

    [Image via erin_wagner, Instagram]

  • AP Stylebook Adds More Tech Terms

    The 2011 print edition of the AP Stylebook is available today, and while the focus is on a brand new “Food Guidelines” section, the “journalist’s bible” has updated their social media guidelines section as well to include some new tech terms.

    Last year, the AP Stylebook added a bunch of new social media guidelines to their rules for journalists. Among those guidelines was a change from “web site” to “website,” hyphenating “e-reader,” and allowing fan, friend, and follow to be used as verbs.

    They also added social media terms “trending,” “retweet” and “unfriend” to the Stylebook. The latter settling the debate once and for all that “unfriend” is more acceptable than “defriend.”

    In March, the AP added some notable tech terms to their online edition of the Stylebook. They decided to officially go with “email” as opposed to “e-mail” and they took the spaces out of “cellphone” and “smartphone,” making them one word entities on their own.

    In the newly revised 2011 print edition, the AP has added some more social media / tech terms to the Stylebook. Among them – geolocation, geotagging, link shortener, stream and unfollow. I’ve been guilty of hyphenating geo-location in the past, so I’m now glad to have one less character to deal with. They announced these changes via Twitter last night:

    @APStylebook
    AP Stylebook    New Social Media entries: end user, geolocation, geotagging, link shortener, stream and unfollow. #APStyleChat 20 hours ago via CoTweet · powered by @socialditto

    As I said before, tech word additions aren’t the focus of the fully revised Stylebook. The focus is food. FYI, the AP added words such as locavore as the preferred term for a person who strives to eat locally and “blind bake” to describe the action of baking a pie crust before filling it. They also added “huitlacoche,” a fungus also known as “corn smut” that grows on corn and is considered a delicacy in Mexico. Mmmmm…corn smut.

    But the addition of these new terms continues the integration of our fourth estate with the wonderful word of social media.

    [Image Courtesy]