Backing Down In The Face of Twitter

The end of 2011 saw big reversals by major corporations in the face of public outcry. First was GoDaddy, who came out in favor of SOPA and was quickly persuaded by online outrage into switching positions. The second was an even faster about-face by Verizon Wireless. Verizon thought they’d quietly slip-in a $2 bill payment fee, only to find the public reaction so seething that they cancelled that bright idea before potential shaming by the FCC. Two up. Two down. Is there something to be learned here?

It might be possible to dismiss either or both of these incidents as the obvious corporate toe stubbing that occurs from time to time. But when you add them to a stack of other news stories this past year that fall into the same category, there’s a pretty obvious pattern that emerges.

What other stories? How about the “Arab Spring” demonstrations that swept many countries in the Middle East and prompted regime changes in Tunisia, Egypt & Libya and ongoing protests in Syria, Bahrain, Yemen and Jordan? How about the “Occupy” movements that have been dubbed an “American Autumn” by some? How about 100,000 demonstrators in Madison, Wisconsin that included tractor parades and farmers dressed as cows circling the Capitol last February? By this summer, it may culminate in recall of the state’s Governor.

How does all this disparate activity tie together? The common thread is the Internet. We are living in a new age of the empowered individual that is different from anything we’ve seen before in one important aspect. Thanks to technology, that empowerment is nearly instantaneous.

Time was, if you didn’t like something you always had the option to write your Congressman or the editor of your local paper. You could call or write a company to voice your disapproval. If the results weren’t satisfactory, you always could discuss matters with your friends, even escalating your group efforts into a demonstration or protest march. The civil rights movement and student protests of the 1960’s can certainly be said to have changed the course of American society over a period of turbulent years.

For those of us old enough to remember 1968, there is a certain resemblance to Zucotti Park and UC Davis. One difference is the way we hear about these things and see the images. In the 60’s, you tuned in Walter Cronkite from 5:30 to 6 PM or you went without video. There were always AP wirephotos in the Sunday newspaper or color pictures in next week’s Time magazine.

Compare that with watching the live feed from Tim Pool's cell phone as he walked through the crowd in New York City, interviewing people involved in the Occupy Wall Street protests as he went. What’s it take to be such a citizen journalist with your own audio and video remote broadcast facility? In this case, a Samsung Galaxy S II smartphone and an unlimited 4G broadband account from Sprint feeding into a Ustream account called “The Other 99.” Would you like to broadcast live video to a dozen friends or tens of thousands of interested onlookers worldwide? The Ustream.tv channels are free. You can feed them from your desktop, laptop or smartphone with wired or wireless broadband connection.

Social media is said to be a major theme for business in 2012. The social media revolution has already become mainstream activity for individuals everywhere. In WWII, desperate messages came out of countries under siege via Morse Code sent from hidden short wave transmitters. In 2012, that’s text messages and tweets from some of the billions of cell phones in service worldwide. Think this can be stopped? Just who is going to round up all those billions of phones or cut off the Internet or texting for very long? There are so many interconnections that if you need to send a message anywhere on Earth, you can probably find a path in short order.

It’s more than the power of motivated individuals. Social media and the readily available tools that feed it allow those motivated individuals to quickly, almost instantly, join forces with others of the same mind. In hours, minutes, perhaps seconds, group efforts can be mounted to address nearly any issue. This is what doomed the ill-fated initiatives from GoDaddy and Verizon before they ever got solidified. One disgruntled customer on the toll-free service line can be placated or ignored. Ten thousand or a hundred thousand in concert bashing your business on Facebook, Twitter, text messages, YouTube, blogs and email are a force to be reckoned with. Once they get the attention of the mainstream media who monitor those social channels looking for newsworthy material, the game is over ... even if it only started a few hours or days ago.

Salman Rushdie and the Nym Wars

LINK

Rushdie Runs Afoul of Web’s Real-Name Police. (The New York Times, 11/15/2011)

Excerpt: The argument over pseudonyms — known online as the “nym wars” — goes to the heart of how the Internet might be organized in the future. Major Internet companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter have a valuable stake in this debate — and, in some cases, vastly different corporate philosophies on the issue that signal their own ambitions.

Insists on authentic identity, or real names.

Authentic identity.

Laissez-faire approach.





For further reading.
Understanding the Nym Wars. (Boing Boing, 8/20/2011)
The nym wars:  how many identifies are enough.  (Practical Ethics, 8/22/2011)

Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore divorce rumours

Sad..

The 33-year-old actor and his wife of six years, Demi Moore, 48, have reportedly been living apart for months as rumors claim they're about to embark in an estimated $290 million divorce battle.

"Ashton and Demi have separated and the marriage is over," a source close to the couple told Star magazine. "The relationship ended because of Ashton's serial cheating. It's a painful time for Demi."
More on Ashton Kutcher cheating on Demi Moore? Couple facing divorce rumors as other woman comes forward - nydailynews.com

Related article:
Ashton and Demi, in Tweets

Happy 5th Birthday, Twitter!

Twitter turned 5 two days ago on Mar 21. Twitter, that microblogging site has a membership of 200 million users, making it one of the most-visited services on the Web.

If you are a Twitter user, you would be enjoying this easy and fast way of getting in touch with your buddies and family or letting them know your whereabouts and activities. You would probably be knowing more about your sports or music idols. Sharing information is never easier.

In honor of its fifth birthday, CNN shares five ways how Twitter has changed the digital communication game. See if you agree.

1. Made a fast flow of information faster - news spreads faster than ever with Twitter.

2. Removed the celebrity filter - Lots of stars chat with their followers shares photos, or even just updates on their everyday lives, let fans see stars in a way they never could before.

3. Created "thought leaders" - When a single tweet puts your thoughts in front of hundreds of thousands of people, you're able to help set the agenda in your community.

4. Strengthened the "second screen" - With Twitter, nobody has to watch a TV show by themselves again. You can have a real-time conversation with thousands of fellow fans watching the same show. Stats has shown that Twitter traffic increases by a factor of 30 whenever "Glee" is on. And during this year's Super Bowl, there were 4,000 tweets sent per second.

5. (Over)simplified the conversation - 140 characters may not be enough to tell our story so some of us will have to shoot out two or more tweets.

For more details and some interesting links, read the CNN article.

So, are you on Twitter yet?

Related article:
Twitter turns 5, goes from 0 to 140 million tweets a day

Source: CNN

Pulse of the Nation: Maps Based on Twitter Activity

U.S. Mood throughout the day, inferred from Twitter

© 2010 Alan Mislove, Sune Lehmann, Yong-Yeol Ahn, Jukka-Pekka Onnela, J. Niels Rosenquist. Some rights reserved. Images, poster, and movie are shared under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

More cartograms!  This series of maps is about degrees of happiness and times of the day, based on tweets.  Check out the animated map sequence.  Thanks for sending the link, Gretchen!

http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/amislove/twittermood/  

And in another twitter-related map, Daniel Huffman interpolated the ratio of tweets containing curse words with total number of tweets to produce an isopleth map of cursing activity.  The comments below the map give a lot of detail on his methodology and data in constructing the map.  http://cartastrophe.wordpress.com/2011/01/24/no-swearing-in-utah/   Thanks for sending me this, Andrew M. (nearly a month ago!).  The Map Monkey moves slowly sometimes, but actually it worked out really well to pair it with this other Twitter map! 

Detail of Four Corners Area

FCC Confiscates Remaining TV Channels For Twitter

Shocked and horrified by the geometrically expanding demand for wireless broadband services, the Federal Commfiscation Commission exercised its powers of eminent domain today and confiscated the remaining broadcast television channels not already sold at auction. Most surprising of all was the declaration that this rare and important spectrum is going to be dedicated exclusively to the text messaging service, Twitter.

FCC Chairman Lowon B. Andwidth explained that the Commission just completed an intensive study of Internet usage and found that the Twitter service is growing at such an astonishing rate that it will soon devour all available bandwidth. “While it is bad enough that Twitter will bring web browsing, video streaming, text messaging and email to a halt,” said Mr. Andwidth, “a far worse situation will occur when Twitter users have to take a number and get in line to post their tweets. I don’t want to be in Washington when that mob of anti-social networkers descends on Capitol Hill.”

In shortest supply is wireless bandwidth. Apparently, the lion’s share of cellular phone activity involves posting messages to Twitter rather than the growth previously expected from mobile video and web browsing. One young smartphone user was heard to exclaim, “Does anyone actually surf the Web anymore? Who has the patience to read blogs and web pages? Anything worth saying can be said in 140 characters or less.”

Twitter itself issued a 130 character statement expressing delight at the government’s pre-emptive action to prevent a massive Fail Whale epidemic from sweeping the nation, and requesting re-tweets. They vowed to expand server capacity to match the new wireless bandwidth capacity as best they can. TV stations that follow Twitter have already been tweeted to cease broadcasting immediately and return their licenses. The remaining stations will be getting old school telegrams. “It’s unlikely anyone will be inconvenienced by this change,” explained Chairman Andwidth. “Everybody is on cable and satellite by now, anyway.”

Expectations are that a swift coordinated move by the public and private sectors can ensure adequate messaging capacity at least until after the fall elections. After that, the FCC will likely look at shutting down other less important uses of the electromagnetic spectrum including most AM and FM music stations. “We may even have to shut down microwave ovens and garage door openers if we can’t keep up with texting bandwidth demand,” exclaimed an obviously frustrated chairman.

Also making quick moves to protect its interests, Google announced that it is going to take over non-wireless Internet service by offering 1 Gbps fiber optic connections to every city that performed ridiculous stunts to try to win Google broadband service for its residents. “All other cities that didn’t make fools of themselves will be getting 10 Gbps Google Internet access free of charge,” according to an unofficial Google statement. It went on to say: “There is only one acceptable day for any foolishness and that is April 1.”

Is Twitter Really 75 Years Old?

Would you be surprised to know learn that Twitter is older than you, your parents and maybe your grandparents?

Well, not Twitter itself but the germ of the idea. BoingBoing published a report of a robot messenger called the Notificator that served a similar need in London in 1935. It was a type of vending machine installed in public places that let people leave notes for their friends. You walked up to this device, wrote your message on the next blank space of a continuous strip of paper, and then dropped a coin into the slot. With that, your message moved up one place on the list leaving a new blank area for the next message. After at least two hours, your message would roll off the top of the list so it couldn’t be seen anymore. But that assumes that by then your friends would have checked the messages and seen what you left for them.

Seems like a good implementation of the technology of the times to create a social networking system where people could follow their friends and leave messages that would be viewed by all users. Sounds a bit like “tweeting,” doesn’t it? How the Notificator would have evolved, we’ll never know. World War II moved the focus of inventing and manufacturing to military needs. From that conflict, the British gave us both radar and the jet aircraft.

We think we know the narrow class of genius geeks who are uniquely qualified to make major advances in technology today. But a lot of that is just stereotypes and popular culture. Would you believe that the basis of Bluetooth technology was patented by a gorgeous movie star of the 1930’s?

Yes, you can thank Hedy Lamarr for Bluetooth. Of course, there were no cell phone headsets or wireless computer mice in 1940. But WWII was already raging in Europe would soon engulf the United States. Hedy Lamarr, popular actress and former wife of an Austrian arms manufacturer, had an idea for an undetectable radio control scheme for torpedoes. She discussed it with her music composer neighbor and they created a scheme using player piano rolls to constantly shift the radio control frequency to keep it stealthy. The key was in synchronizing identical piano rolls at each end, so the transmitting and receiving frequencies would be coordinated only for that particular transmitter and receiver.

Today we know that technology as FHSS or Frequency Hopping Spread Spectrum transmission. It traces its lineage to patent number 2,292,387, “Secret Communication System,” awarded to George Antheil and Hedy Kiesler Markey. Markey is the remarried name of Hedy Lamarr.

So, is everything old new again? Could be that those steampunks are sensing some hidden truth when they build modern computers and related technology that have the appearance of something Jules Verne would have cooked up. By the way, Verne had the basics of the moon landing worked out in 1865 and we still haven’t mastered time travel.