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from Tales from the Trail:

“Talking about” Obama and Romney on Facebook

When President Obama marked the one-year anniversary of Osama bin Laden's death earlier this week by unexpectedly addressing the nation from Afghanistan, several commentators cited it as an example of the "advantage of incumbency": the president's visibility and ability to dominate the news are greater, just by virtue of being president, than those of challenger Mitt Romney, and he should be expected to benefit from the groundwork his campaign laid during the 2008 campaign, particularly its vast network of supporters, donors, and social media connections. 

Indeed, across a number of social media platforms, Obama's following dwarfs Romney's: Obama has 26 million Facebook "Likes" to Romney's 1.7 million; while Obama has nearly 15 million Twitter followers, Romney hasn't yet hit half a million; on Google+, Obama has just over a 1 million users in his circles, compared to Romney's just over 500 thousand; on Instagram, Obama has 636,790 followers to Romney's 9,695. In absolute numbers, Obama seems to own a towering advantage over Romney.

But on Facebook at least, sheer number of "Likes" may not tell the whole story, or even the most important part of it. Last fall, Facebook launched "people talking about this," a metric that counts interactions with a Page -- things like "liking" a Page, commenting on a post, or sharing a photo from a Page -- over a seven-day period to measure user engagement.

Here, too, Obama leads Romney in absolute numbers, with a "talking about" total more than twice as high as Romney's -- 283,819 versus 126,990. Yet, as a percentage of overall "Likes," engagement over the past week is much higher for Romney, at 7.6 percent, than for Obama, at 1.08 percent. 

For comparison's sake, the activity of Romney's Facebook followers appears to surpass those of Ron Paul, known for his passionate internet following: of Ron Paul's 949,319 "Likes," 24,943 -- 2.6 percent -- are " talking about" his Page. And the percentage of Newt Gingrich's fans who are engaging with his Facebook Page this week -- 4,887 out of 295,289, or 1.65 percent -- falls short of Romney's -- though it is still higher than Obama's.

At the party level, too, Republicans seem to be more engaged on Facebook: while the "talking about it" score for the Republican National Committee -- which this week launched a new app for Facebook called the "Social Victory Center" -- is 6 percent of total likes (312,462), the Democratic Party's Facebook page, which has a roughly equal number of "Likes" (336,951), is just 2.2 percent. 

Note: The "talking about" numbers on Facebook Pages tend to fluctuate on a day-to-day basis. The Facebook stats cited in the sample above were collected on just one day -- May 3, 2012 -- and reflect only the week prior.

from MediaFile:

Copious revamps social commerce service with a new twist

Pinterest has yet to provide many details about how it intends to make money from its fast-growing image-sharing social service.

But that’s not stopping others from trying to capitalize on the online service’s rich catalog of product images.

Copious, a social commerce start-up, launched a new version of its website on Monday that lets consumers buy many of the bags, shoes and other fashion accessories that get shared by Pinterest’s millions of users every day.

Pinterest is just one of several online social media services, including Twitter and Facebook, that the Copious site connects to, allowing consumers to create a personalized online storefront that changes as frequently as your Facebook newsfeed.

The idea is to create a shopping experience based around people you follow and their actions, rather than around static categories of merchandise. Instead of browsing pre-set selections of shoes or sweaters, a visitor to Copious sees an ever-changing mix of items, based upon whatever the friends and bloggers they follow are sharing or commenting on at that moment.

The result is a shopping experience that’s constantly morphing, supposedly giving consumers a reason to come keep coming back.

“Conversation is always ongoing. That’s why people go back to Facebook on a daily basis, but don’t necessarily go back to Amazon.com on a daily basis,” said Jim Rose, the co-founder and CEO of Copious.

from Breakingviews:

Twitter gives peace a chance in patent wars

By Reynolds Holding The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.

All we are tweeting is give peace a chance. Twitter is going to allow its engineer-inventors to veto lawsuits against alleged infringers of patents they develop. That’s a model for curbing the kind of expensive legal salvos that Apple, Microsoft and others are lobbing just to slow each other down. If the rest of the technology world one day falls in line, innovation could benefit.

Apple and Samsung’s 20-lawsuit, 10-nation battle over smartphones and tablets may be the most prominent, but patent brawls have engulfed plenty of big-name tech firms, from Oracle to Google to Microsoft. In March, Yahoo sued Facebook over 10 web-advertising patents, the first major case involving social media.

The lawsuits have fueled a costly arms race, with Microsoft shelling out more than $1 million apiece for 800 patents bought from AOL earlier this month. Such acquisitions allow firms to launch infringement suits against competitors while countering legal ambushes with claims of their own. Promoting innovation, the supposed purpose of patents, has little to do with it.

The U.S. Congress tried to fix flaws in the patent system last September. But the law that passed didn’t address a major problem. Too many patents remain vague and overly broad, allowing holders to assert rights they were never meant to have.

Twitter’s plan might help. Its agreement with its innovative employees will permit the company to use patents to fend off infringement claims but prohibit it from acting as the legal aggressor without the inventor’s permission. An engineer’s veto would survive even if he or she leaves Twitter or the company transfers the patent.

In part, the plan is spin designed to lure top-notch engineers, who tend to prefer to let creativity bloom, and make Twitter’s customers feel good. And it’s relatively easy for a company that lacks a big patent arsenal to make such a move. But the idea will still pressure rivals to adopt similar policies, something Facebook and Foursquare say they will consider.

from Paul Smalera:

All your Tumblr are belong to Them

Forget Instagram’s billion-dollar payday. Forget IPOs, past and future, from Facebook, Groupon, LinkedIn and the like. And ignore, please, the online ramblings of attention-hungry venture capitalists and narcissistic Silicon Valley journalists with the off-putting habit of making their inside-baseball sound like the World Series. Their stories, to paraphrase Shakespeare, are tales told by idiots, full of sound and fury, but signifying very little about the impact of technology on most of our lives. (Sure, some of their tales are about great fortunes, but those are only for a select few; to summon the Oracle of Omaha rather than the Bard of Avon, only a fool ever equated price with value.) Their one-in-a-million windfalls are just flashes in the pan. Or, actually, they are solitary data points, meaningless when devoid of context.

That context is here. It’s come, in part, because of the cunningly simple social and curatorial tools that media companies like Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook and Pinterest give away to their users. But making sense of our social world is only possible with the the tools and technology behind what we call Big Data. The massive information collections spawned by our digital world are too big to address directly, so smart scientists have used fast computers to carve the data into real knowledge. This is how Big Data is already changing the way the world works.

But Big Data is young; though there are hundreds of accessible data sets already, there are still many more chaotic stores of information its tools can tame. Take, for example, social media: Yesterday, social media API company Gnip announced that it is providing customers with all of Tumblr’s data, what in techspeak is called the firehose. What Gnip and competitors like DataSift are providing to customers are Social Big Data firehoses that can be perfectly filtered into gently babbling brooks lined with digital gold nuggets. When the tech media wonder out loud how social companies will ever make a buck – sifting the gold out of their user-generated content is a huge piece of the puzzle.

At Gnip, Tumblr joins Twitter, WordPress, Disqus and the Chinese microblogging service Sina Weibo as the latest tree in a forest of Social Big Data accessible via API. A well-written API can transform a jumble of numbers into a perfectly organized multiplication table – on the order of millions or even billions of complex data pieces. (See this recent Economist visualization of the data record of a single tweet for more context.)

The data pieces are valuable, but not solely because they help advertisers sell more widgets: In an email, Gnip Chief Operating Officer Chris Moody explained one of the coolest uses of data his company has enabled may have actually helped firefighters do their job better: “During the 4 Mile Canyon Fire in Boulder in 2010, [Gnip customer] VisionLink was able to provide fire crews and managers a realtime view into what was happening on the ground by layering geo-tagged Tweets and Flickr images onto a Google map of the area.”

It’s not just maps, photos and geo locations that number crunchers crave. Tumblr, after all, is a blog network full of cat photos, animated GIFs and other tomfoolery. Yet last year its already booming traffic grew an additional 300 percent. As the Web comic XKCD noted a day before Gnip’s announcement, the proper noun “Tumblr” is perhaps six months away from surpassing “blogging” in online searches, much the way “Google” became synonymous with the verb “search” a decade earlier. Tumblr users know that the site’s tools are heavily oriented toward sharing and signaling, as opposed to pure content creation. On Tumblr, users can of course write posts and upload photos, but they can also follow other users, “heart” each others’ posts and reblog posts they want to share with their own followers – and each action takes little more than one click. All these actions are trackable, all of them indicate some sort of sentiment or preference and all of them are discrete chunks of data in Tumblr’s massive data store – now joining the 90 billion pieces of social data Gnip is already delivering on a monthly basis.

If all of this sounds like a grand plot to aggregate, sift and derive insight into social behavior from all sorts of data that unsuspecting users unwittingly upload – well, it is. But those are the trade-offs that users agree to when they sign up with social-media websites, right when they check that box agreeing to the terms of service.

from MediaFile:

Unmetric gets funding to help brands gauge their social media clout

This guy probably has social media clout. How many 'likes' will he get this November?

What would you get if social media ego measurement tool Klout had a baby with comScore, the Web traffic measurement firm? It would  probably be Unmetric, a new "social media benchmark" tool that helps brands measure their social media engagement.

If you're a big brand-owner all those Facebook Likes and Twitter Retweets by your customers and 'fans' are fine but what do they really mean in terms of engagement and customer sentiment? More importantly, how do they stack up against your rivals? These are some of the questions Unmetric hopes to help answer after raising $3.2 million in Series A financing led by Nexus Venture Partners.

Chicago-based Unmetric will debut its Unmetric Score, tailored for Fortune 500 companies, based on weighted data from at least 24 qualitative and quantitative metrics measuring online brand performance versus competitors. The Unmetric Score will be somewhat similar to the Klout Score but Lux Narayan, Unmetric's Chief Executive, hopes its own score will have, er...more clout (sorry).

As far as marketers and advertisers are concerned these are still very much the early days of social media as they try to engage with their customers in more tw0-way conversations in a range of these fledgling platforms.  Even Narayan admits it's too early to declare what the value of a "like" on Facebook really means in itself. But he believes a "like" for example offers a very important tool for brands in the new world.

"A Like is a right for the brand to engage in a conversation with their customer," said Narayan.

from Chrystia Freeland:

Statecraft via Twitter

It turns out you can govern in 140 characters. Social media is often accused of coarsening our public discourse and of making us stupid. But some innovative public leaders are taking to their keyboards and finding that the payoff is a direct and personal connection with their communities.

To understand how statecraft by Twitter works, I spoke to three avid practitioners, who are spread around the globe and work at different levels of government: Carl Bildt, the foreign minister of Sweden; Michael McFaul, the U.S. ambassador to Russia; and Naheed Nenshi, the mayor of Calgary, Alberta.

Bildt is a veteran blogger, but he was dubious about Web 2.0, as the social-media revolution is sometimes called. “I was rather skeptical on Twitter,” he told me. “I thought, ‘What can you say in 140 characters?'”

But Bildt, who has more than 116,000 followers , soon found Twitter to be “very useful” and also “fun.”

“As a matter of fact, you can say something in 140 characters,” he said. “The restriction isn’t as absolute as I had thought.”

One way Bildt uses Twitter is promote his bigger-think pieces. “A lot of the tweets are links,” he said. “If I write an op-ed, then I can tweet it.”

Bildt combines his Twitter posts with a blog. Twitter is for links and instant comments; the blog is for longer, more considered arguments. Bildt tweets in English and blogs in Swedish.

from MediaFile:

Tech’s forbidden touch

"You can look, but you can't touch" – great advice in most museums, and every strip club. But it makes no sense when it comes to our computers. We are getting very touchy-feely with our smartphones and tablets, and this is how it should be. Even BlackBerry and Amazon's Kindle, which launched with hardware keyboards to differentiate it from the competition, have abandoned them.

It's no accident. We touch instinctively. We are born touching everything, and only learn where the boundaries are later in life. Our handheld devices are reconnecting us with the primary technique we used to learn about the world we had just entered. The metaphor extends. Now it's the mobile computers that we use to learn about the world around us, and we control them with our fingers, by touching a screen. How do you place a price on that?

Many are trying, thanks to software patents. Patents have become a bane to the very essence of innovation. They are arsenals, ostensibly meant to defend but more often used to offend. Yahoo's lawsuit against Facebook over 10 patents further proves that weaponizing software patents is the last gasp of a dying business.

Which brings me to the news that Twitter is trying to patent one of the most instinctive gestures on the iPhone, what they call User Interface Mechanics. Anyone who has used a Twitter client on their phone knows to refresh the page: You "pull" it down and release. Others use this as well, like Google's Gmail mobile site.

But as Techcrunch noticed, this functionality isn't built into every core app on the iPhone (like the Mail app), and the reason is probably because it's potential lawsuit bait.

It's not a sure thing that Twitter's application will be approved, or that Twitter would enforce it. The most important computer interface device – the mouse – was patented by visionary Douglas Engelbart in 1970, and everything worked out all right.

from The Human Impact:

Will Twitter put the U.N. out of the disaster business?

How is communications technology transforming disaster response?

A business that doesn’t communicate with its customers won’t stay in business very long -- it’ll soon lose track of what its clients want, and clients won’t know what products or services are on offer.

In the multi-billion dollar humanitarian aid industry, relief agencies are businesses and their beneficiaries are customers. Yet many agencies have muddled along for decades with scarcely a nod towards communicating with the folks they’re supposed to be serving.

That’s because relief agency "lines of accountability" – to use a much-loved piece of aid jargon – are to the donor governments who fund the bulk of their activities, rather than to the people on the ground who are caught up in the crisis.

Choose a disaster, any disaster, and the result is the same -- the last people to know what the heck is going on are the affected populations.

from The Great Debate:

Our social-media amnesia

It began with a hashtag -- #fitn. On the eve of January’s Republican presidential primary, it seemed that every member of the political press, election observer, and New Hampshirite had adopted #fitn as a sort of quasi-official tag. It was a reference to “First in the Nation,” a long-used political phrase that dates back to the 1920s. As I watched those tweets fly by, it struck me how ubiquitous its shorthand version had become online. Where did the hashtag come from? Who first injected it into the tweet stream? Twitter’s internal search engine, as it turns out, only goes back so far. I fired up Topsy.com, by general consensus the best tweet search tool going today. But I hit the outer limits of Topsy’s archive far before I uncovered my proto-tweet. I asked Twitter HQ. No go. A smallish company, it lacks the resources, they said, to track a hashtag back to its starting point.

My struggle to find the origins of #fitn is not unique. We’re tweeting more than 340 million times a day, conducting a robust public conversation on Twitter. Yet, even on Twitter’s sixth birthday today, we still can’t track it, can’t search it, can’t access our archives. There is no public record. Is that really so much to ask?

Maybe, yes. Consider the technological constraints. Brewster Kahle, who runs the Internet Archive, a non-profit online repository for 150 billion Web pages, told me startups have a hard time being “archive aware.” For them there are more pressing concerns, like integrating servers and avoiding “fail whales.”

Twitter’s internal search tool only reaches back a week or so before you get a note saying that older tweets are not available. Twitter does, to its credit, publish an interface that allows others to pull information from its services. But there’s a built-in cap on how many tweets can be accessed that way. (It changes, but at one recent point it was in the couple-thousand-tweet range.) And so, we’re left with our current status quo: tweets that seem to fall into a black hole. (Twitter declined to speak on record for this piece.)

Who cares, right? These are tweets, after all. Somehow we’ve survived as a culture without recording, say, every phone call we made in the '80s. But Twitter’s centrality to the political conversation from the U.S. to Egypt has already made it more than mere ephemera. It’s still the early days of the social-media era, and our vantage point is not a particularly good one to decide what’s worth saving and what’s not.

"In the Elizabethan era," points out Michael Lesk, chair of the Rutgers University Department of Library and Information Science, "plays weren't saved because only sermons and poetry were considered literature."

Of course, it’s not really us making the decision about what to save. It’s Twitter and the other big players in the digital communications realm that are making it. For a few years, it was tempting to let the Web’s natural order take care of things. If Twitter was busy helping people produce huge caches of information, Google was helping to make it searchable. Starting in 2009, Google and Twitter had a deal to include a healthy helping of tweets in its real-time search results. But with the rollout of Google+ and, especially, Google’s choice to give special treatment to Google+ posts in its organic search results, Google and Twitter have gone from complementary online players to competitors; their real-time search agreement was allowed to lapse last summer.

from MuniLand:

Tweeting from muniland

Now that muniland has a great presence on Twitter, the platform has become an excellent source for news stories, reports, trade reports, curve data, links out to official statements and material disclosures. There is no other public platform that aggregates muni market information the way Twitter does, and it's just in its infancy. I get a lot of questions about whom to follow on Twitter, and I thought it would be helpful to compile a list of muniland tweeters. This list is also an attempt to encourage my Reuters muni colleagues to take the plunge and sign up for Twitter as I've been urging them to do. When you join, make sure you send me a tweet at @cate_long, and I'll retweet it out for all my followers to see.

An easy way to see a lot of municipal content is to follow the hashtag #muniland when you become a more proficient user.

Here is a great YouTube video of how to get started using Twitter. A much richer platform to tweet from is Tweetdeck, an app that runs outside of the browser. I encourage anyone who doesn't have firewall restrictions to migrate to Tweetdeck as soon as possible.

If I have missed anyone on this shortlist, please add their names in the comments. I have not included local newspaper reporters, politicians and public-interest groups for the most part, but their presence, too, is growing.

Here's the core group of muniland tweeters:

@greavespg Managing Editor of Debtwire Municipals and adjunct professor in public administration @BondDesk BondDesk Group is the nation's largest retail bond trading venue, providing enterprise-wide fixed income solutions to many of the top broker-dealers in the U.S. @SIFMA SIFMA represents hundreds of securities firms, banks and asset managers.

@cate_long I'm a guest contributor to Reuters.com on the municipal bond market.