My Favorite Twitter Moments Since 2006

Since 2006 the microblogging site Twitter has risen in popularity and Tweets are now a well established form of self-expression among people from all walks of life. Pew research shows that the future is bright for Twitter as the younger connected generation continues to grow in size and influence. Twitter filed for its IPO with the SEC back in July, and revealed its plans in September. Along with basic metrics, the S-1 reveals some interesting details.

Here are my favorite Twitter moments and Tweets:

Cofounder Jack Dorsey sends his first-ever tweet to the world:

Twitter as a breaking news source

Captain Chelsea “Sully” Sullenberger wasn’t the only person who made headlines when he successfully landed a plane full of passengers on the Hudson River after a double-bird strike. Twitter user Janis Krums snapped a photo of the plane moments after landing that was shared and used by media organizations all over the world, sealing Twitter’s reputation as a breaking news source.

The Retweet button 

Retweet is a button that makes forwarding a particularly interesting tweet to all your followers very easy. Biz Stone talked about it in a 2009 blog post. “We’ve just activated a feature called retweet on a very small percentage of accounts in order to see how it works in the wild. Retweet is a button that makes forwarding a particularly interesting tweet to all your followers very easy.”

The beginnings of a business model

In 2010 Biz Stone wrote a blog post introducing Promoted Tweets. “Over the years, we’ve resisted introducing a traditional Web advertising model because we wanted to optimize for value before profit. The open exchange of information creates opportunities for individuals, organizations, and businesses alike. We recognized value in this exchange and planned to amplify it in a meaningful and relevant manner.” This was the first sign that Twitter could generate it’s own revenue.

The Library of Congress 

In 2010 The Library of Congress started to archive every single tweet ever sent.

The IPO

I believe that everything listed above contributed to the moment below…

Scrolling is king on Twitter

As soon as Twitter moved from a texting platform to a service that supported links users were posting them everywhere. We had links about bad date excuses, books never written, fairy tales fixed, food for thought, oxymorons, palindromes, pickup lines, and trivia… At the time it was interesting and kinda fresh. But over time users got tired of clicking links that were basically web pointers to other content.

Today twitter changed all that and announced that images and videos — just Vine videos, for now — will display directly in users’ timelines. This is what it looks like:

https://twitter.com/twittermobile/status/395263251971596288

Now Favorite, Reply, and Retweet buttons are displayed between your tweets. You don’t  have to open a tweet, or swipe, to interact with it — you just tap or click the option you want. This update will be very popular with people who use Vine. Vine is Twitter’s video service and it works a lot like Instagram and uses scrolling over tapping. Vine also plays videos automatically when you stop on them. I can’t wait to see how long it takes for all videos to play automatically on Twitter.

Shareable graphics are awesome!

I love this shareable graphic from FedEx. Being relevant and timely is not always easy. Great job FedEx for being real-time for the sake of being real-time on Halloween!

Scheduled tweets during live events… still a bad idea

Social media runs in real-time. Real-fast real-time. If you want to Tweet at an event, you better be ready to be there the whole time. Numerous brands and people have looked foolish in the past when they’ve scheduled auto-tweets that get sent at bad times during events like disasters and elections.

Have you ever been sifting through your Twitter feed and come across a tweet that stood out like a sore thumb? Haven’t we all… For most of us, coming across an obviously scheduled tweet is irksome and distasteful. Why? Because it defeats the entire purpose of Twitter. Especially at live events.

Recently my company was attending a Gartner Symposium in Orlando and the fire alarm went off during the show. Thousands of people had to evecuate and go outside until the all clear was given. Below are tweets during the evacuation. Some tweets are scheduled and some are live. It’s easy to tell the difference.

These tweets are embarrassing but the now famous Worst Scheduled Tweet Ever takes the cake. 

Minutes later this scheduled tweet was posted:

Love it or Hate it. Conan O’Brien is a LinkedIn Influencer

Conan O’Brien is one of the funniest people out there. I would go as far as calling him a comedy genius. But perhaps the person who thought of naming him a LinkedIn influencer is the true genius.

His first “influential” post on LinkedIn is typical Conan. But a lot of people, including “real influencers”, are angry and voicing their opinion on the comment section of his post.

As of this morning, there were almost 1,000 comments. Many are saying that Conan missed the point on becoming an influencer. Others are applauding Conan for giving his usual sarcastic point of view on the whole influential business: “it feels good to be on LinkedIn among my peers – attractive, fabulously successful plutocrats who laugh at their own jokes.”

Check out Conan’s first post.

Instagram turns 3, now it has to make money…

In case you missed it, Instagram, the ridiculously popular photo and video sharing social platform, turned three years old last week. During those three years, the company swiftly overcame some tough obstacles (including a huge backlash to its proposed privacy changes) to remain the selfie addict’s app of choice. In three short years it has racked up some impressive feats. For instance, it has amassed 150 million users worldwide, who have collectively shared a brain-melting 16 billion photos. Figures like this prompted social giant Facebook to snap up the company for an estimated $1 billion in 2012 as it obviously saw the money making potential.

The #Selfie Experience [Infographic]

2005 to 2008 was dominated by MySpace, the largest social network then who started the selfie concept by letting users upload a ‘MySpace pic.’

Fast forward to August 28, 2013, when ‘Selfie’ has been officially added to Oxford Dictionary.

All kinds of people from kids to important public figures like The Pope have starting taking selfies.

Here are the top ten hash tags on Twitter related to Selfie, with over 41 million photos: #selfie, #selfies, #selfiesunday, #selfiesaturday, #selfienation, #selfiee, #selfiesfordays, #selfiecentral, #selfiemonday, #selfieee.

The infographic below by ebay talks about the top 25 Twitter Celebrities, calculated by the number of their posted Selfies, with Miley Ray Cyrus topping the charts.

Surprisingly enough, Barack Obama has tweeted 0 selfies out of 1,463 messages containing photo or video, the lowest selfie rate out of top 100 Twitter Celebrities.

Facebook Launches Program to Expedite Reports of Cyberbullying

From U.S. News:

Facebook announced Thursday it will launch a new campaign to combat cyberbullying, in a partnership with the state of Maryland, where the company will begin a pilot program.

The new program will give school teachers and staff a streamlined channel to report potential cyberbullying incidents on Facebook, according to an announcement from Maryland Attorney General Douglas Gansler. Each school system will have one point person who deals directly with Facebook to resolve any questionable activity that is not resolved through Facebook’s standard reporting system within 24 hours, through the site’s “Educator Escalation Channel.”

“Too often, we read headlines about cyberbullying that inflicts serious emotional trauma on children, or worse yet, ends in tragedy,” Gansler said in a statement. “We can no longer brush off these episodes and we must reject a ‘kids will be kids’ mentality that ignores how to confront this troubling trend.”

Nationwide, 28 percent of middle and high school students experience some type of bullying, according to PACER’s National Bullying Prevention Center. But the majority of students who said they were bullied did not report it.

(Read More)

Twitter files IPO, reveals revenue & much more

Twitter Inc plans to make its IPO filing public this week, news website Quartz reported on Sunday, citing a person familiar with the social media network’s plan.

Twitter, which is expected to be valued at up to $15 billion, filed with U.S. regulators on September 12 to go public, but did so confidentially and without providing a timeline under a process available to emerging growth companies.

Quartz said that Twitter’s IPO could still be delayed by a variety of factors, from changes to the prospectus to market conditions, to a potential shutdown of the U.S. government. Representatives for Twitter did not immediately respond to a request seeking comment on the Quartz report.

Twitter is leaning toward picking the New York Stock Exchange over Nasdaq for its highly anticipated initial public offering, a person familiar with the matter said last week.

Another person familiar with the matter said earlier this month that Twitter aimed for its shares to trade in the stock market before the U.S. holiday of Thanksgiving on November 28, a timeline also reported by Quartz on Sunday.

Facebook testing ‘Similar To’ feature after users like?

Facebook continues to experiment with ways to entice its users to like more pages, with several users sharing screenshots over Labor Day weekend of a “similar to” module that appeared after users liked pages, suggesting similar pages.

The social network tested a similar feature on mobile in March, and a More Pages You Might Like module began appearing on the desktop version of Facebook in January after pages were liked.

Have you seen this similar to module?