Archive for August 21st, 2009
By Ben Haber
Today is the beginning of a new weekly feature for RaceTalk called RaceTalk’s #FollowFriday. These weekly posts (occurring every Friday) will highlight a couple of reporters and/or bloggers that we recommend following on Twitter. To kick-off our inaugural #FollowFriday post, we are featuring Wade Roush and Peter Kafka.
Wade Roush is the Chief Correspondent for Xconomy, where he covers technology and innovation in Boston and beyond. Wade posts links to all of his articles on Twitter, which are often very useful and contain valuable information, such as great new iPhone apps. He is also very interactive on Twitter and encourages discussion around many different topics. If you’re in the Boston area or are interested in technology, Wade is a great follow.
How could we highlight reporters engaging in new media without mentioning the senior editor for All Things Digital, Peter Kafka? Tasked with covering the evolution of the media industry for ATD’s Media Memo, Peter has quickly become a must-read for those interested in the convergence of media and technology. What’s more, he’s very active on Twitter – posting links to his articles and those he finds interesting around the web. Whether he’s covering the plummeting ad market or reporting on Rupert Murdoch’s efforts to create an online news consortium, Peter is always entertaining and definitely worth a follow.
Dan Walsh contributed to this post
August 21st, 2009
By Kyle Austin
What if you could filter tweets by location? Find out what other folks in your neighborhood, town or city are up to. Get the latest local news at a seconds notice. Engage with fellow concert goers or relay important information during earthquakes or other natural disasters.
It may not be that far off according to a post from Twitter’s Biz Stone on the Twitter blog:
“We’re gearing up to launch a new feature which makes Twitter truly location-aware. A new API will allow developers to add latitude and longitude to any tweet. Folks will need to activate this new feature by choice because it will be off by default and the exact location data won’t be stored for an extended period of time. However, if people do opt-in to sharing location on a tweet-by-tweet basis, compelling context will be added to each burst of information.”
Ryan Sarver, who has led local indexing work at both Skyhook Wireless and Blue Trim, is leading the geolocation platform team for Twitter – so they appear to be in good hands. Although Biz notes that folks will need to activate this new feature by choice, because it will be off by default, I’m guessing many people will embrace the feature (especially while traveling) through their Twitterberry or Tweetie apps in the not too distant future.
While Biz is rightly more interested in the social implications of local Twitter functionality, the implications could be big business, if you think it in terms of the growing local, mobile search market. This is good news for marketers, as analysts are predicting that the majority stake of mobile search advertising revenues will be driven locally by 2013. Local, mobile advertising through twitter, could bring more options.
It’s also good news for those searching for new, hyper-local media business models. Jeff Jarvis has been out at the Aspen Institute this week presenting various models for these hyper-local projects and many of the proposals include the use of twitter coupons. As people begin to filter tweets locally, these new hyper-local news organizations will have the opportunity to grow a larger share of the local voice through twitter. Marketers won’t be far behind, in terms of being open to spending marketing dollars in these types of twitter campaigns.
August 21st, 2009
By Ben Haber
While this may be shocking for some people to hear, there are a lot of people that don’t Twitter. Many people don’t find it useful, and others find it to be a complete waste of time. While I was in New York last weekend, I was at breakfast with some family members when the topic turned to Twitter. One person said they couldn’t care less what someone was having for breakfast, another said it was a just a current trend and would soon die off.
Then I read Twitter’s announcement yesterday about local search and immediately had two thoughts: (1) This is a huge step for Twitter and (2) could this feature help it appeal to the masses?
Even though Twitter is the hottest thing since sliced bread in some circles, it still only had a quarter of the traffic (21.2 million unique U.S. visitors) that Facebook had (87.7 million unique U.S. visitors) in July, making it uber-popular with some crowds but essentially non-existent to others.
But could Twitter’s local search feature be the tool that brings in these other groups of people? While they may have complete different preferences then the normal Twitter user, who isn’t concerned with what’s happening around them? If done correctly, this new feature will be able to bring communities of people together much better then hash tags currently are. For the small town it will be great for local events, elections and news. It will also be a great tool for conferences and meetings, vacationers, people waiting around in airports, going to concerts, sporting events, and even heading to college for the first time.
The opportunities that a local Twitter platform presents are endless, and could be the feature that drives in a lot of younger users (it really is perfect for a college campus) and people who are not yet on board the Twitter train.
For more information on Twitter’s local platform, check out these articles at Mashable and TechCrunch.
August 21st, 2009
