Twitter posts

Twitter has had a rocky road since its rise to fame in 2008. It first had issues when its growth outpaced its ability to handle the load. Then, it started getting a bad name for being irrelevant. Then, the spam started to dominate. Users are hot and cold on it depending on what day you ask them, putting the shortened update social network in a constantly precarious state. Still, they’ve managed to thrive through it all. Some point to the streamlined way the company has been operated over the years. With under 200 employees sustaining a site that has over 190 million monthly visitors, they don’t need…

The acting President of Venezuela Nicolás Maduro is the front runner going into today’s election followed the death of Hugo Chávez last month. His campaign suffered a minor blow as several Twitter accounts associated with the campaign her hacked a group calling themselves Lulz Security Peru. The primary, verified account has over 700k followers and has been very active over the weeks leading up to the election. For the last two hours since 3:22 pm Pacific time, the accounts has been under hacker control. This was their first Tweet from the account: Since then, the Tweets have been more boastful…

“I think I’m sort of insecure. What if you tweet and nobody tweets back? There’s nothing worse than a friendless tweeter, right?” It’s every microblogger’s worst fear: to be publicly hung out to dry in the social media world. It seems like a rational concern if you’re one of the millions of Tweeters twittering ferociously in order to garner attention – but it’s patently ridiculous if you’re, say, former president Bill Clinton. The ex-president recently made his social media debut, thanks to Steven Colbert’s tweet on Clinton’s behalf. Just spent amazing time with Colbert!Is…

President Barack Obama’s team is very active on social media. The Facebook page that carries his name has new posts twice a day on average with a mix of hopeful messages, political statements, and personalized views into life at the White House. On Twitter, they post several times a day with links, pictures, and quotes from the President. Google+ is a different story. It was only mildly active during the election campaign. After a peak of 19 posts in August, 2012, it started falling off quickly. In September, there were 11 posts followed by 5 in October. November, the month of the election, saw two…

Let’s start with the bottom line first. Both sides of the argument have valid points. With that said, let’s get to the facts on the matter… The full story can be found on Buzzfeed, but here’s the short version: A woman heard an inappropriate joke told behind her at a conference. She tweeted the incident including a picture of the perpetrators. Conference officials pulled her our, identified the perpetrators, then removed them. One of the perpetrators was fired from their job after the incident started going viral. The woman reporting the incident was fired from her job because of the backlash…

There was a time in 2008 when Twitter really started taking off. Celebrities were starting to use it. Kevin Rose, former geek leader and entrepreneur, dissed his own startup, Pownce, by saying that he preferred Twitter. The company was on a good trajectory. That was on the surface. Behind the scenes, it was far from cozy. They were having coding issues. They couldn’t stay up for an entire day without presenting a fail whale for an extended period of time. They were, in essence, a tech company that was getting too popular for their own good and couldn’t figure out how to bring everything together. Then,…

The opinions that we express in the real world are often not congruent with what we post on Twitter according to a report from Pew Research. Just because something is loved or hated on Twitter doesn’t mean that the real world feels the same way. Sometimes, the Twitter reality is opposite of real world reality. In politics, social media is left leaning, but both sides come out strong when there are complaints to be Tweeted. According to Pew: At times the Twitter conversation is more liberal than survey responses, while at other times it is more conservative. Often it is the overall negativity that…

If you’re going to spread your message on Twitter, it’s best to avoid the Viagra technique. That’s the message coming from capitol hill as Congressman Steve Stockman (R-TX) released evidence in a press release that he is being spammed by twitterbots. “Obama’s anti-gun campaign is a fraud,” Stockman said in the release. “Obama’s anti-gun activists are trying to defraud Congress using the same scam that sells ‘male enhancement pills.’  Every day thousands of Americans call, write and email the Capitol opposing Obama’s anti-gun schemes.  Obama’s supporters are panicking…

Twitter is still the most used social network by businesses. This surprises some, but the latest statistics showed that 77% of businesses were on Twitter versus 74% on Facebook. It’s not a big difference, but it’s still at least a little surprising to many who view Facebook as the big social network and Twitter as the other guy in the field. Twitter is easier. It requires less time. It’s more about communication than popularity and there are no algorithms that can make your efforts meaningless like they can on Twitter. I’m not suggesting that businesses should be on Twitter and not Facebook. On the…

It may never stop happening. Twitter accounts are hacked every hour of every day. Every now and then, a big fish is hacked and the results can be sadly hilarious. A Twitter account controlled by hacker group Anonymous is claiming responsibility for today’s hacking of the Burger King Twitter account. As can be seen in the image above, they changed the name on the account to “McDonalds” and put the familiar “M” as the profile picture. They then announced that the company had been sold to McDonald’s because “the whopper flopped”. McDonald’s was quick to express their sympathies and state that they…