The automation of Twitter for businesses continues to become the norm. As microblogging, interaction, and expression get replaced by RSS feeds, Facebook feeds, and post scheduling that is all dominated by links, links, and more links, the power of Twitter is being replaced by the easy alternatives to actually, well, using the service. This is a huge mistake for most. There are some who are simply overwhelmed by social media and internet marketing in general and anything that they can check off their list with minimal or zero effort is a good thing. For those who actually want to find success on…

Just weeks after snapping up TweetDeck, Twitter has acquired social analytics start-up BackType. The company’s main product, BackTweets, has helped companies like AOL and Microsoft understand the influence of their tweets. BackType has also been in the midst of developing Storm, a new data-processing tool that the company calls the “Hadoop of realtime processing.” “Joining Twitter gives us the opportunity to bring insight to tens of millions of publishers around the world that are using Twitter to communicate and connect with their audience,” BackType wrote in a blog post. “We’re also…

Oh Twitter, what have you become? You used to be a place of the proud few: the tech geek. But now it’s all about the GaGas, Sheenanigans, and celebritweeties. And I don’t like it one bit. I wasn’t too excited to join Twitter back when it all began. I, like many others, insisted that the whole concept was nonsense — it was just a fad, I told myself and others. I created an account when Twitter started making some buzz. But I let the account lie dormant. Instead, I stuck with Facebook. But I eventually came back to Twitter. I knew that it was going to be big after learning that the competition — particularly…

According to yet another lukewarm survey by yet another random analytics company, your tweets are worthless and nobody likes you. Research conducted using 1.2 billion posts over the past 2 months found that 71% of tweets disappear into thin air. Only 6% of tweets were retweeted, 23% received a reply. Over 90% of retweets occur within the first hour. More amazingly, only 1.53% of Twitter conversations go further than two replies. It’s comforting to know that something tweeted in error after a drunken night out won’t still be a conversation point in five years time, but surely the negative implications…

Twitter has finally began moving towards paying gigs, probably fed with being only worth a paltry $5 billion. But you might not like what they have in store. Currently, Twitter sells “promoted tweets” for around $100,000 each. These are sponsored tweets that appear at the top of search results, although the general consensus is that the system is experimental and not worth the investment. Well, now they have a new plan. Twitter is going to sell spots in their “who to follow” recommendation list. Twitter insists that relevance will be the key here, although this is obviously going to be the weak…

About an hour ago, Twitter just hit the big two-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh. For those of you who would rather not be confused, that’s twenty-effing-billion, and scientifically speaking, that’s a hell of a freaking crap ton of dadgum tweets. The milestone has been hit a mere two months after everyone’s favourite microblogging platform hit 15 billion tweets, and five since 10 billion, which means one definite thing: no, not that Twitter’s growth is still accelerating – that we, as a species, certainly have an awful lot of nothing to say. I’d have captured a more on-the-nose photograph,…

I live in downtown Toronto, which, when last I researched the matter, is statistically the most ethnically diverse city in the world. As such, the World Cup is a pedestrian’s nightmare – with no general squad bias, the entire duration of the tournament is a storm of rabid fans cheering and criss-crossing sidewalks and spilling out of pubs and driving their World-Cup-themed automocars down the street, honking all the while; World Cup Toronto is a sight that needs to be seen to be believed. You should come next time. No, you can’t sleep on my couch. Anyhow, the point is that the World Cup creates in human…