It's on — at least partially: Reddit has announced that it will be going dark for 12 hours to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act, and Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has said that he hopes to coordinate with the site so that Wikipedia does the same. Will other sites join in? Should we prepare for the Great Internet Strike of 2012?
In the face of legal pressure last year, Twitter fought for user privacy. This year, its new challenge will be censorship—and a repeat performance would be welcome.
The Tweet Smarter blog has released a chart of 2011′s most popular subjects in terms of how many tweets they produced per second, and the leader by a wide margin is the December 13 Japanese television screening of Hayao Miyazaki’s animated movie Castle in the Sky, which resulted in a staggering 25,088 tweets per second.
On the one hand, it’s easy to predict where social media’s going over the next 12 months: more of the same, with the sublime, ridiculous and mundane occurring in equal amounts, both reaffirming and quashing our faith in humanity and technology. But a social media roadmap for 2012? I’m not sure anyone knows what that looks like at this point.
Sure, we’re in the worst economic slump since the Great Depression, with 8.6% unemployment, plummeting home values and Europe on the brink of collapse, but hey, I really wanted an iPhone! That’s the message our country’s youth so bravely tweeted from the confines of their Xbox-equipped, Justin Bieber-adorned bedrooms after Santa Claus didn’t bring them exactly what they wanted this Christmas.
Well, this is depressing: A team of scientists from the University of Vermont appears to have proven via the judicious use of Twitter that people have been gradually growing more and more unhappy over the last three years.
Oh those crazy, free-wheeling Swedes. It appears the country has decided to allow regular citizens to man its official Twitter feed. That’s right, instead of boring government announcements and links to policy proposals, Sweden will now be tweeting hilarious jokes and mundane details about everyday life.
Can Facebook get you a job? Well, on the face of things, no. Clearly, you’d have to have something approaching the right qualifications and skills to actually get the gig. But social media is definitely helping; according to a new study by Jobvite and MBA Online, one in six workers used social media to help [...]
At this time of year, Twitter and Facebook might come in handy for proving the existence of Santa Claus to cynical children. But given the abundance of fake Clauses out there, we thought we’d provide a guide to choosing your online Saint Nick wisely.
Usually high school kids have to write more than 140 characters to get a college scholarship. Now, thanks to KFC, students who attach the hashtag #KFCScholar to a tweet could end up scoring $20,000 for their college education.
What is the value of one Twitter user? If you believe an email the company is sending out to advertisers, the answer could be as little as $2.50.
