This is an interesting curio – a video that shows the mood of residents across the United States over an entire day, as indicated by their tweets, culminating in a collective barometer of emotion.
Twitter is a gigantic repository for our collective state of mind. Every second, thousands of tweets reveal what everybody and their mother had for lunch, what Justin Bieber is up to, or what magnificent link you should be checking out right now. Individually, each tweet is mostly interesting to friends/fans of the tweeter, but taken together they add up to something more.
In the video, green corresponds to a happy mood and red corresponds to a grumpier state of mind. The area of each state is scaled according to the number of tweets originating in that state. Note how the East Coast is consistently 3 hours ahead of the West Coast, so when we’re sleeping in Boston, the Californians are tweeting away. It’s also interesting that better weather seems to make you happier (or rather, that better weather is correlated with happier tweets): Florida and California seems to be consistently in a better mood than the remaining US. Also note how New Mexico and Delaware behave very differently from their neighbors.
It moves like a living thing, which of course is exactly what it is.
There’s some great stuff here. In fact, the only one I really disagree with is #2 – “follow anyone who follows you”.
In my opinion, you shouldn’t automatically follow anyone who follows you. In fact, that’s the worst thing you can do, and it’s a bad habit to start. Be selective. Twitter becomes an unmanageable mess when you follow thousands of people, and all that will happen is you’ll start to exclude (ultimately) the bulk of your network above a select (and elite) group of others.
(To his credit, Brogan doesn’t do this – but he admits himself he doesn’t read every tweet, which is fair enough but that can be improved. If you find yourself breaking everybody down into lots of lists, it’s time for a re-think on your follow number.)
And because of the ripple effect on Twitter – everybody is connected to everybody else through network mesh – and the upcoming Twitter Business Toolkit for brands, it’s also completely unnecessary.
(Also, tip #22 is perhaps a little bit cheeky, given that Chris bangs out 52 tweets per day – he must spend hours in search! )
Brogan knows his stuff and perhaps above anybody else has proven Twitter to be an incredible resource for building a community, generating leads and driving business. You can learn a lot from his advice, and these tips are a great starting point.
Lots of people get a real kick out of checking in at places and reporting their current location. I’m have to say that I’m not one of them. However, if this is your kind of thing, you’ll soon be able to do this easily on Twitter with a new featured called Twitter Places.
We’re excited to announce Twitter Places on twitter.com and mobile.twitter.com. Starting today, you can tag Tweets with specific places, including all World Cup stadiums in South Africa, and create new Twitter Places. You can also click a Twitter Place within a Tweet to see recent Tweets from a particular location. Try it out during the next match—you will be able to see Tweets coming from the stadium.
Other features include:
Foursquare and Gowalla integration
API functionality that lets developers integrate Twitter Places into their applications
Support for more browsers (including IE)
You’ve been able to do something similar to this on various mobile apps for a while now, but Twitter has made it all official and built-in. Enjoy.
Since early March, we have been routing links within Direct Messages through our link service to detect, intercept, and prevent the spread of malware, phishing, and other dangers. Any link shared in a Direct Message has been wrapped with a twt.tl URL. Links reported to us as malicious are blacklisted, and we present users with a page that warns them of potentially malicious content if they click blacklisted links. We want users to have this benefit on all tweets.
When this is rolled out more broadly to users this summer, all links shared on Twitter.com or third-party apps will be wrapped with a t.co URL. A really long link such as http://www.amazon.com/Delivering-Happiness-Profits-Passion-Purpose/dp/0446563048 might be wrapped as http://t.co/DRo0trj for display on SMS, but it could be displayed to web or application users as amazon.com/Delivering- or as the whole URL or page title. Ultimately, we want to display links in a way that removes the obscurity of shortened link and lets you know where a link will take you.
In addition to a better user experience and increased safety, routing links through this service will eventually contribute to the metrics behind our Promoted Tweets platform and provide an important quality signal for our Resonance algorithm—the way we determine if a Tweet is relevant and interesting to users. We are also looking to provide services that make use of this data, an example would be analytics within our eventual commercial accounts service.
Already using your own URL shortener for analytics? Don’t worry – they’ve got that covered.
If you are already partial to a particular shortener when you tweet, you can continue to use it for link shortening and analytics as you normally would, and we’ll wrap the shortened links you submit.
Sounds sensible. And the wrapping means that reports of bit.ly’s demise might have been greatly exaggerated. Which is good news for me, as my tailored URL shortener is ticking along nicely.
There’s some great stuff here. In fact, the only one I really disagree with is #2 – “follow anyone who follows you”.
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