Twitter: The bipartisan satirist reaches into Myrtle Beach area politics

As Twitter has continued to grow as a social networking tool, it’s also started to branch out into the realm of satire. At first, fake accounts would spring up to parody pop culture figures. Now, however, it’s started to trickle down into national, state and, in the case of “Trillion Dollar Tom,” local politics.

In fact, whoever “Trillion Dollar Tom” is, he used his Twitter feed to ask a question one might consider if they’re a supporter of a candidate being spoofed and don’t much care for the satirist’s tone: “Should parody Twitter accts be a federal offense, and if not, are you a communist?”

Still, at least one expert doesn’t see these satirical Twitter feeds as any real threat to a candidate’s chances with voters, nor do they represent libel or slander.

Dr. Scott Huffmon, director of the social and behavioral research laboratory at Winthrop University, said the majority of fake political Twitter accounts he’s seen tend to be mostly tongue-in-cheek and point out an absurdity or hypocrisy of a politician by a member of the other political party.

Take the satirical Twitter feed SCLegislator if you’re looking for a “Daily Show-esque” review of politics in Columbia. This is what a recent Tweet stated: “Twitter feed this a.m. reminds me: Politics + Twitter = perfect combo if you stopped taking your meds for narcissistic personality disorder.”

“In the past, most fake Twitter accounts used to be entertainment or pop culture related,” Huffmon said.

The few truly malicious fake Twitter accounts, Huffmon said, won’t hurt a candidate mainly because the audience is composed of people who already don’t like that political hopeful.

Despite a political cycle that’s seen 180 candidates statewide tossed off the ballot because of a Supreme Court ruling, Huffmon doesn’t expect any satirical Twitter feeds to have an impact on the Palmetto State’s primary and general election.

The reason is simple; most people on Twitter aren’t the average voter. That person is generally middle-aged or older, and doesn’t have their own Twitter account, Huffmon said.

And if there is some 43-year-old Average Joe using Twitter who isn’t a celebrity, a politician or a journalist, then they’re more likely to be following S.C. Gamecocks, Clemson Tigers football or one of the Kardashian sisters, Huffmon added.

He said what Twitter can do to impact a race is not in conversion of attitudes, but in solidifying support.

“And to the degree that Twitter can excite your base, it will have an impact,” Huffmon said.

Rice is just one of several candidates for area races that use Twitter to reach constituents. He’s also been doing it the old-fashioned way; by getting out, shaking hands of the people of the 7th Congressional District and listening to their concerns.

“The deficit are huge issues. People are scared,” Rice said.

He seems to be continuing with his campaign without any concern from “Trillion Dollar Tom.”

Of course, the fake Twitter accounts do make one wonder if the creators could face legal ramifications down the road.

“If it was an attempt to make people think it was a legitimate Twitter account … maybe,” Huffmon said.

However, if the creator clearly states that the account is a parody, then it’s protected, he added.

Article source: http://www.myrtlebeachonline.com/2012/05/19/2837022/twitter-the-bipartisan-satirist.html

Twitter to use Do Not Track

Twitter says it will honour requests from users who do not want their online behaviour tracked, the company said on Thursday, in contrast with web companies such Google and Facebook whose business models rely heavily on collecting user data.

Twitter announced that it will officially support “Do Not Track,” a standardised privacy initiative that has been heavily promoted by the US Federal Trade Commission, online privacy advocates and Mozilla, the non-profit developer of the Firefox web browser.

But some commentators have pointed out that the support also indicates that in the US the company presently does track where users go on the web through data collected from sites that have integrated Twitter “follow” buttons or widgets.

Dustin Curtis, a web developer, pointed out that a posting on theTwitter blog on Thursday says that “We receive visit information when sites have integrated Twitter buttons or widgets, similar to what many other web companies – including LinkedIn, Facebook and YouTube – do when they’re integrated into websites. By recognising which accounts are frequently followed by people who visit popular sites, we can recommend those accounts to others who have visited those sites within the last 10 days.”

Curtis commented: “Twitter is recording your behaviour. It is transparently watching your movements and storing them somewhere for later use. Right now, that data will make better suggestions for accounts you might want to follow. But what other things can it be used for?”

Twitter clarified that it does not intend to use the “suggested user” or tracking feature in Europe at present.

However the adoption of the Do Not Track system could alleviate those fears. Some browsers, including Firefox, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Apple’s Safari, include a Do Not Track option that sends a line of code to websites indicating the user does not want to be tracked. But under current regulations, it is up to the website to honour the requests. Google has said it will implement a Do Not Track feature in its Chrome browser later this year.

The Do Not Track announcement also coincides with Twitter’s recent push to provide a more personalised service. Twitter says that when it recommends “tailored suggestions” based on a user’s surfing history, it does not use the data for any other purpose.

“As always, we are committed to providing you with simple and meaningful choices about the information we collect to improve your Twitter experience,” Twitter’s director of growth and international, Othman Laraki, said in the blogpost. “For those who don’t want to tailor Twitter, we offer ways to turn off this collection.”

Twitter’s support for the initiative was first announced on Thursday by Ed Felten, the FTC’s chief technology officer, during a panel in New York. The microblogging site later confirmed Felten’s statement, adding in a tweet: “We applaud the FTC’s leadership on DNT.”

Mozilla praised Twitter’s move in a blogpost and noted that adoption rates for Do Not Track have risen steadily, to 8.6% of desktop users and 19% of mobile users.

“We’re excited that Twitter now supports Do Not Track and global user adoption rates continue to increase, which signifies a big step forward for Do Not Track and the web,” Mozilla said.

Twitter’s decision to get onboard with Do Not Track represents something of a balancing act for the six-year-old company, which has been closely scrutinised on how it can generate enough revenue to justify its multibillion-dollar valuation.

Online tracking through bits of code embedded in websites known as “cookies” underpins the business models for many internet companies.

Facebook, due to go public on Friday in the largest-ever US IPO, has been valued at $104bn, partially by investors who believe it can offer advertisers a platform for highly targeted ads based on perceived user interests. Google similarly generates billions annually by targeting ads based on what a user is searching for.

Major online destinations that have endorsed Do Not Track include Yahoo, which said in March it would allow consumers “to express their ad targeting preferences to Yahoo” beginning this summer.

Updated: added in clarification that “suggested user” system is not used outside the US.

Article source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/may/18/twitter-do-not-track

Twitter Wants An Interest Graph: Now Tracking Your Browsing To Make Follow Suggestions

Twitter does a lot of things right, but it still hasn’t solved the problem of turning its noise into signal. After joining Twitter, it can take a lot of following and unfollowing scores of accounts before you’ve curated a stream that makes sense for you. With its platform growing fast, Twitter is looking to make the onboarding process a little easier (and more personalized) for new users, which is why it announced today via its blog that it will begin serving users tailored suggestions of who they should follow.

Twitter is calling its new personalization features “experiments,” (in other words, they’re in beta), which will manifest for users in several ways. The first being that it will show new users a list of recommended accounts, which will be accompanied by a timeline that features tweets from those recommended accounts. New users (who are part of the beta testing) will see the list as soon as they sign up, but will not be required to follow their suggestions.

For those of us already using The Twitters, if you’re a lucky winner, you’ll begin to see Twitter’s suggestions in the “Who To Follow” box on the left side of your homescreen. From what we can tell, the box won’t be altered from its current placement/design, but will instead just start showing more relevant suggestions. To see who Twitter will recommend for you, check out their preview page here.

So, how exactly is Twitter going about serving you these recommendations? The suggestions are “based on accounts followed by other Twitter users and visits to websites in the Twitter ecosystem,” meaning that Twitter is culling the data that it receives from other websites that are utilizing its buttons/widgets, identifying the accounts that are most followed by people who visit those sites, and recommending it to you based on similarities with those users in your own Twitter activity.

Twitter will be offering the ability to turn this functionality off. This comes with the context of the announcement earlier today that Twitter will be supporting Mozilla’s “Do Not Track” feature, which allows users to opt-out of those pesky third-party cookies, including … wait for it … those used in advertising.

This morning, that seemed just a symbolic gesture on Twitter’s part, because they weren’t really tracking you anyway. With the addition of their follow recommendation engine, now this move makes perfect sense, and is obviously timed perfectly. Now Twitter can just say that, hey, if you don’t like it tracking your activity, turn on Do Not Track. As to who’s supporting: Firefox, Safari and IE9 already have some form of Do Not Track features built-in, but it seems that only Firefox is really evangelizing. However, all three browsers should be compatible with DNT, and allow for opt-outs.

There is more information about Twitter’s integration with Do Not Track reflected in its privacy policy, so, as mentioned, if you’ve got it enabled in one of those browsers, you won’t see any tailored suggestions. With the heightened interest and concern over the way social networks (and beyond) are using our personal data, this is a smart move on Twitter’s part to ensure users that it’s taking transparency (and privacy) seriously.

The other important piece of this is that people who are new to Twitter will see an option to tailor their feeds based on the sites they’re visiting from twitter, accompanied by a “learn more” link, whereas current users will find a “personalization” section added to their account settings.

Users can disable personalization at any time, which prevents Twitter from collecting information on your activity, and as the blog post adds, “You can even choose to turn off tailored suggestions from the preview page (which shows some suggestions we’d make for you).”

What’s really interesting here is that this is the first sign of Twitter getting serious about building its own interest graph, as if you’d ever get tired of all this “graph” talk, right? But this is the social network’s first big move that shows it following in the footsteps of Facebook, as the more personal info they collect on your interests and activity on their platform, the more info there is to feed targeted advertising and tweets.

For more, check out Twitter’s blog post here, and current users can test out preview here. Do Not Track info here. Do Not Track info here.

Additional reporting from Frederic Lardinois

• TWITTER
• MOZILLA

Twitter allows users to post text updates via SMS, instant messaging, email, Twitter’s website and third party applications. Users have their own profile page that displays their latest updates. In addition, users can become “friends” with one another, or simply be a “follower.” Other than reading another person’s profile page, a user can also receive others’ updates through text messages, RSS or third party applications.

Twitter itself is a free service, though users may have to pay text messaging charges…

Learn more

Born from Netscape’s 1998 open sourcing of the code base behind its Netscape Communicator internet suite, Mozilla Firefox currently holds approximately 22.48% of the world market for internet browsers as of April 2009. Version 1.0 was released on November 9, 2004 after a series of name changes, and within a year close to 100 million downloads of the browser technology had occurred.

The following two years saw upgrades to version 1.5 in November 2005 and 2.0 in October 2006….

Learn more

Article source: http://techcrunch.com/2012/05/17/twitter-wants-an-interest-graph/?grcc=cee21c3070643fbcda43f1f513163dcfZ8ZwdgtZ0Z124Z200Z65Z3

Twitter Partners with NASCAR for Full Coverage During Pocono 400

May 19th, 2012, 11:11 GMT · By Lucian Parfeni

Article source: http://news.softpedia.com/news/Twitter-Partners-with-NASCAR-for-Full-Coverage-During-Pocono-400-270603.shtml

Twitter Announces NASCAR Partnership; More Deals to Come?

Longtime informal social media buddies Twitter and NASCAR are making things official for next month’s Pocono 400 race. It’s Twitter’s first official partnership with a sports league, and may hint at a larger shift to come for the microblogging platform that has become a hit with sports fans in particular.

The Pocono 400 partnership will revolve around the #NASCAR hashtag, according to a joint press conference Twitter and NASCAR held Friday.

[More from Mashable: NBA Player, Wife Receive Twitter Death Threat After Missed Shot]

“During the race, we’ll curate accounts from the NASCAR universe and surface the best Tweets and photos from the drivers, their families, commentators, celebrities and other fans when you search #NASCAR on Twitter.com,” reads a post to the official company blog.

Omid Ashtari of Twitter’s business development team called the arrangement “part search algorithm and part editorial,” during Friday’s press conference.

[More from Mashable: Twitter Wits Roast Facebook IPO]

More details about the partnership are expected to be revealed before Pocono happens on June 10.

Why NASCAR? Ashtari said one reason is races draw fans of dozens of drivers at a time, as opposed to just a couple teams, which will give Twitter a chance to experiment and learn rapidly about how to curate tweets and step into a more editorial role.

NASCAR fans are very active on Twitter and the league promotes social media use among its drivers. Driver Brad Keselowski made a classic Twitter sports moment earlier this year when he tweeted photos from inside his car on the Daytona 500 racetrack during a fire delay, gaining more than 100,000 followers in about two hours.

It’s hard not to see the NASCAR partnership as a harbinger of future official deals with other sports leagues, as well as a more general shift toward an editorial emphasis by Twitter. The company is looking for at least one sports fan to take on a new editorial role.

Sports are a natural starting point if Twitter wants to become more of a media company across the board. Pro sports moments dominate the tweets-per-second record book, and the network has become a go-to destination for breaking news and fan discussion. The company’s famous avian logo is even named after an NBA Hall of Famer.

Would you welcome editorial input from Twitter for major events? Let us know in the comments.

This story originally published on Mashable here.

Article source: http://news.yahoo.com/twitter-announces-nascar-partnership-more-deals-come-170904096.html

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