Twittering On In A Flash (Of Light)

We are a chatty lot! Social media demonstrates a basic human need; the desire to communicate with others.

TweetPing

And if you ever doubted have active Twitter is a global communication tool, have a look at TweetPing (above), the brainchild of Franck Ernewein, a French web designer.

Every time a tweet is made somewhere in the world Tweetping gives of a light flash, superimposed on a map of the Earth.

But the site provides more details than a simple visual reference.  Activity by continent is detailed in the bottom section of the design -  the total number of tweets, total number of words, characters and the last #hashtags and @mentions.

Here is one hour of the Twitterverse in action presented in just five minutes


There are other excellent alternatives to the above. Frog Design's "A World Of Tweets" also presents data on a map showing where people are tweeting at from the past hour. A region's heatmap gets "hotter" depending on the activity.

A World Of Tweets

Tweereal's animation on the map features only those tweets containing geo-tags (coordinates)

Tweereal

So is Twitter the collective consciousness of the 'Net as some pundits suppose? It must be coming close to be reaching this status as one in eight people in the world tweet, albeit that the range of content followed is often confined to relatives, celebrities and a few chosen brands.

Patrick Meier of National Geographic quotes Hillary Clinton as saying in 2010, that social media is the new nervous system of our plant.  Certainly if you throw in other social media maps such as these for Flickr, FourSquare and Facebook you get a better overview of global activity, but is activity enough to gauge the prevailing mood.

For this you really need to add a layer of sentiment analysis. The Global Twitter Heartbeat Project is heading in this direction. Here is their Hurricane Sandy Tweetbeat.

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Most Boring Photo Above 30,000 Feet

I recall attending a party in the early 1980's where the theme was "The Most Boring Slide Evening". Revellers were encouraged to sort through their carousels of kodachrome tranparencies and select slides that fitted certain categories.

My favourite was in the "Most Boring Slide Above 30,000 Feet" which featured the wingtip of an aircraft and a lot of cumulus clod and was entitled "Vietnam". You get the general idea of the hilarity of the evening,  but behind this was the social norm of sharing images with family and friends.

Family and friends were often subjected to packets of holiday snaps that were spread on the kitchen table after the photographer (and I use this term advisedly) had returned from a lengthy overseas experience - O.E.

As an article in The Telegraph recalls, few in those days would have envisioned a global photo sharing site which would grow to contain 5 billion photos.  A site with 35 million adherents who would willingly share their families and passions with complete strangers.

But this is of course what Flickr has done.  It has melded the desire to share images with the capability of social media and in so doing has created an online phenomonon.

As it ingests 3 million photos and videos each day Flickr can seem a bit of a monolith, even to those who upload the material. It has also significanlty contibuted to the craze for digital, amateur photography in a very postive way, without requiring a user to divulge their personal information.

Despite the ability to share photographs, most of the images stored on the site are viewed only by the person who uploaded them.

People who post images to Flickr do so under Creative Commons which means most of the photos are free,  but this hasn't stopped companies such as Getty Pictures approaching individual Flickr photographers and skimming off their best images for the Getty image database.

So what is the competion for the platform?  Photo Weekly records that Facebook is now receiving 6 billion photos a month which is more than Flickr's entire collection. See the infographic below, based on Pixable data, which gives a very clear indication of the placement of Flickr in the social media image pecking order.

Maybe the way to beat the Flickr opposition to is to start a "most boring photo above 30,000 feet' group!

Related articles

• Flickr Still Beats Facebook for Photographers (blogs.photopreneur.com)
• Flickr Stock - The Way Stock Photos Should Have Been (blogs.sitepoint.com)

What A Difference A Year Makes

Click on the chart to see the larger version

A year on year analysis of social media from January 2010 clearly demonstrates the rapid growth of the major networks.

While Wikipedia is chugging along with 5,000 new contributors Facebook continues to blitz the opposition, signing up 290 million new accounts over the same period.

Note also that users accessing Facebook on their mobile device has grown by over 200 percent to 200 million.  This growth trend will continue

Another significant mover has been the professional network, LinkedIn with a 100% growth and Flickr has now features 5 billion images, which represents a 25% increase in their activity.

Related articles

• 2011 social media statistics show huge growth (browsermedia.co.uk)

Flickr Focus - Brighten Up Your Presentations

Here is an interesting tool called Tag Galaxy that demonstrates image association with a product, company or term.

In this example we type in a country name; Singapore.  The galaxy presentation demonstrates those sub categories of images that are associated with the principal term.

The next step is to select either the principal "planet" or one of its satellites by double clicking on it.

Images are pulled from Flickr under the search term.

The completed visualisation can be rotated and is a useful tool in demonstrating image association with a product, place or service.

A screen shot of the graphic will also brighten up any corporate presentation.

And here is another handy tip.  If you plan to upload whole albums of images to Flickr why not consider using a free tool like Bulkr to make the task easier.

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A GeoSocial and GeoCultural World

Without doubt we are living in a geosocial universe as the above graphically demonstrates.  The omnipresent hump that represents the mobile market should be a pointer that all marketers should follow.

Equally interesting is the global share that Skype occupies.  As an enabling technology it may have been around for a while but is still a key player.

JESS3, who produced this infographic,  have been trying to accurately depict the size of the key players in the geo / social space.

Source:JESS3

See JESS3's charts on Flickr.  The rise of the professional networking platform LinkedIn is also a trend of note.

As well as our social method of communication, those bound by cultural and religious conventions have been making their own presence felt online.

Members of the Muslim faith are celebrating Ramadan and Muxlim.com, a Muslim lifestyle site has a vision of connecting the world's Muslim communities to each other, and to the wider world, through shared online experiences.

There are a number of Ramadan apps that they promote online including the Ramadan Daily Dua which offers a prayer of supplication specific to each day during the holy month.  Another is the Ramadan Booster Pro offers "tips and recommended good deeds to help organise your Ramadan".

Finally this week comes updated data from Nielsen, that shows a continuing decline in search.

 The only exception is the rise of MSN/Windows Live/Bing which has risen 28%.  The effectiveness of placing advertising with search engines would appear to be even more in doubt.  Geo Social and Geo Cultural sites would be a better bet.

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• New smartphone apps help Muslims during Ramadan (newstatesman.com)
• Ramadan goes hi-tech with phone apps to remind the devout to pray (guardian.co.uk)