TechnoCloud

Google News is taking on Twitter by trialling a real-time news trends service. In the trial, a list of trending key words appears beneath the ‘Top Stories’ tab, in addition to a personalised news box, that allows users to add topics of interests. It’s still at the trial stage, so only certain users will see it until Google decides whether to add it to the default feature set.

Earlier this month Google began adding a personalised news tracking service, which allows users to star a story so they can keep track of updates to the story.

The Uganda Wildlife Authority is using an innovative approach to raise awareness of and funds for endangered gorillas. The ‘Friend a Gorilla’ website allows users to become friends on Facebook with their chosen gorilla for $1. The gorilla will then appear in their friends list and its status updates will appear in their news feed.

This is the first example I’ve seen of paying for friends on Facebook. While a charity is a laudable start, it may open up the practice to commercial organisations. Would you pay £1 to be one of a limited number of friends of Stephen Fry to get exclusive updates? And if so, how long until this practice is extended to creating a private Twitter network?

An article summary caught my eye in the BBC Technology feed this morning: “Thousands of pieces of rubbish are to be tracked using sophisticated mobile tags…”

A click on the piece revealed it was actually about tracking household rubbish. Call me cynical, but surely that summary could equally be applied to most of Twitter?

Don’t get me wrong, I do see value in Twitter as a tool, but struggle to use it on anything like a regular basis due to the constant noise even a small number of followers generates.

There are endless debates in the industry about how to measure social media ROI and indeed even if you can or should. However, these almost exclusively focus on off-site activity on social networks, e.g. what benefits are there from a Facebook page or a Twitter profile.

What is missing are credible statistics that cover on-site social media functionality.

There are a multitude of white label social networks all promising to add varying degrees of social media functionality to your site from simple commenting, all the way to building a quasi social network around your site’s content. The problem is that case studies on the effectiveness of these types of functionality are very thin on the ground.

Specifically, what impact on traffic, site loyalty, ad returns is there by adding the likes of a forum, commenting, profiles, reviews, rating…?

There is the difficult question of how you separate the rating or comment from the post itself. However, you can track before/after introductions of functionality; likewise, you can track the activity on a forum as a separate section of the site. So where are the case studies?

I’ve seen a range of client testimonials from white label social networks, but these by their nature are cherry-picked examples to showcase a service. What we need are credible case studies from sites themselves and from media measurement firms to really demonstrate the case for social media ROI, something that would benefit the industry as a whole in terms of take up of these services.

If these case studies are already out there, great, link to them in the comments. If not, it’s time to start creating them.

Like death and taxes, spam will always find a way.

And so it seems for Twitter whose problem with spam has grown in line with its popularity. On what is essentially an open communications platform, it is inevitable that the worst as well as the best facets of communication would find their place.

These take several forms, including:

1. Simple posting of spam links
2. Hacking of Twitter accounts to post said links
3. Fake profiles with official sounding names (e.g. Walmart offers) or even blatantly suggestive ones
4. Mass follows in the hope that others will reciprocate. Return to 1.

The last deserves its own paragraph for its sheer cheek. You receive a follow from a seemingly random and very attractive stranger; that profile includes a few pictures of demonstrate said attractiveness; the profile states oh so innocently how that person is in a new town and looking for friends; they invite you to chat via what looks like a standard Yahoo (or other) embedded chat client; you enter your credentials; your password is stolen. Nice (and no, this is not from personal experience).

There are of course many other methods, but this post is not meant to be a spammers checklist.

You can block profiles and followers, although as the requests mount up it becomes an annoyance, and there’s even Twitter’s own spam profile to help you along and report spammers. Even then, the individual Tweets would still appear in the increasingly popular search results and, as with email spam, automation will add to the increasing unwelcome noise.

Twitter may or not be a new form of communication, but one constant annoyance of internet communication is not going away any time soon - Twitter spam is here to stay.