And you thought tweeting from space was an achievement?
Ukrainian TV journalist Julia Gorodetskaya (@gorodetskaya) has sent the first documented underwater tweet from the floor of a 19-feet deep dolphinarium in Odessa, Ukraine. The scuba tweeting session was broadcasted by local media (see subtitled video below) and documented by regional press.
The tweet was sent via a mobile phone sealed in plastic from the Twitter website, using the Opera Mini browser. Radio waves passed to the surface through an elongated antenna.
The preparation process and the actual underwater tweeting was also filmed and broadcasted live by Boris Khodorkovsky to his QIK account and published on YouTube and other social media services. You can find pictures of the whole thing on Flickr.
Gorodetskaya, who did not know how to dive or swim prior to the event, sent a total of four messages to Twitter. Below is the first one.
In English, it reads: “This is first in history #underwater_tweet. I told you, @netocrat.”
The event was dreamed up and organized by a national mobile operator to tout the quality of its network. And I can’t help but think about the wonderful opportunity to raise awareness for a good cause in the process that was somehow overlooked, and therefor terribly wasted.
(Image via Flickr / NETOCRAT Communications)
Klout, a startup that measures influence on Twitter, is releasing a new version of its API today. Klout’s API is currently being used by more than 250 companies, including CoTweet, HootSuite, and the newly-launched Tweetup. You can read our previous coverage of Klout here.
Klout’s API, which is free, can be used by developers to identify the Twitter users they need to connect with to spread word about a new product, by publishers to understand how influential their audience is, and to help marketers and advertisers helping target influencers within your a particular market. The new API now allows users to return a Twitter user’s “True Reach”, “Amplification Score” and “Network nScore” as well as a machine learning classification of the type of user a person is (Connector, Persona). Basically, the API gives third-party users a much richer insight into influencers’ behaviors.
Klout is also adding two new benchmarks to measure authority on its platform. The first, Relationship Method, allows the ability to measure influence between relationships on Twitter. So you can determine who you influence across your social graph or who influences you. The second new feature, Influential Topics, highlights topics where a user is considered influential. These features will also be included in the new version of Klout’s API.
With over 250 clients using Klout’s technologies, it’s clear that the Twitter influence startup is gaining traction, especially in third party Twitter clients. There’s always the risk that Twitter will develop its own measure of authority that can be used, but for now Klout seems to be leading the pack in terms of measuring influence on Twitter.
Here’s a phrase many of you will remember, probably from the late 1990s: “Yeah, I’d get a cell phone, but I don’t want to be on, like, an electronic leash, you know?” People had land lines, pagers, car phones — the pocketable mobile phone was still a luxury and, to some, an unwanted responsibility. Over the next 10 years or so, the mobile phone gradually reached such high levels of market penetration that it’s quite difficult to find anybody without one. It is simply too practical and affordable to refrain from at this point. However, in the last few years, as smartphones and texting have become the default mode of communication for many people, the tone has changed again; the electronic leash is returning.
Why is this? It’s actually pretty simple: once a tool reaches a certain level of integration with the social and communication norms of a person, it receives the same level of cognitive consideration as, say, speech. Do you wonder whether you should end a text message with an exclamation mark, a period, or nothing at all? This is because texting and email are approaching the same level of integration with our daily lives as the speech and gestures we’ve been using for millennia.
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There’s been a lot of hoopla over the past couple of years about Twitter’s so-called “firehose.” Essentially, it’s an open stream of all their data that is provided to developers to use for third-party apps. Foursquare has a firehose of its own, but access to it has been on lock down. Today, for SXSW, Foursquare opened up its firehose a bit more.
Social Great, a service which tracks trending places in cities back on location data, has just gotten access to this firehose of data. This allows them to show in realtime the trending places throughout Austin, Texas, where SXSW is taking place. The service also pulls in data from Gowalla, Brightkite, and GraffitiGeo (Loopt).
As Polaris Ventures EIR Jon Steinberg notes (who helped build Social Great), “the numbers look crazy.” What he means is the check-in data at SXSW. Judging from what I’m seeing on the ground here in Austin, that may be an understatement. Venues routinely have dozens if not hundreds of other Foursquare users at them when they’re trending.
SimpleGeo, one company that has had early access to Foursquare’s firehose, built Vicarious.ly to visualize real-time check-ins around Austin. That data looks fairly insane as well. Most of the check-ins appear to be coming from Foursquare (which saw over 300,000 check-ins on Thursday alone) and Gowalla, but co-founder Joe Stump notes that the battle is too close to call still.
One other note: all these check-ins are made possible by the fact that AT&T’s network has been up and working the whole time. It’s been impressive. Crisis averted, so far.
