Twitter improves search with ‘Top Tweet’ emphasis in apps, removes video services on iOS
Twitter has just released an update to its iOS and Android apps which features an improved search interface. As predicted by us, it has also removed support for video upload via Mobypicture in its iOS app. Vodpod and Posterous are also getting the axe in this version.
We predicted the removal of Mobypicture last week, and posited that other video services would also be removed at the time. At the moment, yFrog and Twitvid are the only two services to remain for uploading video natively. When we discovered the removal, we noted what this would mean for Twitter:
This would do a couple of things for Twitter. First, it would give them more complete control over the way that video is uploaded to the service. Taking control of image uploads with its own image service and then implementing filters in the main app ensures that there is a constant flow of content coming into its network, rather than out to other utilities like yFrog, Mobypicture or even Instagram.
Second, it removes third-party failures from its list of worries. If a service like Mobypicture has issues and fails to upload a video, the user isn’t going to give the Mobypicture app one star or send a support email to Mobypicture. It’s going to complain to Twitter and Twitter will take the hit. It’s a brutal way of thinking about it but in the end, every third-party service that Twitter supports natively in its app is another potential headache.
Twitter says that there are improvements to search in this version, including more search suggestions and topics based on things that are trending on Twitter at the moment.
Top Tweets (which are filtered and collated using Twitter’s new flags) are also surfaced when you search for big events. If you search for the Super Bowl, you might get tweets about the halftime performance from several months ago first, for instance, rather than people talking about next year’s Super Bowl on Twitter right now. These Top Tweets are the equivalent of Google’s ‘I’m Feeling Lucky’ results.
I’m about to get a bit picky about some of the other changes in Twitter’s apps, but I have to say that the search is very much improved. A realtime stream of search results was never going to work well and Twitter has finally gotten around to fixing some major issues with the usability of its search engine here. While Twitter has offered streams of its data to advertisers and data brokers for a while, the normal users haven’t really been given the best experience.
This is a great move up in performance and result quality for the apps, and should help attract ‘regular’ people to the idea of dipping into Twitter’s data for ‘answers to questions’, something that it hasn’t done a whole lot of so far.
There is also now a contextual tweet presented to you at the bottom of a page after you tap on a link to read it. You can drop the tweet out of the way by either tapping the page or pulling down on the tray. One suggestion that could improve this new implementation is that if you minimize a tweet, it should stay that way for all links until you re-open the app. Sort of a ‘cookie’ type preference for your current session. Or a permanent toggle as I can’t see myself being so hair brained that I’m going to forget a tweet I just tapped on.
As far as the reasoning behind leaving the tweet exposed? It’s most likely an effort to increase engagement levels. If the ‘reply’, ‘retweet’, ‘fav’ and ‘more’ buttons are readily available, people are more likely to tap them. Expect Twitter to be watching those metrics closely to determine whether this sticks around or not. My bet? It probably will increase engagement and therefore never go away.
Overall, the implementation of this feels a bit odd to me. If it’s there to be ‘available’ to share, then why does it go away the moment you tap or scroll? Yes, it lowers the annoyance level, but someone is far more likely to share after they finish checking out the content of a tweet. It seems that it would be better to either display it only at the end of a page or at the top of a page. This means that it would go away (or never appear in the first place) only to show up when you hit the bottom or scrolled back up to the top.
It seems that people are more likely to share content that they have actually consumed and enjoyed, but perhaps not. Maybe (most likely) Twitter knows things that we do not about the way that people share on Twitter. A metric showing that people just want to briefly check that a link leads somewhere before they share would be a good justification for the current behavior, for instance.
This update also adds support for traditional Chinese. As Twitter is still blocked in China, this is likely a play for Hong Kong and Taiwan, rather than mainland China, which uses simplified Chinese. It’s probably also a hedging effort vs. Sina Weibo, which grew 73% in 2012 and surpassed 500M registered accounts.
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Twitter opens up cross-platform Nielsen Brand Effect survey tool to all advertisers in US, UK and Japan
Twitter has today announced that its Nielsen Brand Effect survey tool is available to all of its ad partners in the United States, United Kingdom and Japan. The tool, which presents surveys to Twitter users in a format native to their platform, is designed to demonstrate the effectiveness and utility of its Promoted Tweets program.
In order to juice up the desire to use the NBE tool, Twitter has rolled out several results from its survey data over the past few months during its beta test. Twitter syas that Promoted Tweets increase the rate at which users associate a brand’s ‘message’ with its presence on Twitter. So if you want 22% more of whatever that is, then a Promoted Tweet campaign will help you do that.
The second factor that Twitter is emphasizing is that you should ship a Promoted Tweet campaign that is continuous, rather than a one-off. Multiple tweets in a campaign will boost ‘brand lift’. So yeah, that’s pretty logical, but now Twitter has some data from its surveys to back it up.
The third is that people who engage with a Promoted Tweet have an increase in favorability and purchase intent. That’s all well and good for the statistics, but there’s sort of a catch-22 here in that the people engaging (retweeting, clicking, etc) with Promoted Tweets likely already have an affinity for a brand. Someone from Pepsi says that the campaign helped them as well, but you can read the quote in the post.
The surveys look better than when Twitter teased them last year, so that’s good. The iPhone version looks like a nice iOS pulldown and the web one follows the site’s aesthetic. Twitter is careful to note that it does not share individual user info with Nielsen or its advertisers, so presumably this data is anonymized.
Late last year, Twitter announced another Nielsen partnership with the Nielsen Twitter TV Rating, a social measurement of TV program popularity based on Twitter data. While that partnership has Twitter data being used to quantify user interest outside the network, the NBE is all about processing data gathered on Twitter to help sell and promote its ad offerings. If you’re sensing a common theme here, yes, data is very important to Twitter. Among other reasons, it’s very much behind the way that Twitter has begun to exert more control over its platform. If Twitter is to survive and flourish, it needs to be profitable, and it knows that (either directly or indirectly) the store of user data that it has compiled and continues to collect is its most valuable asset.
Image Credit: DPA/AFP/Getty Images
Continued here: Twitter opens up cross-platform Nielsen Brand Effect survey tool to all advertisers in US, UK and Japan
‘War Correspondents’ In Mexico Address Mainstream Media Shortcomings, Use Twitter To Spread Information
In Mexico’s drug-war-torn cities, a small number of Twitter users affected by narco violence are acting as war correspondents to the masses, providing a public-safety alert system of sorts, according to a recent research paper from Microsoft, called “The New War Correspondents: The Rise of Civic Media Curation in Urban Warfare.”
These “curators,” tweeting with hashtags like #mtyfollow, #reynosafolllow, #saltillo and #verfollow, produce an inordinately high number of tweets compared to other users, informing people about recent violence, clashes and other news in regions where traditional news outlets have engaged in self-imposed blackouts to avoid narco violence.
“Twitter in particular and social media in general have become important elements of the information ecosystem. They have not replaced traditional news media, but they have certainly extended it in new ways,” Andrés Monroy-Hernández, one of the report researchers, tells TechCrunch. “Social media is more participatory and democratic than the existing mainstream media, which is one of the reasons why it has emerged as a form of public sphere — like a networked version of the public plazas.”
The report noted that of the 34 million people with Internet access in Mexico, 20 percent use Twitter. About 4.2 percent of Mexico’s online population has posted about the drug war on Twitter, according to the report. These users tend to use Twitter on desktop, and occasionally mobile, Monroy-Hernández says.
Twitter’s adoption in the cities most affected by violence and studied in the report — Monterrey, Reynosa, Saltillo and Veracruz — paralleled the rise of violence there. And the volume of tweets in these cities continues to mirror violence-related events there, according to the report.
Because the use of Twitter in these cities revolves around the drug war, a big chunk of tweets are actually retweets, users notifying their networks about the danger. Hence, the importance of the core group of “curators” who work independently, or with their own sources, to tweet out information to the masses. For example, in Monterrey one Twitter user was responsible for 3 percent of the city’s total tweets, two users responsible for 2 percent and seven users who were each responsible for 1 percent of the city’s tweets.
Yet, because of the nature of these tweets, curators are also anonymous, which at times means it is difficult to ascertain the veracity of the information in the tweets. This legitimacy issue is something Monroy-Hernández sees as part of the evolution of social media in Mexico.
“I see an emerging trend of civic media technologies playing a central role in public life, especially those technologies that build on everyday social media practices,” he said. “I expect this is going to become a very rich space — not only in Mexico, but across the world.”
Continued here: ‘War Correspondents’ In Mexico Address Mainstream Media Shortcomings, Use Twitter To Spread Information
Jeep’s Twitter account hijacked, apparently by the same guy behind Burger King hack (Update: BET and MTV take advantage)
Here we go again. On Monday, it was Burger King’s Twitter account hijacked with a McDonald’s logo. Today, on Tuesday, it’s Jeep getting hijacked with a Cadillac logo.
For a brief period of time, Jeep’s account had a McDonald’s background. This, as well as the fact that Jeep followed Burger King, suggests the same hackers are at it again (although it’s of course possible these are copycats):
Just like McDonald’s yesterday, Cadillac says it is not responsible for today’s hack:
Just to clarify, Cadillac is not connected to the hack of the @jeep Twitter account.
— Cadillac (@Cadillac) February 19, 2013
Yesterday caused quite a bit of chaos for Burger King. A few hours after the hijacking, the account was suspended. It eventually came back, though many of the tweets were still present. Burger King then protected its tweets and eventually issued an apology.
That was 16 hours ago, and the company hasn’t sent out a tweet since:
Interesting day here at BURGER KING®, but we’re back! Welcome to our new followers. Hope you all stick around!
— BurgerKing (@BurgerKing) February 19, 2013
Yet the party that really needs to be apologizing here is Twitter. Account hijackings are nothing new, and the company has been asked for years to implement two-factor authentication to help thwart such attacks.
Twitter has said before it is working on such a feature and further proof came recently via a “Software Engineer – Product Security” job posting with the following opportunities listed (first spotted by The Guardian two weeks ago):
- Design and develop user-facing security features, such as multifactor authentication and fraudulent login detection.
- Create custom security tools, like @brakeman and @SADB.
- Implement and contribute to emerging defenses, like Content-Security-Policy & Strict-Transport-Security.
- Lead code and design reviews for features shipping from throughout the company.
Aside from that, Twitter has stayed silent regarding beefing up security with such a move.
Update at 3:20PM EST: MTV and BET look to be taking advantage of all the hype by acting as if their accounts were hacked. Before the questionable messages appeared, BET’s social media manager posted the following:
Furthermore, an MTV employee tweeted this before the “hack” started:
Everyone watch @mtv right now… #MTVHACK
— Annie Schoening (@Schoprah) February 19, 2013
Update at 4:00PM EST: One more.
We totally Catfish-ed you guys. Thanks for playing! <3 you, @bet.
— MTV (@MTV) February 19, 2013
Image credit: kamil101
Continued here: Jeep’s Twitter account hijacked, apparently by the same guy behind Burger King hack (Update: BET and MTV take advantage)
Tweetbot for Mac adds thumbnail support for Vine and Flickr, new menubar icon options and more
Tapbots has updated the Mac version of its incredibly popular Tweetbot app today, adding an avalanche of new features including thumbnail support for Vine and Flickr, new menubar icon options and the ability to add .mp4 videos to new tweets. Due to new rules surrounding Twitter’s API guidelines, users of earlier versions of the software will need to upgrade by March 5th.
The independent Twitter client now allows you to enable or disable notifications for specific users, which is a welcome way of muting people for short periods of time. To access the new functionality, simply control-click a user in the feed and choose ‘Enable/Disable Notifications’ from the menu.
Vine is the latest social network to launch with a great deal of fanfare. The service, created by Twitter as a means of uploading short, six second videos to the Internet, has proven popular despite its issues with uploaded pornography. It joins Flickr, which has also seen a resurgence recently due to some revamped mobile apps and the debacle over Instagram’s proposed terms of service, in Tapbots’ new and improved OS X app.
Thumbnails for both services will now appear directly in the feed, meaning that users don’t need to click-through to either see a preview or visit the webpage where it originated from.
The app also has a lot of small and technical tweaks for users who like to customize their Twitter experience. Accounts can now be reorganized on the left-hand side via the account preferences menu, and users can now drag an image or .mp4 video onto the app icon in order to start creating a new tweet.
A whole host of bugs have also been fixed, smoothing out the experience in day-to-day use:
- Fixed the issue where ‘goto user’ would fail if there was a space before or after the username.
- Fixed the issue where a twitter search url didn’t work as expected in some cases.
- Fixed the issue where if someone faved your tweet it looked like you faved it.
- ‘View in Favstar’ now respects open links in background preference
- Fixed the issue where when creating new tweet, typing something, hitting escape and then clicking somewhere would dismiss the tweet.
- Fixed the issue with changing muted keyword durations.
Last but not least, today’s update also includes the ability to open profiles or tweets on Twitter.com, as well as click on the date label in the status detail in order to open the tweet in your chosen browser.
It’s also worth nothing that due to Twitter’s API changes in version 1.1, all users must upgrade to the new version of Tweetbot for Twitter by March 5. After that point, all previous versions will stop working. So if you haven’t done so already, hit the link below before you forget. The iOS version of Tweetbot has also received an update that brings it in alignment with Twitter’s 1.1 API guidelines. As with the Mac version, users will need to upgrade before March 5th.
The update follows similar improvements for the iOS iteration, which also includes link support for Chrome and 1Password, earlier this month.
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Continue reading here: Tweetbot for Mac adds thumbnail support for Vine and Flickr, new menubar icon options and more