Check out this Twitter spike around the time that Michael Jackson died courtesy of our internal Spinn3r stats:

Apparently, I’m not the only person who noticed this:

As the news of Michael Jackson’s fate unfolded, sites around the Web felt the strain of spiking interest.

On Twitter, the volume of Jackson-related messages – up to 5,000 per minute at peak – put such a demand on the site that it slowed considerably.

“We saw an instant doubling of tweets per second the moment the story broke,” Twitter co-founder Biz Stone wrote in an e-mail response to our inquiry. “This particular news about the passing of such a global icon is the biggest jump in tweets per second since the U.S. presidential election.”

This is good news. Facebook now has public status updates.

We’re eager to have more Facebook content in Spinn3r (and personally I’m a big advocate of the open web).

Facebook has just announced that it’s now testing a new version of the “publisher” that allows users to choose who can see their status updates and posts. The most interesting part? The first option is “everyone.”

In other words, Facebook is making it easy for users to post status updates that are visible not just to their Facebook friends – but for the entire world (and Google) to see. Facebook has said for a long time that it’s planned to give users more granular privacy controls over status updates, but Facebook has never promoted making status updates publicly visible this heavily before – though the company did take a step back in March to allow users to share some content on their profiles with everyone.

Microformats are four years old now and will have a birthday party this friday to celebrate.

Some of us from the Spinn3r team will be there as well. Unfortunately, due to a timing error, our Spin3nr 3.0 launch dinner is that night so I need to take off around 8pm.

Venturebeat has a great piece on Real Time Search out right now covering a hot new trend.

Real-time search engines have proliferated over the last month, with a series of launches from start-ups like Topsy, almost.at and Scoopler. The companies are hoping to edge in on a space that Google co-founder Larry Page has admitted is a weakness for the search giant. And they’re using microblogging and social bookmarking sites as tools to figure out what content is relevant up to the second.

This includes new startups like Topsy, Scoopler, OneRiot, TweetMeme, Almost.at, DailyRT, Twazzup, Friendfeed, Collecta, and CrowdEye.

Some of these guys are already using Spinn3r… I should be able to disclose a few here this week (need to check and verify).

We’re also working on some more real time social medial integration in Spinn3r so I’m hoping to work with more of these companies directly.

I threw this together in a couple hours tonight.

The mainstream news is pretty pathetic at handling this story so I just figured Twitter would be covering it correctly.

News is sorted by time and by rank. Any videos are embedded directly (also sorted by rank).

Message me on Twitter if you have any commentary.

Spinn3r 3.1 just went live today and we’re announcing two new features.

Twitter Firehose Support

Spinn3r listens to a new Twitter firehose API which is a sample of the full Twitter feed.

All Twitter content is classified with a new MICROBLOG publisher type which we will be using for Twitter, Identi.ca, Jaiku, and other Microblog systems.

Further, it is language classified (using an algorithm we have developed) and includes all metadata from Twitter including publication time,
author name, handle, etc.

All content is real time and indexed and available within Spinn3r a few moments after it is published.

There were a lot of requests for this feature (Social Media is HOT) so I expect a lot of innovation from our customers.

Technically this is still in beta but we feel it’s ready for use in production applications (once we get some feedback from our users).

Here’s the current breakdown of Twitter vs other social media and blog content in Spinn3r. While Twitter is larger it’s important to realize this is much less content since Twitter posts are short.

Social Media Rank

We also published some of our new ranking technology which has been in development for a while now (more than a year).

We’re indexing social media sites and computing rank on users based on their social graph.

The results are pretty interesting. Scobleizer OWNS Friendfeed. Techcrunch consistently places high. They’re #3 on Friendfeed. #274 on Digg and #24 on Twitter.

It’s also interesting how the founders of these social media properties consistently place high, even over celebrities. Ev Williams is still #5 on Twitter. Kevin Rose is still #1 on Digg. Paul is #16 on Friendfeed.

Sources (or nodes) are ranked by authority whereby the more friends or inbound links you have the higher your rank.

Our key differentiator is that we do not consider raw inbound link count to be an accurate representation of authority. This is highly vulnerable to spam and rank errors as users who attract a large number of links (either through black hat methods, link baiting, or viral marketing) can inflate their rankings (and harm other legitimate users).

We consider the quality of inbound links to be far more important. You can observe this in our results as the authority for a source is not a direct function of raw inbounds links. Some users can have high authority but very few (relative) inbound links.

We’re really eager for feedback here. If you have any comments on our ranking system feel free to contact us with your thoughts.

If you’ve been paying attention to the news, there are massive protests and riots all over Tehran following the recent (potentially corrupt) election.

The phones have been cut off and you can’t make calls into Tehran.

Apparently, you can’t blog if you’re hosted on Blogfa.com.

They’re down at the moment and not responding.

Here’s the current Spinn3r graph for content being published from Blogfa.

We monitor all the posts across the blog networks for anomalies. Needless to say, this would be a significant anomaly.

Update: The HTTP server is up and responding but with Service Unavailable

It looks like Google might be launching a microblog search engine:

Google prepares to launch a service that indexes and ranks content from microblogging services like Twitter. Since it’s very easy to post updates and the posts are usually very short, micro-blogging services are great for live blogging, posting real-time information about an event.

Twitter’s search engine has two important drawbacks: it’s limited to Twitter and it sorts the results by date. While there are other search engines like Tweefind that try to sort Twitter posts by relevancy and search engines like Twingly that index multiple microblogging sites, none of them does a great job.

This is almost certainly a win for non-Twitter services like Jaiku and Identi.ca.

For Twitter, this might be a mixed blessing. They are clearly holding back some of their search results as they don’t provide full access to Twitter content for other systems.

This might just be because they feel that their main market is Microblog search and Google would be a competitor here.

I tend to disagree. This puts them in an unusual position of being at odds with their user base. Their users want to publish content in the public. If they are blocking 3rd party services from indexing their content they are doing their users a disservice.

Of course this might not matter if the users are unaware or don’t mind.

On the technical front. There is only so much you can do with microblog content for ranking. You can do a traditional IR score on the text but this only gets you so far.

Twitter search seems to just be boolean matching of results sorted by time (which might be fine).

Not sure if secondary metrics like ranking should kick in to resort results. It might be a good idea to use this just to prevent spam.

I think the major goal should be to put this in front of users and see what they think is best.

Update: I should note that Google doesn’t exactly have a big win with Google Blogsearch. It’s a decent product for sure but I find that the main Google search is better for blogs. Blogsearch has quit a bit of spam in it from our audits. We’ve compared Spinn3r to blog search both internally and from our customers performing audits and have consistently come out on top. Further, Blogsearch has problems that we’ve solved years ago (and have been solved by Google) so I’m not sure exactly what’s going on here…

It could be that Microblog and LIVE search is a totally separate type of product but Blogsearch is so close to the main Google search that it’s hard to differentiate them.

Perhaps a unified Blog and Microblog search would be best?

The new Facebook Pages are really just blogs. Unfortunately, not very good ones.

First. It’s totally possible that a given page/blog doesn’t have permalinks. If it’s a ‘note’ then it has a permalink. If it’s a ‘link’ then it does not have a permalink.

How am I supposed to share these with people over IM or link to them? There’s no link!

Second. No RSS or Atom. Seriously Facebook? Seriously?

These pages are public. They update frequently. They should have an RSS feed.

Those who have not learned the mistakes of content management systems are doomed to repeat them.

Seriously. We learned ALL of these lessons back in 2000. Can we not repeat the mistakes of the past?

Perhaps you’ve been reading all the news today about Apple’s new Snow Leopard release.

What you didn’t see mentioned is that the Snow Leopard is an endangered species. Along with the Bengal Tigers and most of the big cats.

The total wild population could be from 4-6k individuals.

The Snow Leopard might become extinct in your lifetime. You grandchildren might grow up in a world where Snow Leopards are only myth and legend and the name of an old and obsolete computer Operating System.

Don’t worry though. You can help the World Wildlife Fund by adopting your very own Snow Leopard.

I just bought a $250 family kit.

Can you match my donation?

You can also join the Facebook cause for the International Snow Leopard Trust or make a donation directly.

Inhabiting the rugged, mountainous terrain of Central Asia and the Himalayan region, snow leopards have long hind limbs and shortened front limbs, which allow them to leap 20 to 50 feet through the air. The diet of these cats varies by region and season, but consists mostly of wild sheep and goats, and smaller animals such as pikas, zokors and marmots. Snow leopards are threatened by habitat loss, diminished food supply, hunting for the illegal wildlife trade and revenge killings by herders. WWF works with local people and supports research and habitat conservation projects to protect these beautiful cats throughout their range.