The tribute and remembrance of the late King of Pop occurs next Tuesday (July 7th) at 10:00 AM PT at the Staples Center in Los Angeles. Beyond the 17,500 tickets that will be given away to fans and the millions more that will converge on downtown L.A., the memorial will be live streamed free via the web and media outlets across the world.

This event will almost certainly shatter records for the biggest single live stream ever, and could be one of the biggest worldwide media events in history. Will the web be able to handle it?

The details

Although details are sparse, CBS News does a good job of breaking down the information currently available. Here are the key points:

- The memorial will occur at the Staples Center in downtown Los Angeles. 17,500 tickets will be randomly drawn in an online lottery available until 6 PM PT July 4th. Only U.S. residents qualify
- 8750 names will be selected Sunday, each of which will receive 2 tickets to the memorial
- There will be a simulcast in the Nokia Theater
- There will be a free live stream on the Internet available to all. Details on how the stream will be distributed are currently unavailable
- However, we suspect that thousands of stream will be available from media companies and live stream services around the world

The demand was so high for these tickets that the Staples Center website has had trouble staying up, and in fact took down almost every non-essential image and menu to keep the website up. This could be a prelude to the worldwide response we’ll see next Tuesday.

What will Jackson’s memorial mean for the web?

If you remember back in January, there was another historic event that blew us away: the Obama inauguration. Here are some of the staggering numbers from CNN and Facebook.

- 200,000+ status updates through the Facebook integration on CNN.com
- 3,000 people commented on the Facebook CNN feed per minute
- CNN served 13.9 million live video streams globally in about 6 hours
- Don’t forget about the millions of other live streams and TV viewers that watched worldwide.

Now, throw all those numbers out the window, because Michael Jackson’s memorial is almost certain to utterly overshadow Obama. Not even Obama consumed 30% of Twitter and set traffic records at Yahoo.

With the world mourning and a specific time and place set for the memorial, we may very well see the entire web converge on this one event. There will likely be thousands of streams worldwide via platforms such as Justin.tv and Ustream (the latter of which has a deal with CBS to stream events like this one). It’s also certain that Twitter, Facebook, and the social web will be booming with commentary on the event.

How many people will watch Jackson’s memorial? Can the web’s biggest players handle the massive traffic that will ensue? Will there be enough bandwidth? Could this event be the single media event in history? The answers to these questions will not only be a testament to Jackson’s impact on the world, but may very well set records that will last in history.

Perhaps most of all, the web will allow people to come together to celebrate Jackson’s life, no matter who they are or where they live.

Tags: jackson memorial, justin.tv, michael jackson, ustream

Another popular website has fallen, Geocaching.com, a worldwide GPS-based treasure hunting game, leaving thousands of people trying to figure out just what’s going on and why it went down. Wikipedia explains the game’s worldwide reach:

Geocaching is an outdoor treasure-hunting game in which the participants use a Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver or other navigational techniques to hide and seek containers (called “geocaches” or “caches”) anywhere in the world. A typical cache is a small waterproof container (usually a tupperware or ammo box) containing a logbook and “treasure,” usually toys or trinkets of little value.

Geocaches are currently placed in over 100 countries around the world and on all seven continents, including Antarctica. There are over 820,000 active geocaches in the world right now.

While the fire may or may not be responsible for this specific outage (we cannot confirm), it’s clearly had an effect on the entire web. Even Microsoft’s search engine Bing was affected, specifically Bing Travel.

We will provide updates on Geocaching and Authorize.Net as we receive the information.

Tags: geocaching

According to ABC7 news, the shooting happened shortly after 10 a.m. at the Apple Store located at 2700 Clarendon Blvd. A search for the suspect is underway.

The Washington Post adds that the suspect is “a black male, between the ages of 35 and 45, with a medium build and facial hair. He was last seen fleeing the area on foot, wearing a light-colored, short sleeve shirt, light-colored long pants and a dark baseball cap. He was carrying a handgun.”

Yet despite its spam woes, Twitter has somehow avoided an overflow of content from one of the Internet’s biggest industries: porn. Well, until recently that is. An interesting article in MediaPost describes both marketers and Twitter users noticing an increase in pr0n-related spam, and they are not liking it. The issue makes us wonder: should Twitter stamp out pornography; and how should they go about it?

Twitter Users’ Feedback on Pornography

The MediaPost piece essentially quotes some of Twitter’s active marketers on the issue of Twitter and porn. What they have to say, though, is not pretty at all. While you can guess how users react in the piece, Ben Smith of MerchantCircle sums up the problem best:

MerchantCircle has begun to offer a portfolio of local city-specific coupons via Twitter feeds. “As we have found with any new communication form, pornography and other types of issues creep in,” says Ben Smith, MerchantCircle CEO. “The problem with this type of activity is that it undermines the trust in the communication channel, which will have a disastrous effect on the channel.”

Has pornography taken over Twitter? No, not by a longshot. Is it a growing problem? Absolutely. Things like Twitter porn trojans make it clear that Twitter is not impervious to porn-related spam and malware.

What Do Twitter’s Terms of Service Say?

We took a look at the Twitter Terms of Service, which governs user interactions with the Twitter platform. While it mentions that they can “remove Content and accounts containing Content that we determine … are obscene or otherwise objectionable,” it makes no specific reference to pornography.

Compare this to the terms of service of other social media companies, such as the Facebook Statement of Rights and Responsibilities, which specifically states the following:

6. You will not post content that is hateful, threatening, pornographic, or that contains nudity or graphic or gratuitous violence.

Does this mean that Twitter doesn’t care about porn? Absolutely not – Twitter has addressed pornography spam in the past and we doubt that it would let the Internet’s underground industry tarnish its strong reputation.

And yet Twitter needs to monitor the situation. Porn should not be acceptable on Twitter, especially an open platform that millions of companies and users use for business and marketing every single day. It may be a relatively small issue now, but it will grow more prevalent unless they put a stop to the problem early. It’s easy to forget just how much of the Internet is entirely porn.

First though, Twitter needs to build a search spam solution ASAP. It’s all part of the same core problem that Twitter will need to address.

Tags: porn, pornography, twitter

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Most Twitter users probably follow under a thousand other people, but that’s enough to make it hard to keep track of the real-time stream. I actually started having trouble keeping up when I hit about 50 follows — and depending on how prolific the people you’re following are, you could be dealing with a hard-to-parse Twitter stream even following just a handful of people. But while people like social media fanatic Robert Scoble, who follows over 100,000 people, appear to have the superhuman ability to stay on top of things, the rest of us need help filtering the Twitter stream.

Fortunately, there are a good number of methods and applications we can put to work to filter tweets from the people we’re following. Which work best for you? Let us know in the comments.

(Please note that a few of the apps in this post actually do multiple types of filtering, and so could have theoretically been added to more than one category.)

By Keyword

One way to filter Twitter is by keyword. Filttr is a full-featured, web-based Twitter app that includes keyword-based filtering. You can both blacklist and whitelist key phrases and Filtter will block or allow those tweets. Flittr, though, has a pretty steep learning curve, and before I even added any keywords it started filtering tweets — and took a particular dislike to a few of my Twitter friends. I’m not sure what criteria it was using for those initial filters.

Another full web-based client that includes keyword filtering is Mixero, which is in private beta.

Philtro, which is also in private beta, learns what types of tweets you like based on your ratings. Give thumbs up and thumbs down ratings to tweets, and Philtro slowly figures out what you like and attempts only to bother you with tweets you’d be likely to want to read.

By Links

About 19% of all tweets contain links, but if your Twitter stream moves quickly, you may miss many of the best unless you use a filter. MicroPlaza organizes the links tweeted by out by your followers by recency or popularity. MicroPlaza personalizes the concept employed sites like Tweetmeme, Twitt(url)y, and dailyRT, which assume that the more a link is tweeted, the more worthwhile it is of your attention.

MicroPlaza not only looks at which links are being tweeted and retweeted the most, but also which are being tweeted specifically by the people you’re following. The idea is that you’re most interested in things your followers are saying (otherwise, you wouldn’t be following them), so if they tweet about popular links, they’re more likely to be of interest to you.

One of the coolest features of MicroPlaza, though, is that you can assume the identity of any other Twitter user — so if you follow someone very connected to a specific industry, you can see the links that their friends are sharing.

By Grouping

Another way to filter Twitter, is by organizing your friends into groups. By putting the people you’re following into groups, you can break up and effectively slow down your Twitter stream, making it easier to follow tweets from your friends, colleagues, and family members.

There are a ton of different ways to organize you friends into groups, but one of the easiest is to use a Twitter client that supports grouping, such as desktop heavyweights Seesmic Desktop, Destroy Twitter, and TweetDeck (which has a complimentary iPhone app that also supports groups), or a web-based app like PeopleBrowsr.

Another option is to use a service that helps you create channels or groups of Twitter users and monitor their tweets. Floxee is one of the most full-featured such sites. It not only lets users monitor the tweetstream of a predefined group, but also displays stats about the activity of that group (or “flock”). Other sites you could use include TwitHive, Tweetizen, Twhanel, Crowdstatus, TwittGroups.com, and TweetChannel.

Disclosure: TweetDeck partnered with Mashable to create MashDeck, a branded version of the software.

By Favorites

Favorites aren’t the best way to filter tweets, because the reasons you favorite tweets might not be the same as other people. However, by the same token, tweets that have been favorited by multiple users are generally worth reading for some reason: they’re interesting, funny, clever, extraordinary, etc.

Favrd keeps track of the most favorited tweets, but is limited to those users who have signed up with the service to have their favorites watched. (Careful: Favrd is often NSFW.) Favotter is another favorite tracking site, but again, watches a limited number of users (due to API limitations, according to the site’s about page).

BONUS: TwitterForBusyPeople doesn’t really filter Twitter, but it does organize your recently active follows in a way that you can get an “at a glance” view of the activity of people you’re following. Once you get used to it, it is potentially a good way to make your Twitter stream more manageable.

BONUS 2: Twalala does keyword filtering, but where it really shines is the ability to mute certain users to remove their tweets from your twitter stream temporarily.

Bird illustration via Flickr user matthamm.

Tags: filter, twitter

Luckily, Authorize.Net understands the usefulness of social media in situations like these. They set up a new Twitter account, @AuthorizeNet, earlier today to keep users informed about the recovery of one of the web’s most important payment systems. So what took Authorize.Net down anyway? And when will it be 100% back?

Twitter and the status of Authorize.Net

According to AuthorizeNet, the cause of the outage was a fire at their datacenter in Seattle. This impacted not only their website and transaction platforms, but even their backup center. Couple this with the fact that today starts the 4th of July holiday weekend, and you have a recipe for disaster.

Luckily, it seems that transaction processing has returned, although global processing is still down:

This is the most important aspect of the outage – without the payment system, merchants couldn’t accept credit card payments, which could result in millions of dollars lost among all of its vendors. The website is still down, meaning that accounts can’t be accessed. Luckily, the company had the foresight to use Twitter to keep merchants and users informed. We will update this post with any new developments on the situation.

Update: From the Authorize.Net Twitter account:

#authorizenet Full transaction processing has now been restored with Concord EFS.

The website seems to be loading now too, albeit very slowly.

Tags: authorize.net, payment

Reader Marek Foss sent us screenshots comparing the old and the new layout (below), which he feels looks more like Google AdSense than a page of Google search results.

And yet we know that such changes can have a significant effect of Google’s revenue and page load times – removal of features (eg. page size indicator) gains a fractional boost in load times, for instance. We also know that Google is meticulous in optimizing pages, and that asking the user what they want (as we do here) might not result in the correct answer, as a CNET article last year explained:

For example, Mayer said, the company wanted to find out how many search results to show users–the customary 10, or 20, 25, or 30? When asked directly, users said they’d like more results on a page, but testing showed otherwise.

Specifically, Google found that when the results increased to 30 per page, people searched 20 percent less overall, Mayer said. After much analysis of server logs, the company found it was because it took about twice as long to display the longer results list for the user, and speed matters.

Google’s latest layout change, then, isn’t likely to be for aesthetic purposes: it’s for speed and revenue. The question is: do you, like Mark, find it less aesthetically appealing?

Now, besides the fact that it doesn’t work on 64-bit operating systems, we have another one: it doesn’t support Macs. Thus, Apple’s computers seem to be – at least for the time being – exempt from the order that all PC makers must include Green Dam with new PCs sold in China.

This is probably just another temporary setback to the controversial Green Dam initiative, as the program will undoubtedly get updated to include support for currently unsupported operating systems. IDG writes:

“A service representative at a sister company to Green Dam’s main developer, Jinhui Computer System Engineering, said the company is testing the software on non-Windows platforms and will release an updated version if compatibility is added for other OSes.“

Yes, the program is a possible security threat, and yes, the entire initiative was launched before it was actually possible to implement. But judging by the fact that most PC makers have already started to comply with the demands of Chinese authorities – even with the actual initiative being postponed – proves that all those shortcomings probably won’t be enough to stop it.

Tags: censorship, china, Green Dam

However, if I did play today, I’d definitely appreciate the ability to tweet in-game. Waiting for 25 people to come together for a raid, or standing in front of the battlegrounds gives you a lot of time to kill, and what better way to do it than to tweet your heart away?

Now you can. TweetCraft, a Twitter plugin for World of Warcraft been in the works for a while, and although it’s still not the easiest thing to install (read the full instructions and some background here), it’s fully functional.

Basic features, beside in-game tweeting, are the ability to queue tweets for later, upload in-game screenshots through TwitPic, autotweet certain events such as entering an instance (for the love of God, please don’t use this option), and the ability to connect with other AddOns which can also register events and set them to autotweet.

If you’re worried about breaking Blizzard’s terms of service, it’s a bit of a gray area, but you’re probably safe. From the FAQ:

“Is this a violation of World of Warcraft’s Terms of Use or the new AddOn policies?
As far as we know, no. We do not do any internal memory reading or other hacks to the Warcraft client. You could argue that it’s possible to follow a Twitter user that would add advertising in-game which would violate the addon policy for in-game advertising, but the onus is on the user of TweetCraft to ensure the people they friend don’t write messages (Tweets) that violate Warcraft’s AddOn policy. In short, it’s up to each person to ensure they’re following Warcraft’s terms of use. “

However, since it is, in part, a third-party app, it’s always wise to wait for official word from Blizzard before you install it.

There are some bad news, too: it doesn’t work on Macs, as it requires an external, Windows-based application to run while you play.

Download TweetCraft here, check out an introductory video below, and remember; if you need a shaman, PVP-specced, has a job but will probably get fired after reactivating his account, I’m back at Burning Legion (EU) (;.

Tags: twitter, world of warcraft

Thankfully, there are a number of ways you can find people on Twitter. Here are ten sites you can use to locate “tweeps” to follow. Let us know in the comments if you know of any others.

People Search

1. Twitter People Search – Twitter’s built in people search isn’t the greatest way to find people on Twitter, but it’s probably where you should start. Twitter searches the “real names” people enter in their bio fields, but because there isn’t much accompanying bio information and because Twitter doesn’t have any sort of requirement to use your actual name, that can make it a bit difficult to find people, especially those with common names. It also makes it hard to verify that the people you find are actually who you’re looking for. Still, it’s a good place to begin your search.

2. Tweepz – Because the biographical information Twitter collects is minimal, no Twitter people search engine can improve on Twitter’s that much. Third-party site Tweepz does an admirable job, though. Tweepz lets you limit searches to specific parts of Twitter’s user information (like name, bio, and location), filter results by follower/following numbers, location, and other extracted terms, and greatly improves on the layout of the search results.

3. TweepSearch – TweepSearch lets you search by Twitter name or location, or search a specific username to get a list of all friends and followers. However, if the “indexing” number listed on their main page is accurate, they’re crawling about 600,000 less Twitter user profiles than Tweepz.

4. TwitDir – TwitDir is another search engine, but if the crawling stats are accurate, it’s well behind the curve, searching about 3 million fewer users than Tweepz. Still, it’s not a bad people search engine, and has some helpful “top” lists if you’re concerned with who the most popular or prolific people on Twitter are (then again, they’re also not that up-to-date — the site doesn’t seem to know who @aplusk is, for example).

Directories

5. Twellow – Your best bet for finding like-minded Twitter users might be to use a directory, and Twellow is certainly one of the most complete. Nearly 6 million Twitter user profiles are indexed in Twellow and placed into a huge number of categories. You can search the entire lot of profiles, or confine searches to a single category. Twellow also operates a local directory called the “Twellowhood.”

6. WeFollow – Created by Digg founder Kevin Rose, WeFollow is a Twitter user directory that organizes people by hashtags. WeFollow is user-generated and anyone can add themselves by tweeting @wefollow with three #hashtags that describe them.

7. Just Tweet It – Just Tweet It is another user created Twitter directory. It’s not quite as well organized or easy-to-use as Twellow or WeFollow, but it is certainly large enough that you should give it a browse when trying to locate people in your interest areas to follow.

Recommendations

8. Twubble – Twubble recommends people to follow by spidering the people you’re already following and recommending users that they’re following. The idea is that the people you’re following are interesting to you, so if more than one of them are also following another person, that person might also be interesting. Of course, that means that Twubble can’t be your first stop when finding people to follow — you already need to be following some people for the service to work.

9. Twitterel – Twitterel attempts to find people you might be interested in following by doing keyword searches of tweets. The service can update you by email, direct message, or @reply when it finds new people it thinks you might be interested in following. It’s kind of like Google Alerts for Twitter follow recommendations.

10. Who Should i Follow? – Enter you Twitter username into Who Should i Follow? and the service finds users who are similar to those you’re already following. The site doesn’t disclose information about how it works, but in my experience it is pretty accurate at finding users whose tweets are similar in content to your followers. The results can be filtered by how popular the people are, and how close they are to a specific location.

BONUS: Mr. Tweet – Mr. Tweet is a very popular Twitter app that lets you give and receive recommendations about Twitter users. The app also provides more helpful statistics about users, such as tweets per day or the percentage of tweets containing links. To get the most out of Mr. Tweet, consider installing the Firefox plugin, which gives you access to statistics and user recommendations while you’re browsing Twitter.

More Twitter resources from Mashable:

- 19 Twitter Desktop Apps Compared
- 6 Gorgeous Twitter Visualizations
- Top 7 Twitter Tutorials on YouTube
- 5 Ways Twitter Can Save You Money

Tags: Just Tweet It, people search, tweepsearch, tweepz, twellow, twitdir, twitter, twitterel, twubble, wefollow, who should i follow

Name: UserTesting.com

Quick Pitch: Provides real users who record their screen and voice as they use your website. $29 and 1-hour turn-around.

Genius Idea: If you’re launching a new web app, ideally you’ll have time to organize a focus group and watch real users interact with your software, and tweak it based on the feedback. Unfortunately, that can be both expensive and time consuming. UserTesting.com looks to solve this problem by bringing together users that are willing to do usability tests (for $10 each) with companies that need testing done on their products (who pay $29 per user for the service).

When you request a test, UserTesting claims it can start returning results within an hour from members of its panel, though that can be delayed a bit if you request specific demographics. Nonetheless, the final result seems like a good value: a video that shows how the user interacted with your site (essentially a screen cast) with their voice commentary. The user also submits a written report detailing what the user liked, disliked, or found confusing.

Here’s a sample video for a usability test done on behalf of TripAdvisor:

The idea seems to fill an obvious need, and UserTesting.com has received some fairly high profile endorsements, including Evan Williams of Twitter, as well as executives from Amazon.com, Justin.tv, oDesk, and lots of other prominent websites. Between a great name, a valuable service, and lots of success stories, UserTesting.com seems like a winner.

Sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark

BizSpark is a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.

Entrepreneurs can take advantage of the Azure Services platform for their website hosting and storage needs. Microsoft recently announced the “new CloudApp()” contest – use the Azure Services Platform for hosting your .NET or PHP app, and you could be the lucky winner of a USD 5000* (please see website for official rules and guidelines).”

Tags: usability, usability testing

Today mainstream news has taken notice and corrected the myth: the video is indeed real, scientists say, but the strange creature is very much a terrestrial phenomenon. News14 writes:

Ed Buchan, environmental coordinator at the Raleigh Public Utilities Department, said staff biologists have confirmed that the “creature” is actually a colony of tubifex worms. The colonies attach themselves to roots that gradually work themselves into weak points in the pipes. “They seem to respond to the light from the camera,” Buchan said. “That light is pretty hot.”

The worms naturally occur in sewage and pond sediment and are actually sold both live and dried as fish food in pet stores. He said other staff members in the department have seen it before, although sightings aren’t particularly common. “I’ve seen a lot of sewer TV before and I’ve never seen them,” he said. “We were surprised. We didn’t know immediately what it was.”

It’s unclear what made the clip such a YouTube phenomenon: most likely it’s explained by the mystery surrounding the strange creature, much like last year’s Montauk Monster mystery.

Tags: creature, lifeform, youtube

Just as on your homepage, you can hit “pause” on the real-time results, which, after a few minutes of staring at items about Jackson being shared, is definitely a needed feature if you’re actually attempting to keep up with a topic. After hitting pause, FriendFeed will tell you how many items have been queued, and you can then hit play to see them and resume the live streaming updates.

Personally, I’m not so sure that I don’t prefer the latter approach – simly checking search results for a given term (I generally keep “mashable” open all day on Twitter search) periodically rather than watching it constantly in the browser.

That said, the coolest aspect of FriendFeed’s real-time search might be that you can extend it to your own website via an embeddable widget. To embed a search, you can simply click the “Share / embed search” option that accompanies each search result and grab the embed code, like such:

Tags: friendfeed, real-time search, Search

First, you can now subscribe to any topic via RSS or Atom, like you already can do in Google News. This means every time there’s a new story in the “Technology” category, or more specifically a search term like“social media” you can get that update pushed to your RSS reader. There’s also a new iGoogle gadget if you’d rather access the topic or search term via iGoogle.

The Google Blog Search homepage now also features a “Hot Queries,” which, is similar to Google Hot Trends. This shows what searches are currently hot in Blog Search, as opposed to Google Trends, which shows what’s hot in the broader search engine. That said, both lists appear to be fairly similar, though Blog Search only shows a top ten at this point.

There’s also a new “Latest Posts” feature on the homepage that simply lists new posts that Blog Search has picked up. It’s a nice update, but one that makes me wonder how much utility separate blog search really has at this point. Google News already includes plenty of blogs in its database (there are now more than 25,000 sources in total), and as evidenced by the similarities in Google’s two different trend lists, users are generally searching for the same things at any given point in time. In other words, blog search might be filling a need that no longer exists.

Are you still using blog search engines regularly? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Tags: blogging, Google, google blog search, Search

Realizing this fact, popular domain registrar GoDaddy has integrated Twitter registration into its domain manager, allowing you to see if the Twitter username that matches your URL is available, and if so, register it.

The target here is GoDaddy’s small business users. The company explains in the tool that you can “Join today and start “tweeting” about your next sale, when you’ve updated pictures on your site, or other things that may be going on with you or your business.”

To use the feature, just login to your GoDaddy account and click on any of your domain names to access the manager (where you also go to do things like update name servers). There’s now a Twitter option under “Domain Enhancements” from which you can check your username availability.

While this probably isn’t a big deal for most our readers, it could be for Twitter. This integration puts the service in front of millions of people that are actively managing their online identity, many of whom have probably heard of Twitter, but haven’t actually signed up for the service. As if being featured on Oprah and on the cover of Time wasn’t enough free publicity …

Tags: godaddy, twitter

The video – “Technologic Overkill” – is directed by filmmaker Steve Ellington, and shows “the plight of a little blue robot and his attempt to be relevant in an increasingly technological world,” set to a song by the band XFYA. Check it out below:

As we recently noted, mobile video certainly seems to be at a tipping point, with dozens of services offering apps to get your video from your phone to the Web, and YouTube seeing a huge upswing in mobile uploads since the iPhone 3GS launched. Technologic Overkill is perhaps a small symbol of this movement, in what will likely be just one of many firsts that we see as people get their hands on the new Apple phone.

See Also: HOW TO: Post Video to Twitter With the iPhone 3GS

Tags: iphone, iphone 3Gs, music videos, video

But apart from the obvious, what makes a retweet different from a tweet? What makes some types of tweets get shared more than others? And what can you learn from that data if you’d like to get retweeted more?

This week viral marketing scientist Dan Zarrella dug into the data on retweets and published some interesting stats about retweet behavior. These help us understand why people retweet things, and might help you too.

1. Retweets Contain More Links

Retweets tend to contain a link, Zarrella explains – 56.69% of retweets contain a link versus 18.96% of normal tweets. So retweets are being used to share content from around the web.

Key point: If you’d like to get retweeted, include links in your tweets more often.

2. Longer Words / More Syllables

Retweets also appear to have more syllables per word than ordinary Tweets – tweets have an average of 1.58 syllables/word, versus retweets at 1.62 syllables/word. This isn’t necessarily what you’d expect, since the most viral ideas are often said to be the simplest ones.

Key point: Using long words is not a barrier to getting retweeted – in fact it seems to help.

3. Higher Reading Grade / More Complex

Another unexpected finding, perhaps: Zarrella found that retweets require a “higher level of education to understand” – 6.47 years of education versus 6.04 years according to the Flesch-Kincaid test. The graph also shows the Simple Measure of Gobbledygook test, which found similar results: 6.13 years of education for retweets versus 5.88 years for tweets.

Key point: Tweets don’t have to be stupid-simple to get retweeted.

4. More New Words and Concepts

Perhaps unsurprisingly, retweets tend to add new information. By creating a “novelty” score that counted how many times a word appeared in the entire sample versus in the retweets, it was found that retweets tend to contain more unique words.

Using a sample size of over 10 million tweets, Zarrella discovered that “in the random Tweet sample, each word was found an average of 89.19 other times, while in the ReTweet sample each word was only found 16.37 other times. This shows us that while simplicity may not be very important to ReTweetability, novelty certainly is.”

Key point: If you want more retweets, try adding new information.

5. Less Self-Referential

Also unsurprising: retweets tend to be less self-referential than ordinary tweets. In other words: talking about what you had for breakfast is less likely to get retweeted than talking about what Obama had for lunch. This was found using the LIWC (“Luke”) method, which is a little complex to explain here but you can learn more on the site. Another LIWC finding: people tend not to retweet swear words.

Key point: Don’t talk about yourself too much if you’d like to be retweeted.

So there you have it: if you want to get retweeted, don’t talk about what you had for breakfast, don’t swear, and throw in a useful link from time to time.

Mashable’s Best Retweeting Resources

If you’re looking to continue your education in the art of retweeting, then we encourage you to read some of our most popular Twitter and retweeting posts:

- How To Retweet on Twitter – Ben Parr offers a primer on how retweeting works, plus tools to retweet more efficiently and track the most popular retweets.

- The Science of ReTweets – Dan Zarrella explains which factors make certain tweets more viral than others.

- Retweet iPhone App for Twitter – Our review of the Retweet iPhone App.

- 15 Fascinating Ways to Track Twitter Trends – Covers some of the best tools for tracking trends on Twitter.

Tags: retweet, twitter

As we’ve noted, her case was always on shaky legs, and it was probably taken into account by the jury which set a very harsh penalty. However, it’s questionable whether the verdict is constitutional, and Jammie Thomas-Rasset will appeal on that grounds.

“She’s not interested in settling. She wants to take the issue up on appeal on the constitutionality of the damages. That’s one of the main arguments–that the damages are disproportionate to any actual harm,” her attorney Joe Sibley told CNET.

And disproportionate they are. 80,000 dollars for sharing a song – one song – on an online network? However you look at it, it’s an arbitrary number. If you tried to apply the same standards in other cases, you’d get ridiculous results. Together with the fact that Thomas-Rasset doesn’t have that kind of money, trying to appeal the verdict is a logical choice.

No one can tell whether she will succeed or not, but in a case as important as this one, it’s good that she’s putting up a fight. Awarding such huge damages for online file sharing is a dangerous legal precedent that might result in further pressure on ISPs and governments to implement draconian measures to stop it, as well as give them more rights to monitor online activities not only of file sharers, but all of us.

Tags: Jammie Thomas-Rasset, lawsuit, riaa

One of the biggest misconceptions by brand managers is that the web is not a luxury market. The truth is that people are spending more money online and it’s a place luxury brands must build a presence. However, most have a nagging fear of ruining their brand reputation.

So, how can luxury brands engage in social media?

The Luxury Market Online

Before we answer the previous question, let’s define the luxury market. According to The Journal of Brand Management, Luxury as a concept is defined:

“…within the scope of socio-psychology as a result of its connection to a culture, state of being and lifestyle, whether it is personal or collective. When linked to brands, it is characterized by a recognizable style, strong identity, high awareness, and enhanced emotional and symbolic associations. It evokes uniqueness and exclusivity, and is interpreted in products through high quality, controlled distribution and premium pricing.“

So, brands with scarce products and high prices must find a way to find consumers online. The questions we haven’t answered yet are, “are premium, affluent consumers online?” and “does making a product available online hurt controlled distribution?”

In November 2007, eMarketer published a report titled “Affluent Internet Users: How the Rich Live Online.” In the report they concluded that the number of affluent Internet users will grow from 43.7 million in 2006 to 57.1 million in 2011.

Now that we know that there are luxury consumers on the Internet, and that the demographic is growing steadily, we need to determine how a brand can engage these consumers.

Problems With Luxury Brands Online

The unique luxury brand must overcome a number of obstacles upon entering the online space. Here are some of the challenges:

1. Luxury implies a sense of exclusivity; that it isn’t for everyone. It’s difficult for a brand to selectively choose who to interact with and, unless done properly, this segmentation could cause a major backlash.

2. Most luxury brands are extremely hesitant to experiment with new marketing strategies. They feel that trying new things is too risky for their brand image. Instead, this hesitation can actually limit online opportunities, hurting the brand in the long run.

3. Because of a luxury brand’s need to maintain the appropriate aesthetics, social media can be a more expensive proposition for them. Building an application or web page is an expensive, arduous task for any major brand. It’s important to remember that social media for brands is not free.

Finding Solutions

The first and most obvious solution is to simply trust your consumers. If your internal perspective of the brand aligns with the customers’ view of the brand, everything will be fine. If not, you’ll finally learn who your core demographic really is and what they are looking for.

Just as a product can be exclusive, so can sites on the web. Creating an exclusive social network, an invite only site, or a suggestion site for actual customers are ways to limit the demographic.

If you decide you must engage on a public site like Twitter or Facebook, throw out any hopes of being exclusive. Selectively following or befriending users can quickly cause a backlash as customers complain about being left out. One way to engage on public sites is to target those sites with the closest demographic to the brand’s consumers. This limits the number of “outsiders” engaging with the brand.

Lastly, if the brand finds a mention that they aren’t comfortable with, it may be better not to respond. The web is huge; not everything will be seen by the masses (especially as we move towards real-time conversations). Responding or seeking removal of a message may legitimize and simply bring attention to any negative sentiment.

Examples of Luxury Campaigns

Case studies analyzing social campaigns are a great way to determine how to position a brand online. However, too closely emulating a campaign can have a negative affect. Social media success requires implementation of something new and exciting; some kind of added value.

Use the following case studies to see what they did right and as a means to understand the fundamentals for a luxury brand in social media.

Gucci On Facebook

Gucci has built an amazing following on Facebook, with over 404,000 fans on their official Page. By continually updating the page, and introducing new content such as photos and videos the brand is keeping its consumers engaged. Each update receives over 200 interactions in the form of “likes” and “comments.”

By opening Gucci to everyone, and not selectively deciding who gets to join, or inviting only specific people, Gucci has built a community. Even though many of the Gucci fans may not be able to afford actual products, the Facebook fan page builds “lust for the product.” This idea of “one day I’ll be able to afford that,” is part of the luxury appeal.

Not only does the Facebook Fan Page build consumers’ desire for Gucci products, but also enables the community to offer free feedback, publish images, and share Gucci content.

Mercedes Benz Social Network

Scarcity online is only achieved in a closed system. Usually this is against the accepted best practices of a social campaign, but for a luxury brand it can work. Mercedes highlighted this idea by creating a closed social network for Gen Y’ers.

GenerationBenz.com, is an invite only social network where consumers can give feedback on vehicles, as well as give Mercedes Benz insight into their younger customers.

By creating a network that includes only those that are either previous buyers, Mercedes members, and potential consumers, the brand has targeted exactly the demographic they want. Mercedes is able to engage users without fear that the brand reputation will be tarnished.

Creating a successful private social network can be costly, but the return on consumer loyalty may be great. Allowing brand customers to connect with each other while connecting with the brand, as well as creating a place to introduce new products to a brand’s core demographic, can be an invaluable asset.

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Summary

Social media can be a powerful tool for a luxury brand. With a growing affluent market, the online world is a place high-end brands need to be. The question is, how are you going to maintain guardianship of your brand identity, keep your product premium-priced and exclusive, or engage your customer?

Knowing that releasing your brand to your consumers doesn’t necessarily hurt brand reputation is the first step.

More social media resources for brands:

- 10 Twitter Best Practices for Brands
- 40 of the Best Twitter Brands and the People Behind Them
- 5 Tips for Optimizing Your Brand’s Facebook Page
- 8 Essential Apps for Your Brand’s Facebook Page
- The Importance of Focus: A Guide for Social Media Brands
- A Control Freak’s Guide to Social Media Influence

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, Erdosain

Tags: brands, business, gucci, luxury, mercedes, social media

Talking to the BBC, Pandeya said that he plans to make legal file sharing (which is what The Pirate Bay will be focused on from now on) more attractive than illegal file sharing by paying the users for sharing files. He also plans to pay the content providers that provide the files, and he plans to raise money from the ISPs by reducing their traffic overload.

“Let’s say a popular song comes out. Rather than a million downloads from a site – which would cause a considerable strain on that ISP – we can take that song and put it out on P2P,” he says.

Unfortunately, when you try to put all of the pieces of this puzzle together, you’ll find out that one piece is always missing. Yes, The Pirate Bay is a huge source of traffic. But this traffic comes from file sharers who will not appreciate the fact that one day, The Pirate Bay will get a “temporarily closed” sign while they work out the deals with all the content providers out there. They’ll quickly move on to other torrent sites; yes, The Pirate Bay was much loved for their activism, but when your goal is to download a new Kanye West video, you’ll just take it from whoever offers it. Need examples? One word: Napster.

The file sharers might be inclined to stay on The Pirate Bay because they’d receive money for their troubles. But I’ve long held the theory that piracy is not only about money; it’s also about choice and availability. A torrent tracker needs to have a lot of content; if it doesn’t, getting paid a small amount to use it won’t help.

Now, about those content providers. There are a lot of them, and many of them hate The Pirate Bay with a passion. They probably don’t even like the name. Working out deals with all of them will be nearly impossible; especially since The Pirate Bay is surrounded by legal problems, recently losing a lawsuit from the same companies they should be doing deals with now. The content providers aren’t as passive as they used to be; they’ve got Hulu and Epix, and I’m afraid that few of them feel the need to deal with The Pirate Bay.

Finally, we’ve got the ISPs. Whether they would be willing to work with the Pirate Bay at all is questionable. Whether The Pirate Bay will remain such a huge traffic source to be interesting to the ISPs after the “true” pirates move on to other torrent trackers and after they’ve cut the deals with content providers is also uncertain. BusinessWeek raises several technical and legal issues surrounding such a deal.

Yes, the entire idea sounds nice on paper – after all, everybody wins, right? But transitions such as the one proposed by Pandeya are tough even when you’re not talking about one of the most notorious torrent trackers out there. In the end, The Pirate Bay might end up trying to sell traffic they don’t have, harnessed from content they also don’t have, to ISPs that are reluctant to buy it. It’s not a very promising future for the pirates, I’m afraid.

Tags: piracy, the pirate bay, torrent, TPB

This might change soon, as a new set of guidelines for web tracking are due to be unveiled today. These new guidelines are set forth by trade associations representing some of the biggest companies out there, including Google, Microsoft, Coca-Cola and Procter & Gamble. It’s an attempt at self-regulation; the US Congress and the Federal Trade Commission have recently been looking into online advertising practices, and the major companies probably decided it’s better to act now than have to adhere to more strict guidelines set by someone else in the future.

So, what do these new guidelines mean for your privacy? Well, companies can still track your online behavior. However, they need to tell you you’re being tracked, explain to you what it means, and (most importantly) provide you with an easy way to opt out of web tracking. In practice, it also means we soon might see a uniform link or an icon that’ll take you to a disclosure page. Finally, companies will have to ensure that the data collected from the users is stored securely; moreso if it’s sensitive data such as children’s personal information, financial data and medical records. Companies will be monitored for their adherence to these guidelines, and answer to federal agencies if they don’t adhere.

Is it enough? Well, it’s an ongoing debate. Measures such as this will provide the users who are concerned about web tracking and their online privacy with a way to ensure they’re not being tracked. On the other hand, one could say that web tracking should be opt-in instead of opt-out; that consumers should be tracked only if they willingly approve of it beforehand, and that no one should be tracked by default. When you consider that cookies change or get deleted, that users often change browsers and work on several different computers, opting out of every web tracking attempt out there might become a never ending chore.

The new guidelines are definitely a step forward; we’ll be able to judge how big when we see some of them implemented in practice.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, caracterdesign

Tags: online privacy, privacy, web

The controversial program was supposed to be installed on all new PCs sold in China from July 1st onwards, but after strong protests from both the Chinese people and the PC sellers its launch was postponed indefinitely.

However, it’s bound to come back, according to an unnamed government official. Speaking to China Daily, he said:

“The government will definitely carry on the directive on Green Dam. It’s just a matter of time. What will happen is that some PC manufacturers will have it included with their PC packages sooner than the others. But there is no definite deadline at the moment.“

This was always a possibility. The implementation of this entire initiative was sloppy, and just as we’ve noted earlier, this was probably the cause for postponement, and not some sudden change in China’s policies with regard to censorship and the Internet.

*Update: AP reports that more companies have taken after Sony, including Green Dam bundled with new PCs sold in China. The list includes Benq, Acer, and Haier, with other companies, such as Asus, claiming they’re planning to start bundling Green Dam with their PCs. HP, Dell and Toshiba still haven’t decided how to proceed, but overall it seems that, regardless of its postponement, Green Dam has already won.

Tags: censorship, china, Green Dam

This time, an odd, vulgar hashtag has appeared in the trending topics, as you can see in the image below. It obviously doesn’t belong there, and it doesn’t lead to any actual Twitter conversations, but someone, somehow, managed to put it there.

*Update: this time, it’s a legitimate trending topic. Commenter Mark Nagurski explains: “British actress Mollie Sugden died yesterday. She played Mrs Slocombe in UK comedy Are You Being Served and ‘Mrs Slocombe’s Pussy’ was a running joke. This is a tribute from fans.” However, Twitter is not showing any results for it, probably because its anti-spam filters have activated.

We’ve seen this done before via an onslaught of spammy or malware-infected messages send through dozens of bogus accounts, but this time the spammer seems to have reached trending topics with other methods. In any case, the topic will probably soon be removed, but Twitter definitely needs to work on better spam prevention methods.

The sentence above still stands, but in a completely different context which we haven’t encountered before. It’s possible that Twitter’s anti-spam detection has worked all too well, removing the results for a legitimate trending topic. You can’t really blame it: joke or not, at first glance the hash tag seems vulgar, but it can also be completely innocent, depending on semantics.

Again, Twitter needs to work on spam detection; not only to prevent spammy topics from entering the trends, but also to prevent legitimate topics to be labeled as spam.

Tags: spam, twitter

It’s not just TweetDeck that saw the change: we’re seeing rate limit increases in Twhirl: this would suggest a rate limit increase across the board, although that’s yet to be confirmed. The blog SocialGeist also spotted the change, and sent us the news.

If the change applies beyond TweetDeck, it’s great news for developers and those who use Twitter with remote applications.

Have the rates increased for your app? Let us know in the comments.

Tags: api, twitter

Here’s the idea: you’re watching a movie in the theater and need to take a restroom break, but you don’t want to miss the best part. The RunPee iPhone app has a timer letting you know when it’s safe to take a break, and gives you a summary of what you missed upon your return.

It also lets you know whether you should stay till the end of the credits, since movies like Iron Man include bonus footage afterwards. You start the timer when the movie begins, and safe break-times are scheduled throughout. The app costs $0.99 [iTunes link].

In an amusing press release for the iPhone app, creator Dan Florio explains:

Our iPhone app gives movie goers “immunity” from the effects of mega-sized sodas and flushes away those grueling post-movie restroom lines where you have to wait your turn in pain and avoid awkward eye contact with the 30 other people in the restroom with you….a bladder is a terrible thing to hold.

Now the Web Ecology Project has gone a step further and published a thorough report entitled “The Iranian Election on Twitter: The First Eighteen Days”. Rather than just looking at specific terms like “#iranelection” or “iran”, the study includes 12 terms related to the Iran situation, giving a more complete overview of events.

We’ve highlighted the key findings here, but stat heads may wish to dig into the methodology noted on the report itself, embedded in full below.

Iran Election on Twitter: Key Stats

- From June 7th till June 26th, the study recorded 2,024,166 tweets about Iran

- An estimated 480,000 Twitter users contributed to the conversation

- Of those that Tweeted about Iran, 59.3% tweeted once – this accounted for 14.1% of the Tweets

- The top 10% of Iran Twitterers accounted for 65.5% of the Tweets

– 1 in 4 Tweets about Iran were retweets

Iran Election Stats by Keyword

- ahmadinejad: 1,765 Tweets

- basij: 3,295 Tweets

- gr88:151,038 Tweets

- iran: 903,193 Tweets

- iranelection:: 857,401 Tweets

- iranian:- 9,929 Tweets

- khameni: 1,409 Tweets

- mousavi: 16,970 Tweets

- mousavi1388: – 325 Tweets

- neda: 97,872 Tweets

- rafsanjani: 77 Tweets

- tehran:- 85,019 Tweets

Full Report – The Iranian Election on Twitter: The First Eighteen Days

This is an embedded version of the Web Ecology Project report, available for download at their site [warning: PDF link].

Tags: iran, iranelection, twitter

The implementation actually isn’t very exciting. Essentially, all Bing is doing is showing recent tweets from well-known people, and only when you search for that person’s name and Twitter in the same query. And it’s all just done via Twitter’s API, making it not a whole lot different than simple widgets that show someone’s most recent tweets.

The Bing team explains on their blog:

“Today we’re unveiling an initial foray into integrating more real time data into our search results, starting with some of the more prominent and prolific Twitterers from a variety of spheres. This includes Tweets from folks from our own search technology and business sphere like Danny Sullivan or Kara Swisher as well as those from spheres of more general consumer appeal like Al Gore or Ryan Seacrest.

Starting later today, when you search for these folks names in association with Twitter, you’ll see their latest Tweets come up in real time on Bing’s search results. For example, if you type “Kara Swisher Twitter” or “Kara Swisher Tweets” or even “@karaswisher” as your search query, you’ll see something like the below. (Note this feature will be rolling out gradually over the course of the next few hours so you may not see it right away.)”

This feature would seem to have fairly limited appeal – after all, most famous people simply use their own name as their Twitter handle, or you can quickly find it using Twitter’s existing search tools (or, Google). Nonetheless, it’s the first in what will likely be many big announcements concerning search engines and the indexing of real-time data from Twitter and other sources.

Tags: bing, Search, search engines, twitter

Michael Jackson’s online popularity continues to soar: we reported previously that 2.6 million Michael Jackson songs were downloaded this week; Nielsen SoundScan says that no artist has ever sold more than 1 million downloads in a single week.

But Jackson is dominating in online video, too. Visible Measures, which goes beyond YouTube views and instead aggregates views from 150+ video sites, reports today that videos of Thriller have been viewed almost 28 million times since Thursday. The count includes tributes to the original, like the prison inmates’ performance below.

What’s more, the viewership has been accelerating, with 8.5 million total views this weekend and more than 19 million additional views on Monday and Tuesday. Jackson, it seems, is getting more popular by the day.

Related: Michael Jackson: A Video Tribute

Tags: michael jackson, thriller, video

The site is rather straightforward: input your name, who you’re offering money to, how much you’re offering, and what that person has to do, and PayPal sends them the offer, either by email or via Facebook. For the latter, the site uses Facebook Connect, so you can browse your friends list and post the offer to someone’s wall from the Do Stuff For Money website.

If your friend accepts the offer, you’ll get an email from PayPal, which prompts you to send money to your friend. This is the “why” in the equation: if the service takes off, PayPal sees more transactions taking place on its site, which translates into more transaction fees and money in the bank.

The Do Stuff For Money homepage shows some recent offers, some of which are fairly entertaining. See if you can spot mine below:

Tags: paypal

Now, the search engine is turning over the homepage image to Facebook users, at least for a day. The company has launched a Facebook application that lets users upload their own photos (with a summer travel theme) for consideration and vote on those uploaded by others. Ultimately, the Bing team will select finalists from the highest rated photos and then let users vote again to determine which image will be featured on the homepage on August 3rd.

The app also features some sharing features, so when you upload or rate photos, you can share them with your Facebook friends. That should give the promotion a bit of a boost, especially as avid photographers find out about the opportunity to have their work featured in front of Bing’s millions of daily visitors.

It’s worth noting that Google also turns over its homepage to users one day per year, as kids compete in the Doodle4Google competition for a shot at having their quirky interpretations of Google’s logo seen by millions.

Tags: bing, facebook, photography