Social Media Round-up #22

Welcome to eModeration's round-up of all that is intriguing, alarming or odd in the world of social media, compiled by Kate Williams (@emodkate).

In this update: baby-whispering the iPhone way; the end of free news; and Katie Price's Twitter woes.


THE HEADLINES ...

THE LOWDOWN ...

IN OTHER NEWS ...


THE HEADLINES ...

Amidst the many stories of desperation and despair in Haiti come some reassuring ones of astonishing heroism, and others of great luck. Included in the latter category is this one concerning US citizen Dan Woolley, who believes his iPhone saved his life. Dan was trapped in the rubble following the collapse of the Hotel Montana, Port-au-Prince – but used a downloaded medical app to self-diagnose and treat his injuries, and the iPhone’s camera to map his location before moving to a safer place. Woolley was eventually rescued 65 hours after the quake hit.

Bill Gates joined Twitter this week – and promptly hoovered up 100,000 followers in eight hours, prompting comparisons to the near-vertical slant of Oprah’s follower stats at the beginning of her Twitter career. So – what prompted multi-billionaire Gates to finally jump in after such a long and noble resistance to Twitter’s siren call? Ah - in MicrosoftWorld, everything happens for a reason, and it soon emerged that Mr Gates had a website to promote.

Gosh, it’s tough being a politico in a digital world. The Conservatives must be wondering quite why they dropped £500,000 on their recent ad campaign, when MyDavidCameron.com can so swiftly subvert it with user-generated comedy.

In a case which pretty much defines the expression ‘taking a sledgehammer to crack a nut’, Paul Chambers – who tweeted a jokey threat to blow Doncaster’s Robin Hood airport ‘sky high’ if their service didn’t improve – found himself arrested on terrorism charges and questioned for seven long hours. He’s had his computer, iPhone and laptop confiscated, and has been suspended from his job – a stark reminder, if we needed it, of the need to be circumspect in what we put Out There.

According to the Telegraph, Google is investigating the possibility that the recent hacks on their Chinese site were an inside job. The attacks, which targeted the email accounts of human rights activists, prompted the search giant to announce that they were closing their Chinese operation – though Google declined to confirm that they were investigating their own employees.

Elsewhere, Chinese mobile providers have been told to monitor their customers’ text messages for “illegal or unhealthy content” - and to suspend the service of those who use tripwire keywords.

Virgin Media has begun using Deep Packet Inspection to track down users who are illegally downloading content. They’re not yet monitoring individual users, but the technology can distinguish between the downloading of family pics and a music album – and will identify the artist and title if it finds the latter.

Meanwhile, Microsoft has agreed to entirely delete users’ IP addresses after six months, following pressure from privacy groups – till now they’d merely been ‘anonymising’ them.


THE LOWDOWN ...

I’m uncertain how to break this to you – perhaps it’s best just to blurt it out and get it over with: Katie Price (aka glamour model Jordan) might be leaving Twitter. A ‘close’ source says that, though KP has many kind messages “from true fans who look up to her”, the haterz are getting her down. Deep breaths now - stiff upper lip and all that.

Got a yen to retrain? Fancy a legal career? Got an iPhone? Got a thousand bucks? There’s an app for that.

If we were to write a list of things that it would be a very poor idea to share on Facebook, a photo of one’s 6-month-old with an (albeit unlit) cigarette in his mouth would be hovering somewhere in the top 5, don’t you agree? Rebecca Davey of Southend was this week investigated by Essex police for doing precisely that – but thankfully officers found that it was a case of not-fully-thinking-things-through, rather than anything more sinister.

Good lord – an iPhone app to help you decipher your baby’s cries. Apparently all babies have five distinctive cries which tell us if they are hungry, annoyed, tired, stressed or bored. Impressive – but I can’t squash the thought that an app to translate years 13-to-18 would rapidly gain more traction.

Meanwhile, US candy brand “Sweethearts” (the equivalent of Lovehearts for we Brits) has begun printing a new message on its sweeties: “Tweet me”. Now why does that cause an involuntary shiver in my own maternal heart?

Warning to UK readers – although this ‘No Pants Subway Ride’ viral is very funny, I predict you will be mildly disappointed by its failure to live up to the promise of its title.


IN OTHER NEWS ...

Britain is a dreadful laggard in the global broadband speed stakes – ranking a measly 26th on the world’s list with an average download speed of just 3.5 Mbps, according to Akamia’s most recent ‘The State of the Internet’ report. South Korea and Japan seize the international laurels with a whopping 14.6MB and 7.9MB respectively, whilst in Europe Sweden is king, with an average speed of 5.7MB.

Campaigning children’s charity Beatbullying is to launch a cinema campaign to showcase its powerful anti-bullying ad, after Clearcast, the regulators of TV commercials, deemed it too graphic for TV. The M&C Saatchi ad, which features a girl sewing her mouth shut and the strapline ‘You can speak out now’ – promotes the website Cybermentors.org.uk, and will appear on YouTube, billboards and in schools, as well as in the 12-rated cinema campaign.

All eyes are swivelled Applewards this week, after the great and the good of the tech world received an invite to a 27th January ‘event’. Speculation that Apple is about to launch their tablet reached fever pitch – Apple Insider shows us what it might look like, and the Guardian gives an excellent breakdown of what it might do.

Despite the President’s Massachussett woes, Obama’s social media team continue to build upon their reputation as the hippest to the hop with a Whitehouse iPhone app, which will stream the President’s upcoming State of the Union address live to users.

YouTube has announced that it’s jumping aboard the indie Sundance filmfest to test the concept of YouTube rentals out. The experiment will offer five of this year’s entries, and will last only as long as the festival – though the video portal says it will also offer a “small collection of rental videos … across different industries, including health and education” once the Utah movie showcase has ended.

Tweens and teens manage to squish a mammoth 11 hours of media content into the not-inconsiderable 7 and a half hours a day that they spend ‘connected’. They do it by multi-tasking – and the figures don’t even include time spent texting, or on the phone.

According to figures from The Anchor Intelligence network, one in every four ad clicks in the last quarter of 2009 was a click fraud attempt – up nearly 40% on the previous year.

The New York Times - America's most popular online news source – today announced that their content will no longer be free. With ad and print sales dwindling, the illustrious newspaper company will soon put a ‘metered’ paywall around its content – a decision which is widely seen as heralding the end of free online journalism. The Guardian offers an explanation of how the metered approach would work, here.

Finally, if proof were needed that virtual goods now sit at the very heart of the social media mainstream, here is news from Engage Digital Media that investment in 87 virtual goods-related companies topped $1.38 billion last year – doubling the previous years figures.

That's all folks!