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This Week In Social Media: Dec 18, 2009

From an army taking over Twitter to an 80 year old grandma who loves to tweet, this is what happened this week in the world of social media and on the world wide web.

Late Thursday, Twitter was hacked into by the Iranian Cyber Army.  Twitter users who logged into the site saw this home page and a message saying:  The U.S.A. Think They Controlling And Managing Internet By Their Access, But They Don’t, We Control And Manage Internet By Our Power, So Do Not Try To Stimulation Iranian Peoples. The group even left an e-mail address.  For anyone to hack into one of the world’s most visited sites is astonishing.  Twitter hasn’t made any official statement other than acknowledging the problem and they are investigating the matter.  It looks like the site is back up and running and for updates be sure to follow iePlexus’ blog at ieplexus.com/blog. 

Both Facebook & Google announced this week that they would begin to start using their own URL shortening services, those are links that are shortened the length of a URL, which have become extremely popular this year thanks to microblogging sites like Twitter.  These can be extremely beneficial to users since users will know what site they will be going to, unlike now with services like bit.ly which can be matched with any website and users don’t know exactly where they are going.  However, bit.ly decided to fight back announcing that they will be offering businesses and bloggers with Pro accounts with their own personalized shortened URL links.  As of right now 23 companies, including AOL, The New York Times and Tech Crunch are a part of the beta testing.  The company hopes to roll this feature out to more users within the new few weeks.

This week, Twitter revealed some of the top trending topics of the year.  Among the many keywords, phrases, and hashtags, the Iran election, which became Iran’s way of communicating with the world, since reporters were banned from covering it, was the number one most engaging topic of the year.  Swine flu was also a major event from the year, which was rated the second most tweeted news event.  It should be no surprise that Michael Jackson and Susan Boyle were the most tweeted people in 2009.  However, it was a bit surprising to find Harry Potter beat out Twilight New Moon in the most tweeted movies of the year.

 You no longer have to be young and saavy to use social media sites like Facebook and YouTube.  A recent survey out by the Nielsen Company shows that more than 18 million senior citizens in the US are regular internet users.  While google is the most visited site for Seniors, Facebook is the third most visited site by seniors, followed by YouTube.  Many say this is a great way to keep in contact with their friends and family from across the country.  Sadly Twitter didn’t make the list, but WTEN-TV from Albany, NY found an 80 year old grandma who likes to Tweet, and she doesn’t even have a computer.  Dorothy Miller, of Troy, NY uses a service called Celery, where she writes her Twitter messages and faxes it in.  In return Miller can get tweets and pictures faxed back with her.  She says it’s a great way to keep in touch with her family.