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Twitter Analytics Now Available to Everyone

Ever wanted to be able to accurately measure your social media presence via hard numbers and data? Twitter understands that many people use Twitter to make a name for themselves, whether that means promoting a product or a website or trying to get attention as a comedian or blogger. There are an enormous number of uses for Twitter and the release of Twitter’s Twitter Analytics program allows Twitter users to better understand how frequently their tweets are being viewed and reacted to (referred to as ‘impressions’ and ‘engagements’ respectively).

Twitter Analytics was quietly being tested roughly a month ago and finally received a widespread release yesterday. Twitter Analytics is available to anyone who has had a Twitter account for at least two weeks, due to the fact that the Analytics provided are only available for the past two weeks. Prior tweets are not counted. Though this aspect may be a bit disappointing, it still allows for an eye-opening change in Twitter’s future, allowing everyone from business executives to cruise ship comedians to see their precise Twitter presence.

Though the ‘average’ Twitter user may just consider this to be a useless function, this addition can mean the world to people who advertise using Twitter (which is an ever-growing number of people and businesses). Twitter users will be able to monitor trends of what makes their tweets popular and what helps to encourage others to interact with their tweets. Currently, Twitter Analytics is only available via the computer; there is no word yet on whether its features will be extended to mobile usage.

Facebook Launches New App for Celebrities Only

Twitter has long been a venue for celebrities to interact with their fans for a number of reasons. Celebrity Twitter accounts can be followed without having to follow back and Twitter has a useful ‘verified account’ feature that’s able to ensure that a Twitter account is the real deal rather than an impersonator or anything else of the sort. Last year, Twitter made its interface even more accessible for celebrities by offering verified accounts special filters that would allow them to interact with other verified profiles.

Not wanting to be left in the dark, there were also rumblings around this time last year that Facebook was working on their own private tool for celebrities, which would make it easier for them to communicate with fans through the popular social network. After this was leaked, there wasn’t much additional information regarding this potential service until just recently.

Today, Facebook announced that they are finally releasing their application for celebrities, known as Mentions. Mentions is a Facebook app specifically geared towards celebrities to help them post messages, photos, and videos to their fans, as well as make it easier to see what people are saying about them on the social network. These features seem to emulate existing features that Twitter has, which have helped to make it so popular for celebrities to use. Mentions can be used by anyone with a verified Facebook page, though its overall usability may be extended in the future.

Twitter Unleashes the Mute Button

Twitter announced on Monday that they’re rolling out a new feature that will be available on the Twitter website as well as the iPhone and Android applications. For quite some time, Facebook has featured the ability to ‘hide’ a friend, which allows them to be completely taken off of your timeline without defriending them completely. This allows a Facebook user to not have to see obnoxious or annoying or boring posts without the potential social awkwardness of having to delete someone from your friend list (which is often seen as a personal denouncement).

Twitter’s announcement is the release of a similar feature, known as the mute button. The mute button will allow a Twitter user to stop seeing posts by users that they do not want to hear from; they will no longer receive notifications on their phone from that user and that user’s Tweets and Retweets will not show up in the timeline. A user who has been muted will not be notified that they have been muted, again allowing users to restrict potentially annoying or otherwise unwanted messages to prevent any awkwardness.

This isn’t exactly a brand new feature, however. As the ‘hide’ function has long been popular with Facebook users, certain third-party Twitter clients such as Tweetbot, have allowed mute functions for quite some time, even including the ability to mute specific hashtags and keywords, which is an option that Twitter has not yet made available. Hopefully, in the future, Twitter will continue to expand on this new feature to maximize its usefulness for what Twitter users do and don’t want to see in their timeline.

Deleting the Past: Teenagers and Social Networks

Social networks have long been associated with youths, as the younger generations tend to be the ones who pick up on new Internet trends and phenomena before adults fully grasp the concepts. Even though Facebook has recently seen its first decrease in teenage users, as they drift towards newer social networks and applications like Snapchat, there is still a very heavy presence of youths and teenagers using social networks. Even LinkedIn recently opened its user base up by allowing students over the age of thirteen to create their own pages.

Because of their heavy usage of social networks and their teenage mindsets, it’s unsurprising that it has become quite common for teenagers to post information that they might later regret online. Sometimes these might be pictures of themselves wearing not enough clothing or statuses referring to their partying and underage alcohol consumption. Many people believe that these mistakes and indiscretions shouldn’t follow them throughout the rest of their lives and make it more difficult for them to get a job or get into college.

For this reason, California enacted a law last year that will give children under the age of 18 the legal right to delete anything they post online. Though most mainstream social networks such as Facebook and Twitter already allow their users to delete posts, this law will require any social media websites to provide the option for minors to delete anything that they have posted. Because most major social networks already provide this, some news sources see this law as unnecessary and unrealistic considering users cannot delete posts that other people have made about them, and believe that it will need to further evolve before it can become worthwhile.

Twitter Evolves, Becomes Less Like Twitter

Yesterday, Twitter announced that it was launching a few new features related to its image sharing abilities. These new changes will allow Twitter users to tag other Twitter users in photos, something that social networks such as Facebook and Instagram have allowed for a long time. Up to ten people can be tagged in a photo on Twitter; this is useful for Twitter users who previously had to use some of their 140 characters to mention other Twitter users in their posts. Now, Twitter users can mention their friends and link them to images without having to shorten the accompanying tweets.

In addition to the ability to tag multiple users in Twitter image posts without using any characters, Twitter has also enhanced their photo sharing abilities by allowing users to share up to four photos in one tweet; these additional images will also not affect the character limit, and tweets will still be able to contain 140 characters in full, removing any user tags or additional photo links from the equation.

Though it’s obvious to see how these new updates to Twitter’s interface could be useful, some critics are not responding well to the updated features. The updates to Twitter have been compared to Facebook, and some say that this is pulling away from what Twitter is meant to represent. Many people like that Twitter is a very different social network than Facebook and enjoy the minimalism that Twitter represents by offering only 140 characters to work with when it comes to each tweet.

By adding in ways to offer more photos and more tags for friends, these critics believe that Twitter is transforming to fit standards that have been established by Facebook, and though this might be the best move for Twitter when it comes to evolving with the times, it may alienate some Twitter users who use the social network as a means of getting away from Facebook.

Updated Designs for Facebook and Twitter

Perhaps due to the low attention span of millennials – the largest user base of social media – social networks like Facebook and Twitter often find themselves going through redesigns. Social networks like these have to be sure that they are keeping up with the times and integrating features that are practical for their users. Having a functional design is a large part of this, which is likely why Facebook and Twitter both recently went through redesigns of their own.

Twitter’s redesign came forth in early February and changed things quite a bit from a design perspective. The redesign was received with generally positive feedback from various news sources, as there has been a focus with this update to make sure the social network looks cleaner. Not to be left behind, Facebook rolled out their own redesign for its News Feed at the beginning of March.

However, it seems that even with these recent updates to the designs of Facebook and Twitter, neither company is satisfied with where they are at. A few people have already been able to view yet another new Twitter design update that seems to integrate aspects of Pinterest and Facebook. Though this is not a guarantee that the design will go through, as social networks have tested out designs in the past that never came to fruition, it is still possible that Twitter is looking into making an even larger update to their interface.

In Facebook’s case, they announced an overhaul roughly a year ago for their News Feed that never manifested itself. It is not yet known if this overhaul that was supposed to be launched last year has been abandoned entirely or if it is still an update that’s on the horizon. It’s possible Facebook is still making tweaks to it, especially seeing that other social networks like Twitter are making constant updates to their own interface. Either way, it’s very likely that Facebook and Twitter as they are now are not likely to look the same six months or a year from now.

The New Web Presence of Twitter and Vine

Though most people are using social networks through mobile phone applications these days, there is still room to grow and evolve when it comes to the actual web presence of social networks. This is something that Twitter has recently embraced with its new web design, as well as with the first web profiles for Vine, its popular video-sharing service, which until now has been exclusively available for usage on iOS, Android, and Windows Phone platforms, rather than being accessible via a computer.

Twitter’s new web design launched on Tuesday and according to Twitter, the site has been designed to reflect the look and feel of the iOS and Android apps. One of the larger non-aesthetic changes to the website is the built-in ‘compose’ box that is on the left side of the page. The intention of this box is to encourage users to tweet more rather than just browsing the Twitter pages of other people. Though the official launch occurred on Tuesday, the new design has not yet appeared for all users.

Additionally, full web profiles were launched on Vine in early January. The Vine website allows for easier browsing of videos posted on Vine and also includes a feature called TV Mode that lets users watch videos in full screen on their computers, which plays through videos one after the other instead of looping the same video over and over. Though the Vine website is still very new, there are plenty of potential ways that the social network’s web presence can be utilized, such as filming Vines through a webcam. As Vine develops, it is likely to add new features to both the mobile app and the website.

Inventor of Twitter Launches Jelly, a Q&A Social Media App

The social media world has recently been buzzing about the launch of Jelly, a new social media app that integrates existing social networks to help answer the questions of its users. The app has been launched by Biz Stone, who is best known as the co-founder and co-inventor of Twitter, who also worked on popular websites such as Xanga and Blogger over the course of his career. Stone has been working on Jelly since 2012, where the nature of the application was kept mostly under wraps.

Jelly was launched for iOS and Android on Tuesday and aims to compete with existing Q&A services such as ChaCha and Quora. There are a few features that separate Jelly from these other question and answer services. For one, users are able to post images alongside their questions (“What is this?” is frequently mentioned as a way images and questions can be used together). The social media app will allow friends on existing social networks — as well as friends of friends — to help answer questions that are posed on the Jelly platform.

Some people are very excited about the potential of Jelly. One blogger referred to the types of questions one would pose for Google compared to the questions that were meant for Jelly — “How much is this new video game?” versus “Is this game appropriate for my ten year old?” The ability to gain this sort of knowledge from someone a Jelly user knows directly or indirectly is exactly the appeal of the social media app.

However, while some have embraced Jelly since its recent launch, others are a bit more skeptical. One journalist mentioned a number of problems that Jelly users may run into. He described that many questions posed on Jelly are snarky or obviously ridiculous or pointless (“Should I drink coffee or tea?”) whereas others are clearly stealth marketing questions that may irk new users of the app. Even when genuinely interesting questions are posed, the answers are usually immediately available via existing search engines. Considering the application is merely days old, there is still a lot of room for growth, but the direction that growth ends up taking remains to be seen.

Recent Security Breaches for Social Networks

In early December, it was revealed that there had been yet another massive breach in social network security, as 2 million passwords were stolen in a hack that affected accounts for Facebook, Google, Twitter, Yahoo, LinkedIn, and more. The hackers, who are believed to have originated from the Netherlands, were using a virus that allowed them to access information for more than 93,000 websites, including many major social networks.

More recently, it appears that the security of Snapchat has also been compromised. A recent hack resulted in information regarding 4.6 million accounts getting posted on a website known as SnapchatDB.info. Though the site has since been suspended, the hackers were able to get information regarding phone numbers and passwords for all of these individual accounts.

According to the people behind Snapchat, the hole that allowed for this security breach has been sealed. However, some people believe that Snapchat’s response to the hack is evident of their existence as a very young startup company. One particular issue is that a group of ‘white hat hackers’ – people who find holes in security so that companies can prevent these kinds of breaches – had explicitly told Snapchat that there were holes that could be exploited. Yet Snapchat ignored this and didn’t even admit to their mistake in not listening when they released a brief statement regarding the breach.

Though these breaches in security have been unfortunate for a lot of people, one website is trying their hardest to help people find out whether or not their account has been compromised. The website ‘haveibeenpwned‘ allows people to enter their e-mail addresses that are used for these accounts to find out if theirs are among the accounts that have been compromised by any of these recent breaches. The website checks Adobe, Snapchat, Stratfor, Gawker, Yahoo!, Vodafone, Pixel Federation, and Sony accounts.

Twitter #Music Apparently a Resounding Failure

Earlier this year, Twitter announced their acquisition of the We Are Hunted service and their intentions to launch their own music-based mobile application. In April, this application came to be as Twitter #Music, which I covered upon its launch. Their were high hopes for Twitter’s official entry into the music business, with dreams that Twitter #Music would reach the same level of popularity as their video sharing application, Vine. Unfortunately for Twitter, this was simply not the case.

Upon its debut, Twitter #Music reached sixth place in the App Store rankings for free mobile application downloads, but this success was short-lived. By the end of August, Twitter had dropped to 1,672nd place in the rankings. Of music-related mobile applications alone, Twitter #Music currently ranks at 264, which is truly nothing to write home about for Twitter.

Apparently, behind the scenes, there were a number of missteps in Twitter’s development of Twitter #Music that may have led to its untimely demise. Unlike usual projects created by Twitter, the application was developed in isolation inside the company by the team behind We Are Hunted and former Twitter business development leader Kevin Thau. Part of the app’s lack of development may be attributed to the fact that Thau left the company right after Twitter #Music was launched, in order to become the COO of the mysterious startup known as Jelly.

While an official announcement has not yet been made by Twitter, inside sources claim that the project is going to be officially shut down, and that Twitter may instead find other ways to integrate music into users’ Twitter feeds. How exactly Twitter intends to proceed with Twitter #Music and their foray into the music industry remains to be seen.