Recent quotes:

Adam Tooze, Crisis Historian, Has Some Bad News for Us - The Atlantic

Russia’s foreign-exchange reserves, for instance. One Tooze post examined how accumulating those reserves helped Vladimir Putin turn the country into a “strategic petrostate” bold enough to invade Ukraine and capable of countering Western powers. About 150,000 people, including some in the German chancellor’s office, read the essay. “I thought, Wow, this is worthwhile,” Tooze told me. “For somebody who comes out of an academic publishing background, where you’re lucky if 1,000 people read what you write, the numbers tick up so fast.” On Substack, his output also proved financially rewarding: “For anyone on a regular, white-collar, academic-type salary, it’s transformative.”

Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid - The Atlantic

The text does not say that God destroyed the tower, but in many popular renderings of the story he does, so let’s hold that dramatic image in our minds: people wandering amid the ruins, unable to communicate, condemned to mutual incomprehension. […]The story of Babel is the best metaphor I have found for what happened to America in the 2010s, and for the fractured country we now inhabit. Something went terribly wrong, very suddenly. We are disoriented, unable to speak the same language or recognize the same truth. We are cut off from one another and from the past.

What's the prevailing opinion on social media? Look at the flocks, says researcher -- ScienceDaily

Murmuration identifies meaningful groups of social media actors based on the "who-follows-whom" relationship. The actors attract like-minded followers to form "flocks," which serve as the units of analysis. As opinions form and shift in response to external events, the flocks' unfolding opinions move like the fluid murmuration of airborne starlings. The framework and the findings from an analysis of social network structure and opinion expression from over 193,000 Twitter accounts, which followed more than 1.3 million other accounts, suggest that flock membership can predict opinion and that the murmuration framework reveals distinct patterns of opinion intensity. The researchers studied Twitter because of the ability to see who is following whom, information that is not publicly accessible on other platforms. The results, published in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, further support the echo chamber tendencies prevalent on social media, while adding important nuance to existing knowledge. "By identifying different flocks and examining the intensity, temporal pattern and content of their expression, we can gain deeper insights far beyond where liberals and conservatives stand on a certain issue," says Zhang, an expert in social media and political communication. "These flocks are segments of the population, defined not by demographic variables of questionable salience, like white women aged 18-29, but by their online connections and response to events.

How Technology Grows (a Restatement of Definite Optimism)

I tweet/retweet three things: informationally-dense pieces, interesting pictures, and good jokes. Generally I try to follow people who do the same. Occasionally the waves of angry Twitter wash up on my happy island, but it’s not frequent.

How an obsession with right wing media spawned a booming newsletter

As far as de-platforming. I think I’m sort of two minds about how often Twitter should be getting rid of people. But I do think that it’s hugely successful in terms of reducing a right wing figure’s influence. Milo went from being hugely well known. Obviously there were other things that affected his credibility within the conservative movement. But he went from a guy who was very out front in terms of being in reporters’ minds to a guy who is reduced to posting on Instagram. And in the exact same thing with Chuck Johnson. He was a character that everyone was sick of, and a guy who gets his credibility and his influence basically from antagonizing people, well, if you kick him out, that goes away. And he’s sort of fuming on Facebook.

Tweets for SCOTUSnom

The White House has created a new Twitter handle, he said — @SCOTUSnom — and he urged people to follow it for “all the facts and up-to-date information.”

Obscure German Tweet Helped Spur Migrant March From Hungary - WSJ

On Tuesday, Aug. 25, at 1:30 p.m., a government agency in the southern German city of Nuremberg posted a sentence on Twitter that would change the lives of tens of thousands of desperate people. “We are at present largely no longer enforcing Dublin procedures for Syrian citizens,” said the note, posted on the account of the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees.

Denton openness

Everybody will be back to work this coming week. New office. New execs. Gawker always bounces back. This is just the way that crises play out in open organizations. And I know I would say that, but it is also true. Just think about it: an all-hands meeting in which everybody is free to speak, and they’re backchanneling on Slack [an instant messaging app] and live-blogging on Twitter. Total transparency. Most companies would be terrified!

Journalists give, Twitter takes

In the last month, I've created nearly 2 million impressions for Twitter. Whether that is good for my Twitter persona and my pride is a qualitative question whose answer resides outside the bounds of an analytics dashboard. But it is quantitatively not a good deal for The Atlantic. Something I already suspected has now been made crystal clear: 99 percent of my work on Twitter belongs to Twitter.

Twitter blames Apple... by mistake

On Friday, a clarification message appeared on Twitter’s investor relations account. “There was no bug or issue with iOS8,” the tweet said. “It is an issue on Twitter’s side as users upgraded.”

How iOS 8 cost Twitter 4 million users - Business Insider

There were two issues. One was Safari auto-polling, and that was 3 million users and we don't expect to get those users back. The other issue that was more complex was an encryption issue related to the Twitter integration into iOS, such that when users integrated, a lot of them weren't able to launch Twitter successfully. That was a much more complex issue, it did not have a one-size-fits-all fix, so the team here worked as quickly as possible to address it but it caused a large number of users to not be able to use the product, even those who were trying repeatedly to figure out ways to get in.

Viktor Orbán is not only illiterate when it comes to computers. What about diplomacy? | Hungarian Spectrum

Goodfriend: “Interesting to see the nature of crowds in Budapest. Internet tax march seemed large & orderly w/good police support.” Then later: “Seeing the news reports of vandalism during the march as well, which I condemn. Not as orderly as it seemed where I stood.” Kovács: “Checkin’ the mood, André?! @a demonstration organized by MSZP and liberals’?! As Chargé d’Affaires? Interesting, Eh?” Goodfriend: “Absolutely. I’ve also checked the mood at the Peace Marches, and at numerous other events organized in Hungary.” Kovács: “Are you sure that’s the wisest thing in this histerically stirred-up atmosphere while you vindicate to be a key actor? Eh?!” Goodfriend: “There’s always a choice between hiding away, & getting out to see what’s happening. I try to hear the full range of perspectives.” Kovács: “Sure ‘hearing’ and influencing does make a large difference.” Goodfriend: “When I want to influence, I speak. Otherwise, I’m listening. Sometimes there’s not enough listening.” Kovács: “That we’ve learned through the past couple of days. Sometimes there’s too much ‘demonstration.'” Goodfriend: “So, now is the time to draw lessons from the discussion, and follow words with constructive, meaningful deeds.” Kovács: “Surely, giving an ultimatum by demonstrators to a govt is no ground for constructivity. Good luck with friends like that…” Goodfriend: “Some people see ‘ultimatum’ others see a proposition awaiting response as part of dialog. Constructive part may be the response.”

Twitter is polluted and getting worse

Even though I follow people I like and respect, there’s no way around seeing some of the crap that happens on Twitter. Even if you don’t use Twitter at all, you will have seen articles about people being harrassed and threatened. You will have noticed the pure toxic sludge that pours through the service. (A hypothetical “Dawn of the Idiocracy” prequel would feature Twitter prominently.) And it’s worse than any blog comments system, because if you use it, anybody can put something in front of your face whether you want it or not. Twitter is also wonderful, and I get so much value out of it. But it’s like 51% good and 49% bad. I don’t see it getting any better. Hopefully it can hold the line at just-barely-worth-it. (But the recent changes to the timeline make that a little less likely.)

Even smart people start shouting amid Twitter's noise.

My feed (full of people I admire) is mostly just a loud, stupid, sad place. Basically: a mirror to the world we made that I don’t want to look into. The common way to refute my complaint is to say that I’m following the wrong people. I think I’m following the right people, I’m just seeing the worst side of them while they’re stuck in an inhospitable environment. It’s exasperating to be stuck in a stream.

Twitter too noisy

But what I’ve come to call Big Twitter is simply not a place for conversation any more. I don’t like this change. I made friends — real friends — on Twitter when it was a place for conversation. I reconnected with people I had lost touch with. Whole new realms of knowledge were opened to me. I don’t want to foreclose on the possibility of further discovery, but the signal-to-noise ration is so bad now that I don’t think I could pick out the constructive and interesting voices from all the mean-spiritedness and incomprehension; and so few smart people now dare to use Twitter in the old open way. Big Twitter was great — for a while. But now it’s over, and it’s time to move on. I’m just hoping that some smart people out there are learning from what went wrong and developing social networks that can strengthen the signal and silence the noise.
The planning began in early March, when one of Cunningham's colleagues on the social-media team, Jessica Lindsay, sat down with a Huge project manager and someone from the agency's strategy department to begin planning social-media posts for April. There, they discussed general themes the brand could talk about over the course of the month and create a calendar of proposed post ideas. In April, the brand would be continuing its "Art of Cheese" campaign, which provides its 100 Twitter followers and 220 Facebook fans with tips on how to best enjoy its products. The campaign had previously been running on various food and cheese blogs before Huge created President Cheese's social-media accounts from scratch at the beginning of April. Shortly after the initial meeting, Lindsay met with a copywriter and graphic designer to brainstorm tweet ideas for the next month. It was then that the copywriter suggested a tweet centered on the idea that Camembert, a French cheese popular during the spring, was best served at room temperature. The copywriter and designer met the next week to create the image for the tweet, which was then pitched at a team meeting alongside other posts for April. The meeting includes Lindsay, the copywriter, a designer team, and a project manager. Then it's on to an internal review, where senior copywriters and strategists sign off on the work over the course of the following week. The post was then sent to President Cheese and, some 45 days after conception, published on the internet for the world to see. Thus far, the post has yet to be retweeted, but it has generated two favorites.
a closer examination of what people are sharing via Twitter reveals that the platform often serves as a flag alerting followers to longer form content. Rather than replacing articles and other long-form features, Twitter is often used to promote them – providing a 140-character tip of the iceberg that points to the rich content experience lurking below the surface.
Summer's Eve's sassy black talking vagina; Pine-Sol's subservient cleaning lady; Popeyes Southern sounding "Chicken Queen" and countless others. I am certain most of them were done innocently enough. And many of you reading this may not even be aware that these efforts rubbed people the wrong way. But today's social-media landscape lends itself to hearty and mercurial retribution. Two words: Black Twitter.
a Twitter follower is almost three times more likely to apply to a job than a LinkedIn connection, and more than eight times more likely to apply than a Facebook follower, indicating that Twitter might be a highly underutilized social recruiting channel. And Twitter followings drive almost twice as many job views per job as their Facebook fan bases.
But unlike Facebook, Twitter really was a collaboration; an idea that came out of a failed podcasting company that happened to come about at the right time. While Dorsey had the germ of the idea, without the collaboration of the people who worked at Odeo, that idea would have remained just an idea. Glass’s realization that the initial concept could be adapted to connect people to their friends was significant. And the name he came up with undoubtedly helped, too. Without Williams and Stone influencing its development with the lessons they learned from Blogger, it still would not have taken off. Making it a company required Williams’s money, then Wilson, Sabet and Fenton’s and dozens of other investors, not to mention Costolo, who turned it into viable business, and 2,000 employees who helped shape it into one of the biggest social networks on the planet. Such is the case with every company in Silicon Valley, though you never hear it in their creation myth. Dorsey will make $400 million to $500 million when Twitter goes public. Glass stands to make about as much as Dorsey’s secretary at Square.
In addition, our advertising revenue per timeline view in the United States is substantially higher than our advertising revenue per timeline view in the rest of the world. For example, during the three months ended June 30, 2013, our advertising revenue per timeline view in the United States was $2.17 and our advertising revenue per timeline view in the rest of the world was $0.30. We expect this disparity to continue for the foreseeable future.
Topsy makes its money from more sophisticated tools — aimed at marketers, media companies, political operations, and hedge funds — that require a subscription fee that starts at $12,000 a year. Those allow searches that compare different terms, narrow down results by geography and surface the specific tweets with the most influence on the social conversation.
Despite the efforts of companies like Klout and Twitalyzer, the industry that’s appeared around “influence” measurement best resembles the early days of search engine optimization. It’s full of tricks, games, and shady third parties trying to game the system to make a quick buck. Anyone with a few hours to spare can create a Twitter bot that not only appears human, but that, according to the best tools we have right now, is a more influential entity than actual people.
Tweets had the greatest impact on programs in the competitive reality genre, influencing ratings changes in nearly half (44 percent) of episodes. Episodes in the comedy (37%) and sports (28%) genres also saw significant increased tune-in from tweets, while programs in the drama genre were less affected (18%) by tweets during episodes.
The annoying SMS messages from nocturnal friends is not the only thing which bothers me about this service, but also the fact, that the texting a message(reply) to twttr ends up on their website. Best thing is to allow users to create micro groups, and give users the options of picking topics and setting rules to maintain privacy and control over the service.
So I've been making a concerted effort to create structure on my computer using different kinds of software and so forth, that forces me to get less of my news from social media, and more of it by reading my RSS feed, which are blogs, or going to other news sites. I really have begun to worry that it gets really easy to tilt into a Twitter centric news diet, because you feel that if you're not following it, you miss something that's gone forever, because the conversation doesn't archive in any readable way. And I think that creates a kind of obsessive quality, it leads to an over-reliance on the far side of what the signal to noise ratio of not just Tweets, but actual links on Twitter, should be.