social media

Social media experts are hard to friend.

Their sheer exalted certainty can often jolt the spine into uncomfortable spasms and jut the jaw into hitherto unknown positions.

It was inevitable, then, that in this moment of political excitement and uncertainty "Saturday Night Live" might attempt a poke or two in their direction.

Here we have a social media expert, Kourtney Barnes, who expresses her knowledge through the examples of one or two Facebook postings. A sample from one Hannah Goldberg on Mitt Romney's Facebook page suggests she doesn't find Mitt Romney terribly attractive at all.

"… Read more

Twitter appears poised to take on Instagram directly by offering sets of photo filters through its mobile apps, according to a report in The New York Times.

The Times reported that "in the coming months, Twitter plans to update its mobile applications to introduce filters for photos that will allow people to share altered images on Twitter and bypass Instagram."

If true, this would potentially be a very big move for Twitter, because it could keep people taking photos on smartphones from using the Facebook-owned Instagram altogether. Whether or not Twitter could create as passionate a community around … Read more

Twitter today unveiled a Political Engagement Map, a tool that lets anyone see where people are tweeting most about specific political issues.

"We've built a visualization that illustrates people's reaction to and engagement by state to tweets from @MittRomney and @BarackObama," Miguel Rios of Twitter's analytics team wrote in a blog post. "While the Twitter Political Index analyzes Tweets about the candidates, [we've] also been studying how citizens interact with tweets from the candidates. We... want to see what insights you can glean from Twitter data, so this visualization is fully interactive." … Read more

Letting users tap industry leaders for original content must be working out for LinkedIn. The professional network is getting more social today, adding a leaderboard for its subscription service and recommendations on who to follow based on member interests.

The company launched the ability for its 175 million members to subscribe to industry leaders, dubbed "influencers" by LinkedIn, and their industry-focused posts last month. The model is similar to Twitter's, in which a person can follow someone without needing them to follow back.

Since LinkedIn's launch of the subscriptions, the elite industry leaders, hand-picked by LinkedIn, … Read more

King.com, a fast growing developer of Facebook games, unveiled its second Facebook synchronized mobile game tonight, displaying the type of gaming experience Facebook says its wants more of.

King said that Candy Crush Saga, which has nearly 5 million daily active players and 15,600,000 monthly active players on Facebook, launches on mobile in November.

Sean Ryan, Facebook's director of games partnerships, said the game is an example of how popular Web games can successfully translate to mobile games. Candy Crush Saga will be available on iOS devices and synchronized with Facebook. This means players can pick … Read more

Social-media and e-commerce site Fancy may not have Pinterest's 25.3 million users or even Fab's 8 million users, but what Fancy lacks in user numbers, the company says, it's making up in mobile traffic and, most importantly, sales.

Fancy, which recently raised another $26.4 million from investors, released some new numbers and announced its new gift card offerings today, touting its mobile success while taking the opportunity to ding its competitors.

Fancy has more than 2 million registered users now, and while that's much less than wildly popular social-media site Pinterest or growing e-commerce … Read more

In recent months, Twitter has been making a push to create a consistent experience across as many platforms as possible, be it the Web, iOS, Android, OS X, Blackberry, or even Windows Phone 7. But one platform has been conspicuously missing: Windows on the PC.

Now, however, Twitter says that it is is planning to release an official Windows 8 app, meaning that for more than four million people who have already adopted the latest version of the operating system, they will no longer have to rely on third-party or Web apps.

This is also an important move for Microsoft, … Read more

Twitter CEO Dick Costolo told a London audience earlier this week that the microblogging service is now processing half a billion tweets a day, according to a published report.

According to V3, Costolo, speaking at the Internet Advertising Bureau's Engage conference in the U.K. capital, revealed the half-billion number, which is up from 400 million daily tweets, the last official number Twitter had publicized.

In the same talk, Costolo also confirmed recent reports that Twitter is testing out "like" and star buttons to potentially replace the "favorite" tool the service has used for years. … Read more