Twitter

Twitter ad revenue should near $1B next year, researcher says

Twitter's ad revenue is soaring, and a big reason for that is mobile, a market research firm said today.

eMarketer estimates Twitter will earn $582.8 million in global ad revenue this year, $950 million next year, and $1.33 billion in 2015. According to its boosted forecast, more than half of Twitter's ad revenue -- about 53 percent -- will come from mobile advertising this year, up from virtually no ad revenue from mobile in 2011.

And mobile is where Twitter will see the most growth over the next two years, eMarketer said. By 2015, more than … Read more

Video not yet ripe on Twitter's Vine

Athletes do it. Celebrities do it. Brands do it. Even fashionistas find it trendy. Yet Vine, the 2-month-old "it" video-clip service from Twitter, isn't as popular you might expect. Nor is the entire video-sharing genre, which looks totally unhip when compared against our generation's photo-sharing ways.

Vine, a 6-second looping video application for iOS, launched on January 24. The app is celebrated for its panache, and allows users to patch together teeny-tiny clips to make artsy or inane mini movies.

Probably the best advancement in red carpet tech ever. #grammys vine.co/v/bvmPO6EZdxY

— Ryan Seacrest (@… Read more

Twitter hit with $50M suit over anti-Semitic tweeter data

The Union of Jewish French Students, UEJF, has doubled down in its battle with Twitter and said it filed a $50 million lawsuit against the social network yesterday.

The cause of the suit? User data for anti-Semitic tweets.

The fracas goes back to October when Twitter was awash in anti-Semitic French-language tweets tied to the hashtag "#unbonjuif" ("a good Jew"). This prompted the student union and other anti-racism groups to ask Twitter to remove both the tweets and the hashtag. The social network complied by deleting the tweets in France that it deemed racist.

While deleting … Read more

'Syrian Electronic Army' hacks a BBC Twitter account

The Twitter account of the BBC weather service was hacked today, and hacker group the Syrian Electronic Army -- which supports Syrian President Bashar Assad -- is taking credit.

The BBC confirmed to Reuters that its account was hacked. The @bbcweather account was posting strange messages today, ranging in content but often mentioning Syria and Middle Eastern politics.

"Long Live #Syria Al-Assad #SEA," read one tweet. The group also claimed to have hacked @BBCarabicOnline and @Bbcradioulster as well. The BBC tweeted that the issue has been resolved.

The Syrian Electronic Army has claimed hacks before, including one on … Read more

Talk on Twitter corresponds to higher TV ratings

This is a classic "which came first, the chicken or the egg" scenario: more talk on Twitter and higher TV ratings, or is it quality TV and more talk on Twitter?

Whatever the case, market research firm Nielsen has discovered that there is a correlation -- but not necessarily causation -- between Twitter and live TV ratings.

Using data from analytics platform SocialGuide, Nielsen found that 32 million unique people tweeted about TV in the U.S. in 2012. This may have led to Twitter being one of the top three variables aligned with TV ratings. The other … Read more

Oops! U.K. budget leaked on Twitter

The U.K. budget was leaked on Twitter today, granting politically minded surfers a sneak peek at George Osborne's number crunching ahead of time.

The key aspects of the chancellor's new measures -- including plans for the U.K.'s Internet speeds -- emerged early when London's Evening Standard newspaper tweeted its front page, which detailed the most crucial aspects of the annual ploy to make the U.K. more economically healthy.

The Standard posted an apology on its site, with editor Sarah Sands saying, "An investigation is immediately under way into how this front page … Read more

Twitter scores a patent for Twitter

If you're thinking about copying the way Twitter works, you might want to get a good lawyer: the technology at the core of the social network is officially patented.

As first reported by The Verge, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office granted Twitter a patent today for what it termed a "Device independent message distribution platform:"

A system (and method) for device-independent point to multipoint communication is disclosed. The system is configured to receive a message addressed to one or more destination users, the message type being, for example, Short Message Service (SMS), Instant Messaging (IM), … Read more

Twitter taking over the Middle East

Twitter may be on its way to striking it rich in the Middle East.

The information networking site has apparently developed an avid following in both Saudi Arabia and Turkey, the two countries that rank highest in terms of active Twitter user penetration, according to data published by GlobalWebIndex and analyzed by eMarketer.

Fifty-one percent of surveyed Internet users in Saudi Arabia and 39 percent of Internet users in Turkey identified themselves as active Twitter users. GlobalWebIndex surveyed more than 152,000 Internet users in 31 markets. An active Twitter user is defined as a person who has used the … Read more

Jack Dorsey on his childhood inspiration for Twitter

Twitter was partly inspired by the emergency dispatch center in St. Louis, Jack Dorsey explained to "60 Minutes" in a report that aired this evening.

A speech impediment as a child kept the Twitter co-founder at home a lot, where he would play on a computer and listen to the police scanner. He found himself fascinated by the short bursts of talking used by law enforcement and emergency personnel, which was the inspiration for the microblogging social network.

"They're always talking about where they're going, what they're doing and where they currently are," … Read more