April saw Americans flock online for the latest information related to the swine flu, causing traffic to surge at CDC.gov, according to new data from comScore.
The month also saw visits to social networking sites reach record numbers, driven by growth at Twitter and Facebook, as well as an increase in visits to real estate and home-related sites as the spring prompted many Americans to consider home improvements. The tax category also experienced strong growth due to the April 15 deadline.
Twitter and Google Respond to Their Respective Uproars
Two of the biggest names on the web had interesting weeks. Google experienced a big outage across a number of its services and Twitter mad a change to how it handles replies and sent a tidal wave of backlash throughout its user base.
Both companies received their fair share of negative responses from users, and both have responded to those responses on their respective blogs.
The Google Situation
Women Prefer Blogs/Facebook To Twitter
Women keep their personal lives and business lives very separate when it comes to social media, according to the 2009 Women in Social Media Study by BlogHer, iVillage, and Compass Partners. While women consider blogs great sources of information, especially regarding purchases, the vast majority of women use social networks solely for keeping in touch with family and friends.
5 Interesting Things Regarding Twitter
Not that this is an uncommon phenomenon these days, but there are quite a few Twitter-related news items floating around. I’d like to share some quick notes about five of them.
1. Twitter has surpassed the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal in traffic. This is particularly fascinating given the whole state of the news industry.
Kanye Puts Caps On Blast Against Twitter
Rapper, singer, professional pout composer Kanye West has a new beef, this time with the fake Twitter accounts being set up in his name.
The musician popular for remaking The Fray songs set his keyboard on caps lock and blogged his displeasure, the uncensored rant as follows:
What Is Twitter About in One Word?
The "what is Twitter about?" article is not a new concept. It’s been discussed frequently pretty much since Twitter was launched. Yet people still have a hard time grasping the concept.
Twitter Changes How Users View Replies
Update 2: Biz posted on the blog again showing that Twitter is taking users’ feelings on the matter seriously:
So here’s what we’re planning to do. First, we’re making a change such that any updates beginning with @username (that are not explicitly created by clicking on the reply icon) will be seen by everyone following that account. This will bring back some serendipity and discovery and we can do this very soon.
Twitter Quadruples Audience in 2 Months
Twitter has more than quadrupled its total audience over the last two months according to new data from comScore. Everybody knows that Twitter has been growing ridiculously, but this growth is astounding.
Compete data even showed that Twitter had surpassed the New York Times and Wall Street Journal sites in unique visitors. Here is the graph on that:
Stweet Takes Twitter Stalking To The Next Level
It’s not clear why anyone would want to do this but it’s interesting nonetheless. Stweet, aside from making those who speak its name sound like an infant, is a mashup of Google Maps and Twitter enabled by TwitterFon, an iPhone and iPod Touch application.
Bit.ly Switch Part of Twitter’s Realtime Search Strategy
URL shorteners sprang into sudden essentialness with the advent of microblogging, and especially with the advent of Twitter. Until yesterday, TinyURL was the shortener of choice, boosted by Twitter’s default shortener setting.
Twitter’s sudden switch to competing URL shortener Bit.ly not only was a surprise to many, but the move could spell an unforeseen and swift death for TinyURL. So what gives? What makes one URL shortener different from another?