As rain lashes and floods hit the UK, Facebook is being leveraged to support those at risk and suffering the affects of flood, in a bid to prevent a repeat of the devastation cause when they hit the UK in 2007.

‘The Flood Group UK’ page has been set up the Environment Agency and is supported by the Scottish Environment Protection Agency , the Rivers Agency of Northern Ireland, the National Flood Forum, the Scottish Flood Forum and the Cockermouth Flood Action Group. Read More »

Back in May the New York Times put real people behind Twitter feed as an experiment to see what would happen. It only tried it for a while before it reverted to mostly auto tweets, which is what many news organisations do including the BBC. Until now that is.

Today the BBC is implementing a new system after auto tweeting its headlines for years it will be putting its editors behind the tweet wheel and getting them to tweet during day time hours. It makes all the difference. Read More »

Twitter have launched a new feature this morning which adds even more context to tweets. Since #newtwitter launched a year ago, the micro-blogging network has been building on the original simplicity of 140-character posts to provide context of conversations and media contained in tweets.

This update reorganises the layout of the tweet as displayed in the timeline, placing the ‘retweet’, ‘reply’ etc buttons at the top along with an ‘Open’ link, clicking which reveals the timestamp and ‘sent from’ data. At the bottom of tweets containing compatible media, there is now a ‘View media’ link which expands a module like the one above, showing an Amazon.com product. Read More »

UPDATE – A follow-up to this morning’s announcement about Twitter and the X Factor Simon Cowell, the show’s creator and one time social media sceptic, has come out and said in the New York Times that “The only powerful people now on TV are the people on Twitter and Facebook.”

Bold stuff indeed. The comment underscores how important TV is to Twitter and how it is working to expand its content team to work with media firms. Read More »