Twitter has just passed the 500 million user mark, as predicted back in January, just shy of its sixth birthday. It has achieved amazing growth over the last year or so as it has become an indispensable feature of the media and entertainment landscape around the world.

There have been a lot of Twitter landmarks along the way stretching back to the 2008 presidential election through to the Arab Spring and the death of Osama Bin Laden. Read more »

Interesting move by The Sunday Times today. It reacted to the outpouring of tweets following the death of war correspondent Marie Colvin in Syria by putting her final report for the paper outside of its paywall.

There was a mass of tweets this morning as the tragic news broke of the death of the long time and highly respected Times journalist who was killed in the besieged city of Homs along with photographer Remi Ochlik after a shell hit the house they were sheltering in. Read more »

What does the future look like? It might look a little different viewed through these Google glasses, or Google Goggles if you like, which come with a heads up display not unlike that most of us will be familiar with from films like The Terminator.

According to the 9to5 Google blog the glasses are real and they are in at the late prototype stage and look not unlike a pair of Oakley Thump MP3 sunglasses featured here. Read more »

You must have already read lots of posts about Pinterest, but add this to the list. A great Slideshare from Micheal Litman. It does pretty much what it says on the tin: everything you wanted to know about Pinterest.

Included here are answer to questions such as how the idea came about, useful statistics; facts and demographics; what are people pinning; which brands are using it; and how to get started. Read more »

While no one looks like catching Facebook any time soon in terms of the size of support brands enjoy on that social network there is an interesting battle being waged for second place and at the moment Google+ growing significantly faster than its 140 character rival.

Fans are signing up in greater number to follow brands on Google+ than they are on Twitter, according to a report by Social Bakers. Read more »

I’m sure you remember the very succcesful Mydavidcameron.com site that ran during the 2012 General Election parodying David Cameron and friends. Now there is a French version targeting Nicolas Sarkozy although the French President is not taking the spoofing so lighlty.

His team appear to have complained to Twitter about the Twitter account related to “Ma France Forte” (@_nicolassarkozy) and it has been suspended along with three other accounts spoofing Sarkozy. Read more »

Twitter is launching a self advertising platform aimed at small businesses who will for the first time have the same control over their online ads on the microblogging service as they do on Facebook.

The self-service ad platfrom will go live in March and will massively expand the number of advertisers using Twitter from an estimated 3,000 to tens of thousands. Twitter has also announced that the new version of Twitter is now available for all. Read more »

A very good event this morning at London Social Media Week run by digital agency Beyond on the Future of Sharing. It presented research that is perfectly distilled here into a very decent infographic. The focus ws on what is being dubbed “frictionless sharing”, which with the introduction of Facebook OpenGraph we are seeing from brands like Spotify, Ticketmaster, AirBnB. Soon a lot more brands we join that small cadre.

This shift to frictionless sharing has proven to be polarising with some saying that sharing is being ruined by oversharing, but it is early days. We are still at the very start of this change in how we share and have barely dipped our feet in the water let alone taken the plunge. Read more »

We’ve already seen the odd brand unofficially experiment with Facebook’s new Timelines, but they due to become available officially for brands very shortly.

Currently the new Facebook Timeline is only available for Facebook users and we have all seen the transformative effect that can have on a page. It has turned Facebook pages from message boards into picture centric social scrapbooks, which stream a user’s life, suggesting brands could so some very smart and distinctive things with these new pages. Read more »

PR firm Portland has released its second NewsTweet Index, which has propelled PoliticsHome.com editor, Paul Waugh (@paulwaugh), to the number one spot in the top 50. Waugh is also the only journalist in the list not from a major media group.

Overall, The Guardian continues to have the highest number of journalists listed in the top 50, with ten represented, but this is considerably less than last time as the list appears to have been broadened out. Read more »