Over the weekend and yesterday there was much Tweeting about how porn had already reached Twitter’s Vine video app. Twitter is taking action against pornography on Vine and banning searches for explicit content and deleting X-rated users. It has also apologised for a “human error” that highlighted a graphic NSFW clip on the Vine homepage on Monday. That was maybe not the kind of showcase we had been expecting.

Now some more positive experiments are taking place as brands begin to look at how they can use it for mini ads. Or if not ads then amusing pieces of bite sized content. Is that the same thing? I think it is. Read More »

This video from Opensite.org is well worth a watch.  Put together by a team of designers and researcher with the idea to show the reach of social media and how over the past year or so it has help spark revolutions around the world.

It takes its cue from Gil-Scott Heron’s famous line, that “The revolution will not be televised” and of course he was right. It wasn’t brought to you by brands and NBC certainly could not predict the winner.

Instead, as we have found out the revolution was youtubed, statused and retweeted by social networking sites around the globe with a potential reach of 82% of the global population or 1.2 billion people.

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We’ve read so much about how the US 2012 Presidential election is going to be the Twitter election, as both sides ramp up their  use of social media although still  fail to engage as I wrote recently, and it has been interesting to watch it emerge and work its way deeper into the heart of mainstream media.

We got a taste of the kind of thing we might see with Twitter’s recent Olypmics deal with NBC. That proved a real learning curve for Twitter, which got into a bit of a muddle when it blocked one journalist’s account before quickly restoring it again

Now we are seeing Al Gore’s Current TV turnover half of its screen to Twitter for the US elections in an effort to help it compete and differentiate itself from its much bigger and better funded rivals such as ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, Fox News and CNN et cetera. Read More »

A good infographic here from Fiasco Design summing up how Twitter was used throughout the London Olympics, which certainly lived up to their promise as the world’s first social games.

It illustrates how Twitter  played such a major role in the London 2012 Olympics from the 10 million who mentioned the opening ceremony, the popularity of Mr Bean and Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the rise of #NBCfail and the millions of mentions of our brilliant Team GB and the athletes.

It is all here. The highs as well as some of the lows such as Tom Daley’s Twitter troll moment. Although that didn’t hold Daley back he was the big winner on Twitter at London 2012. Read More »

It was a storm in a Twitter cup. Guy Adams the Independent journalist who had his account suspended, after publishing the email address of an NBC executive, has had his Twitter account reinstated.

In a blog post reminding users about its private information policy and its Terms of Service Twitter admitted that the team working with NBC on its Olympics coverage did over step the mark and pro-actively flagged Adams’ tweet to NBC and told the broadcaster how to make a complaint.

For that part of the story Twitter held its hands up and apologised admitting “that we did mess up”. It went further, to reassure Twitter users, and said that “this behaviour was not acceptable and undermines the trust we users have in us”. Read More »

Twitter has suspended the account of the Independent’s Los Angeles correspondent, Guy Adams, after a tweet criticising NBC’s wobbly Olympics’ coverage, which has been trending on Twitter under the hashtag #NBCfail.

Twitter looks to be making a fascinating move into become a fully fledged media player, producing original content, according to an Ad Week article.

It says that the San Francisco-based company, along with multiple Hollywood producers and network executives are in serious talks about the possibility of launching several original video series via Twitter. Read More »

Twitter chief executive Dick Costolo has again been talking about how Twitter is not a media company, but rather “a technology company operating in the media space”.

He made his comment in an interview with the Wall Street Journal at a timely moment.

Yesterday its was revealed that Twitter was teaming up with US broadcaster NBC Universal to cover the Olympics. Read More »

With a lot of talk recently that Twitter is increasingly positioning itself as a media company it is expected today to announce a major Olympics partnership with NBCUniversal to cover the London 2012 games.

Working out of an office in Boulder Colorado, a team of Twitter staff will curate Olympic tweets from athletes and fans and NBC television presenters into a single page on Twitter.com. Read More »

From worrying over divided attention to leveraging the potential of the portable screen, marketers have started linking the ‘second screen’ (tablets and mobile phones) with the ‘first screen’ (TV) to raise levels of engagement.

“The second screen can turn TV viewing into a shared experience, enable fans to go deeper into the story world, allow instant follow-up on a call to action, extend a message beyond the limits of 30 seconds—and the list goes on,” says Ann Mack, director of trendspotting for JWT.

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