The project, which has been called ‘Pulse of a Nation’, was set up to establish which areas in the US were most satisfied with their lot, and whether analysis of Twitter status feeds could actually bring insight to the state of a nation.

The research concluded that people in the West were more happy than their East coast counterparts, and overall Hawaii constituted the most happy place for people. Alaska and Mississippi did not fare so well, with residents thought to be the most miserable in these two locations.

The study also discovered that people are more bad-tempered on a Thursday, possible due to the fact that they have worked all week, but are still one day away from the weekend. To gain these insights, scientists examined 300 million Twitter updates, published over a three year period. The tweets were categorized and organised in to keywords. Typical keywords which added to the results included ‘Happy’, ‘Sad’, ‘Glad’, ‘Love’ and ‘Joy’.

A Northwestern University researcher commented: “This isn’t in any way a mature research project. But it’s a cool project and promises all sorts of possibilities. And while it underlines prejudices people hold about the west coast and the east coast, it is impossible when you see the map not to make that interpretation. But again, we haven’t anchored this data down.”

The project follows on the back of research which uses Twitter to determine public trends and opinions, for example film reviews and receptions, or sports predictions. Future development could see scientists and researchers relying upon Twitter to determine political opinion, financial and economic stability, or cultural shifts.

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With the new feature, updates will now reveal the location of the person who posted the status update. It will be enabled for Twitter Web and Twitter’s Mobile Web capability. When a reader wishes to find out where the post was sent from, they simply click on the link in the tweet which points to ‘Twitter Place’.

Twitter has designed the new functionality to provide more context for tweets, and offer more capability for online social networking. Now, if a group of people are all located within the same area (such as at a football match, concert or theatre performance), they will be able to click on the Twitter Place link to see all the most recent tweets being sent from that location. This means that festivals, holidays or events will now have an additional form of media coverage, created by social networking.

The API functionality behind the idea has now been made available to developers, so that it can be integrated in to programmes. With the exception of Firefox and Chrome, all platforms should be supporting the new functionality.
Twitter is becoming one of the most popular ways for people to keep friends and business associates updated, in just a few characters.

The nature of the site means that busy internet users need spend less time on status updates, and have the functionality to ‘tweet’ in a matter of seconds. The new feature allowing Place updates will revolutionise the site to some extent, as it provides geographical background to users and readers. This functionality will make it easier to locate potential new business prospects, target new and existing customers, and enable natural geographical groups to form through online networking.

Twitter Places will be rolled out in 65 countries, next week.

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The popular microblogging web site, which also recently announced it would integrate advertising with searches through its Promoted Tweets, plans to use existing Smallthought employees as part of the web site’s analytics team.

According to a post by Kevin Weil on the official Twitter Blog:

“The new employees have joined our analytics team and will focus on integrating ideas from Trendly into our current tools and building innovative realtime products for our future commercial partners,”

The company required extra staff and resources in order to maintain the overflowing amount of information that the Twitter web site handles on a daily basis, according to Twitter CEO Dick Costello. The service currently receives more than 65 million updates every day from its users, whose numbers are nearing 200 million.

“Every day millions of people use Twitter to create, share and discover information, and as we grow, analytics becomes an increasingly crucial part of improving our service,” the company said on their blog.

The staff from Smallthought and Trendly will also be working on new tools and products to offer for Twitter partners in the future as well.

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The companies chief operating officer Dick Costolo stated in his blog post that Twitter are committed to creating the best possible “user experience”.

“It is critical that the core experience of real-time introductions and information is protected for the user and with an eye toward long-term success for all advertisers, users and the Twitter ecosystem,” he wrote.

“For this reason, aside from Promoted Tweets, we will not allow any third-party to inject paid tweets in to a timeline on any service that leverages the Twitter API.”

Costolo also stated that the company were going to start charging companies that sell advertising based around Twitter content, “where that Twitter content is the basis (in whole or in part) for the advertising sale”.

This would mean that companies such as Ad.ly for example, a US site that sells adverts into streams, and Tweetup may need to begin to look elsewhere for revenue.

Costolo also said that companies could continue to sell analytics and other services that are based around Twitter.

Twitter said that they would be issuing a new set of revised terms of service that will outline what will and will not be permitted under the new rules in the clearest way possible.

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This is according to a brand new survey published by the UK Online Measurement company (UKOM), they found that your average web user in the UK spends a total of 22 hours and 15 minutes on the internet every month.

Unsurprisingly the highest percentage of the time (22.7 per cent) is spent on blogs and social networking sites, which have majorly shifted focus away from other online habits since 2007 – particularly instant messaging, (MSN and AIM) which now only accounts for just 4.9 per cent of time spent online, compared to 14 per cent three years ago.

This drop in instant messaging shows just how popular social networking sites have become as millions of users seem to have stopped using the previously ubiquitous instant messaging programs. Social networks such as Facebook and Twitter now hold a highly significant influence in many areas of contemporary life, they have even played a role in the recent General Election.

UKOM spokesperson Alex Burmaster stated that communication, networking and online games are still the most popular pastimes. “These are the pillars on which the internet is built,” he said.

E-mail was previously perceived as being an obvious victim to the rise of social networking but it has surprisingly grown from 6.5 per cent in 2007 to 7.2 per cent in 2010. Whilst online games take up 6.9 per cent of all time spent online in the UK, including on games consoles such as Microsoft’s Xbox Live service.

“Social networking is like an organism, feeding off itself and getting bigger,” Burmaster explained. “People are plugging more and more of their lives into it.”

The study by UKOM also revealed that adult sites only account for a modest proportion of internet use, with people actually spending more time visiting news sites (2.8 per cent) than seeking out pornography (2.7 per cent).

“It is a bit of a digital myth that everyone online visits adult sites,” Burmaster said.

“We divide the internet into 85 different sections so the fact that adult content is in the top 10 shows it is still one of the most heavily used sectors.”

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Named Spindex the service works in a similar way to products such as FriendFeed and runs with the slogan “Make sense of your social overload.”

The main aim is to show users all activity across each of the Social Networking sites that they are registered with thus avoiding the annoying task of having to log into each of your accounts individually.

Lili Cheng, General Manager of Microsoft Fuse Labs wrote:

“Spindex, which we’re making available in early technical preview form, aggregates your social streams (Facebook, Twitter, Bing, etc.), making it simple for you to find what’s new, see personalized trending topics, and generally make the most of the time you spend being social on the Web.”

Microsoft’s Fuse Labs is the company’s short term centre for innovation having recently launched a Bing-Twitter mash up to enable users to see where their friends are tweeting. They have been busy of late having released a product for Microsoft Office 2010 that can integrate social media into outlook and a tool to integrate documents completely into Facebook.

It would seem that Microsoft are subscribing to the age old prophecy ‘if you can’t beat them join them’ as they habitually team with Facebook and Twitter rather than competing directly against them.

A trip to the Spindex website gives a little more information as to what exactly the service does:

“Allows you to access and interact with your social networks, see trends from your friends, and see related info from Bing on literally everything you click on. Spindex proactively finds useful articles and information based on your interest in your friends’ messages and comments.”

It is only available as a technical preview to those at the web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco but should be on general release later in the year.

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The service was launched earlier this week and can be used by both free and premium account users of Spotify, the new feature will allow users to access their Facebook accounts from the Spotify site, a trend that appears to be growing quite rapidly this year.

The link with Facebook will allow users to share music and playlists to be shared with friends over the social networking site. Twitter users will have a similar experience as they will be able to share music through direct Spotify links that will appear as Tweets.

This is a bold and decisive move by Spotify as they attempt to dent Apple’s dominance of the music sharing market. There should be no reason why the two cannot co-exist as the Spotify service is quite different from that of iTunes.

Whereas iTunes concentrates on selling the tracks to the user at a price, Spotify have concentrated more on the access model of allowing the user to listen to whatever song they choose but without being able to own it as an mp3. Both have their uses and each will suit the different ways that people listen to music.

This announcement has conveniently come just after Facebook owner Mark Zuckerberg declared last week that Facebook are helping to push the web to move into an area of more social interaction.

Spotify’s new social feature hopes to add more premium users to the service. At present only 320,000 people pay the £9.99 subscription for the ad-free premium account, a figure that they hope will rise with the addition of Facebook and Twitter, never underestimate the power of social networking.

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The site is fairly well known in the US and has only recently raised eyebrows in the UK but they are already set to hit the milestone of 1 million users according to a Tweet posted by the company last week, not bad for a company that is just over a year old.

The service has proved extremely popular for those living in big cities around the US . It will track a users whereabouts via their mobile phone and is able to recognise when a user arrives or ‘checks in’ to a specific store, restaurant or attraction located in their city.

The user must be signed into Foursquare in order for it to track their movements via the GPS built into their phones. If the user visits a specific establishment enough they are awarded the ‘mayor’ status, which means that they are the individual with the most visits. Many businesses offer prizes and rewards for anyone that becomes a mayor, it works sort of like a high tech loyalty card that you are pretty much guaranteed to have on you at all times.

The service has only recently been introduced in the UK with London inevitably the first city to become part of the network. Debenhams and Dominos Pizza were among the first major companies to target users of the service in the UK and with the growing popularity of Foursquare there are likely to be many more over the coming months.

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Google Buzz went live in February of this year and has been met with much criticism as it does not appear to offer anything innovative or different from its rivals apart from its integration with G-mail, until now.

Google will hope that the new map feature changes the criticism into praise as it will also be made available to mobile phone users of Buzz.

It sounds as thought the integration between Maps and Buzz will work very well alongside Twitter posts and mobile uploads which will place the user at the location they were in when they submitted any updates or posts whilst logged into the service.

The service is primarily aimed at adding a new dimension to status updates as they will show other users your exact global location along with your status update, if that is something that at all appeals to you.

The user will also be able to go into Google maps, perform a location search (probably of the location that they are at or are planning to visit) and tick ‘Buzz’. This will then show that user who else is at that particular location.

Although it does sound like a unique service that will surely have its users it is also bound to have complaints from people seeking web privacy as the question will surely be asked: who wants everyone to know exactly where they are at all times? Google will hope that everyone does.

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Service will help greatly to archive the billions of status updates made in Twitter from the millions of users registered with the site.

To date the Twitter search had been struggling a great deal to even show users Tweets from a month ago due to such massive demand and use on the site.

This new search feature created by Google will help archive and search of both Tweets and status updates. Twitter are currently receiving 50 million Tweets every day worldwide, over the course of a month this is incredibly overwhelming in terms of data, Google’s new archiving system will help to rectify this.

At the moment Google Replay can only search through a months worth of Tweets but Google have announced that in the future it will be able to search through all Tweets since the inception of the site in March 2006. This will include Tweets from the specific user or from other users that they may be following.

Google Replay will also offer a timeline which will allow users to choose a specific year, date or time in which they are looking to find a Tweet.

This could prove to be a rather handy service and is another example of co-operation between Google and Twitter after Google ensure that real-time Tweets would be available in their search.

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Co-founder of the Twitter site, Evan Williams, said that they decided to make their own official Twitter application because new users are constantly having trouble finding the right software to access the site on their mobile phones.

The company did not reveal whether the Twitter team would be building the client in-house or whether they would be looking to acquire the technology from a third party that has already built an un-official application that can support Twitter such as Twidroid or Swith.

Twitter have already purchased third party app Tweetie for the iPhone suggesting that they may be releasing an official Twitter app for the Apple operating system soon enough.

In the same announcement Twitter revealed that they would soon be releasing their own official link-shortener to rival companies such as TinyUrl and Bit.ly.

Most Twitter clients already have a built in link-shortener that auto-condenses the URL address in order to help keep the Tweets within the 140 character limit so this does make sense.

As Twitter expands on its 105 million registered users a day it would seem that they are making moves to support the growing popularity of the social networking site.

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Advertisers will be able to purchase “promoted Tweets” that will appear on search result pages on the Twitter site. Twitter seem keen to underline the fact that they will not be regular internet advertisements, they must “resonate with users” and become a part of their conversations according to Twitter co-founder Biz Stone.

As would be expected a few big names have already signed up to be a part of the promoted Tweets service, including Starbucks and Sony.

As not to go from having no adverts to completely overloading the site with them only one Tweet will show up on each search page, but we will see how long that lasts.

This is Twitter’s first move in the direction of profit making, previously the company has not made any money, only now are they starting to do deals to raise revenue.

Promoted Tweets is only the first step in Twitter’s overall advertising plan, in the future they hope to include the promoted Tweets in a users stream of posts rather than just on the search page.

Twitter seem to be following a similar path to Facebook, no adverts at first, then the allowance of just a few, surely it will not be too long until each page is flanked by ads offering bigger muscles, compensation for injuries and strangely high paying jobs.

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The new look homepage will focus mainly on ‘real time’ updates as it now features recent trends and popular Tweets in real time. The update will also entail real time search options as well as a feature that Twitter have named ‘Top Tweets’. These are Tweets from users that Twitter considers high profile, so most likely celebrities or anyone else in the public eye.

The main premise behind these updates is to entice more users to join the social networking site by presenting them with Tweets that they may be of interest to them, i.e. posts by a selection of well known names.

Trending topics will remain on the homepage but the way that they are displayed has been changed, they will now scroll across the page rather then being listed, this will increase the amount of space available for content that Twitter deems more important.

A blog from a Twitter representative sums up the reasoning behind the changes well:

“All of our recent changes embrace the notion that Twitter is not just for status updates anymore. It’s a network where information is exchanged and consumed at a rapid clip every second of the day. With so much being shared, we know that there’s something of value for everyone. People who internalize the value of Twitter understand the power of this simple medium. But it hasn’t been easy to make that value transparent or obvious for curious folks coming to Twitter for the first time.”

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They have this week announced that they will be making a geo-location service available on the site. The ever creative people at Twitter are continuously innovating and changing what you can input into the strict 140 character tweet limit and geo-location is the latest edition. They have already pushed the use of URL shorteners like bit.ly and TinyURL which allow ridiculously long web links to be shortened so that they can fit in a tweet, and the use of hash tags has also taken off. So they thought that it would be good to add the person’s exact location into the tweet as well, but it is questionable just how popular this will be.

Twitter co-founder Biz stone explained the thinking behind the new feature:

“A recent burst of interest in location-sharing applications, games, and services has many Twitter users excited about appending geographic data to some of their tweets,”

Although this may be true it is difficult to think exactly what benefit this feature has apart from informing people that you are not at home, which may not always be wise. The service can be toggled on and off by the user for privacy however, as default it will show the general neighbourhood location that you are in, but if the user chooses it will show the exact street that you are on in a mini-map that comes up next to each of your tweets, scary.

The service will go live this week for those that wish to tell the world exactly what they are doing and where they are doing it.

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