SEARCH CLINIC

Twitter had its fifth birthday yesterday- 21 st March 2011.And in it’s five years it has helped to transform the world- with it’s simple communications channel being cited by the protesters in Egypt leading to the overthrow of President Mubarak and the subsequent political reformation.

Since its first ever tweet by co-founder Jack Dorsey in 2006 (“Just setting up my twttr”) the social media website has grown to become one of the most important online marketing and communications tools of a generation – which many people claim is second only to Facebook.

It now hosts more than 1 billion tweets a week and is estimated to be worth around £6 billion.

Dr Search recounts some of the landmarks in its five year history:
* March 2006 First tweet posted by co-founder Jack Dorsey
* November 2008 Barack Obama thanks supporters via Twitter after winning the US presidential election.
* January 2009 Twitter users break news about a plane crash landing in New York’s Hudson River, with pictures.
* April 2009 Universal Pictures, Virgin Media and Gorrilaz among first brands to launch commercial services on the site.
* June 2009 Showbiz website TMZ breaks story about Michael Jackson’s death on Twitter.
* September 2010 Twitter receives more UK visits than MySpace for the first time.
* September 2010 Twitter overhauls home page design and partners with YouTube, Yahoo! and Flickr to embed content on site.
* October 2010 Dick Costolo replaces co-founder Evan Williams as CEO.
* December 2010 Twitter valued at £2.3 billion after fresh investment.
* December 2010 Twitter says more than 25 billion tweets were sent in 2010.
* January 2011 Over 40% of all Twitter posts are made by a mobile phone, says Costolo.
* February 2011 Costolo says Twitter is “already making money”.
* February 2011 Charlie Sheen becomes the quickest tweeter to reach 1 million followers (achieving this in 25 hours, 17 minutes).

UK internet users now find social networking sites like Facebook more popular than pornographic ones, according to new figures from Experian Hitwise.
The internet research company says that in January sites like Facebook accounted for 12.46% of all online traffic.

That’s the equivalent of 2.4 billion hits or one eighth of all web visits.

In comparison entertainment websites, including pornographic ones, accounted for 12.18% of traffic.

It’s the first time social networking has overtaken entertainment in terms of popularity.

Of those, social network site Facebook accounted for more than half, or 56%, of visits.

Robin Goad, Experian Hitwise’s Research Director said: “While social networks of course compete amongst themselves for users, many of those users have a presence on multiple networks.

“One in every eight people leaving a social network visits another one immediately after.

“Facebook, for example, is a key source of traffic for many smaller social networks, while almost a fifth of people leaving Twitter go on to visit another social network”.

Twitter’s tweeters now have the option of logging on to the site through a secure connection.The “always use HTTPS” setting has been introduced to help stop hackers who target people as they connect over public wi-fi.

The same type of technology is used to protect online bank accounts and electronic purchases.

Switching to HTTPS on Twitter is not compulsory, but most security experts say it is a good idea.

The site has been trialing the use of HTTPS for some time, however users had to access it by a slightly different address.

They can now use it automatically by changing an option in Twitter’s security settings.

HTTPS, or Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure, creates a secure channel within an internet connection by checking a website’s authenticity with certain approved certificate authorities.

Unsecured wireless connections are susceptible to certain types of hacking, such as “man in the middle” attacks, where criminals intercept the data stream and monitor whatever passes through.

Although relatively little personal information is exchanged over Twitter-  compared to services such as internet banking, hacked accounts can be problematic as account login details can be found by third parties which are then used to reconfigure the account.

This can lead to accounts being taken over or someone can send a message which might be spam or phishing or malware.

While HTTPS offers greater protection, using the system can slow down access to a service because of the extra messages used to authenticate the correct person.

From today, the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) gets powers to police the claims companies make on websites- and includes social networks.How companies talk about themselves on Twitter feeds or Facebook profiles is to be policed just like paid for adverts.

The rules cover statements on websites that can be interpreted as marketing, even if they are not in an advert.

Until now, the ASA has only been able to oversee paid-for ads online.

Since 2008, the watchdog has received more than 4,500 complaints concerning text on websites that it could do nothing about.

The ASA said that the new powers would help it tackle a growing number of complaints about the way companies sell themselves on the web.

Extending the UK advertising code to non paid for statements means that these, like paid for adverts, must be legal, decent, honest and truthful as well as not harming, misleading or offending readers.

While aimed primarily at sites using the .co.uk domain suffix, the ASA said its powers could also cover .com sites, such as Facebook, if the online space being used was under the control of a UK firm.

User-generated content, such as comments left by customers on a website, will not be covered by the extended powers.

But the ASA said that such content could be examined if a company adopted it and used positive endorsements to advertise.

To encourage firms to comply, the ASA said it would extend a name and-shame policy which will expose firms that make unsupportable claims.

Further sanctions for offenders could see non-compliant material removed from search engines. The ASA said it might also take out adverts to warn people about companies that do not comply with the code.

In anticipation of the extra work it will have to do, the ASA has expanded the number of staff in its complaints and investigations unit by 10%.

JP Morgan is reportedly in talks to take a 10pc stake in Twitter in a deal that could value the social networking website at £2.8 billion ($4.5 billion).The US investment bank could acquire the stake for $450m, in what would mark the first investment from JP Morgan’s new media fund.

The talks come as JP Morgan has so far raised £750 million for a new Digital Growth Fund, launched to give the bank’s clients access to the rapidly growing new media market. The fund’s target size is £800 million.

It remains unclear whether the fund will invest directly in Twitter or buy out existing shareholders according to the Financial Times.

However, it appears unlikely the US bank will buy shares in the secondary market, as had been previously rumoured.

Twitter has enjoyed rapid growth since it was launched in 2006.

The website has 253m unique users each month, 85pc higher than the number who visited this time last year, according to venture capital group Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

Kleiner Perkins was the most recent investor in Twitter when the group spent £125 million on a stake in December, valuing the website at £ 2.3 billion ($3.7 billion).

From 1 March, Britons will be able to complain to the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), which has been given on new powers to regulate commercial websites.
Up to now the ASA has only been able to monitor traditional advertising- these were generally on billboards, newspapers or on television.

UK consumers will be able to make official objections about false, indecent or misleading information on the internet.

From the start of March, the ASA will be able to regulate any statement on a company’s website which could be interpreted as marketing, even if it is not a paid for advert.

These new powers will of course also cover anything that you write on social media websites like Twitter or Facebook.

The principle that marketing has to be legal, decent, honest and truthful is now going to extend to companies’ claims on their own websites.

Anyone with a website needs to have a fresh look at it, and ask themselves “am I totally happy about that?”

Certainly if you have had a claim ruled against you by the ASA, now is a very good time to put that right before 1 March.

The ASA has spent a year preparing for the change, and is expecting a large number of extra complaints.

Last year 2,500 people complained about website content, but under the old rules their objections were not admissible.

Nevertheless the ASA is expanding staff numbers by 10%, to cope with the extra workload.

The Advertising Standards Authority can be contacted at: http://www.asa.org.uk/

Tweets that are published on Twitter should be considered public and can be republished, the Press Complaints Commission (PCC) has ruled.The decision follows a complaint by a Department of Transport official that the use of her  tweets by newspapers constituted an invasion of privacy.

Sarah Baskerville complained to the PCC about articles in the Daily Mail and Independent on Sunday.

The messages included remarks about being hungover at work. She complained that this information was private and was only meant to be seen by her 700 followers.

Ms Baskerville said she had a clear disclaimer that the views expressed by her on Twitter were personal and not representative of her employer.

The disclaimer read: “Scottish & Sober-ish.. Civil Servant. This is my personal account, personal views. Nothing to do with my employers. What I retweet I may or may not agree with.”

Ms Baskerville complained to the press regulator, arguing that she could have a “reasonable expectation” of privacy and that the reporting was misleading.

But the PCC said the potential audience for Ms Baskerville’s tweets was much wider than her followers, because each message could be forwarded by others by retweeting.

It also agreed with the newspapers’ argument that Twitter was publicly accessible and that the complainant had not taken steps to restrict access to her messages and was not publishing material anonymously.

As a result, the Commission ruled that the articles did not constitute a breach of privacy.

“This is an important ruling by the Commission,” said PCC director Stephen Abell.

“As more and more people make use of such social media to publish material related to their lives, the Commission is increasingly being asked to make judgements about what can legitimately be described as private information.

“In this case, the Commission decided that republication of material by national newspapers, even though it was originally intended for a smaller audience, did not constitute a privacy intrusion.”

Dr Search reminds you of SOL- Sod’s Online Law- anything you publish online which you don’t want anyone to find will be found, and the stuff which you want to be found will be hard work to rise above the dross.

There are of course ways round the problem- if you need any publishing help- please just click here NOW.

Google and Bing have recently confirmed that social media reactions are a ranking factor with both search engines.
It may be stating the bloomin’ obvious, but search engines- in the business of delivering quality search results, would not ignore these signals.

Are Twitter and Facebook just other sites that are/may be treated specially by search engines, the idea of a social graph as a current reality being a trendy spin on something has existed in some form for a while, or are they a completely new type of influence on organic results?

Before Twitter and Facebook, for a number of years the vast majority of social online discussion was carried out on various bulletin boards and forums. Google can identify discussion results of this type, and it seems plausible that links from such pages could be treated differently to the rest of the web.

The same could be true of links in blog comments. If Akismet can identify which comments are spam, would it not be conceivably possible for Google to do so too?

After learning of their reasonable surfer patent, granted earlier this year, we know that spiders can identify different areas of content on a page and process them by different standards.

Historically, we don’t know how Google has treated links from sites like Digg, Reddit and Del.icio.us, many of which were around before Twitter and Facebook.

They could be handled the same as any other website, but as social bookmarking became more and more significant in shaping the content people view and consider to be notable, does it not stand to reason that someone at Google would have considered factoring the role of these sites into ranking algorithms?

Social discussion online in itself is obviously not new. Usenet used to be a particularly social platform, distinguished from walled off forums by being decentralised and entirely public.

The same metrics used to grade the value of Tweets and Tweeters could be used in any other public arena of social discussion where links or their equivalent are shared.

There’s no reason search engines couldn’t already have been using methods like these to determine quality of article submissions and submitters on, say, Digg for a long time already, but unless a specific announcement was made the SEO community would be in the dark.

No SEO person outside of the search engines knows all the intimate details of Google’s ranking algorithms, either currently or historically.

I think many in web marketing mistake this information void as evidence that ranking algorithms are simpler than they likely are in reality, and see info like this as announcement of something that’s new.

Whatever the case, it won’t change the fact that producing unique, compelling content and marketing it well is the simplest strategy to attracting online traffic.

Companies that sign up celebrities to advertise products on Twitter are being warned by the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) to be clear about their marketing.
The OFT says celebse should make it clear if they’re being paid either in cash or with gifts to tweet about something.

Celebrities like Lily Allen, Liz Hurley and Peter Andre have millions of followers that companies are keen to advertise to.

But now the OFT says what it describes as “deceptive” advertising must stop.

In a statement it said: “Online advertising and marketing practices that do not disclose they include paid for promotions are deceptive under trading laws.”

In America this type of advertising is already big business.

Stars like Kim Kardashian, who has nearly six million followers, can earn thousands of pounds for online endorsements on the site.

Snoop Dogg and Lindsay Lohan have also cashed in.

But the law governing this type of social media advertising is much more clear in America than in the UK.

The US Federal Trade Commission insists that stars must include the word “ad” or “spon” to show if something they’re talking about is an advert or sponsored.

That way there’s no question of anything being deceptive.

Publishing your Facebook status updates could increase the risk of your home being burgled, West Midlands Police have warned.The force said anyone who published details about their whereabouts could tip off thieves.

Sgt Andy Gregory said the amount of information people shared about their lives on social networking sites was a real cause for concern.

He said by sharing information with friends online, people could unwittingly also be giving strangers information about their whereabouts, if they were indiscriminate about accepting friend requests.

“The issue for us is that they need to ensure that their profiles are locked down, so only your trusted friends and family have information about your personal movements.”

In a statement Facebook said the risks of sharing information online carried the same risks as sharing information with people in a face-to-face conversation, phone call or e-mail.

“What it means is that both online and offline, we all need to control who we’re friends with and what information we share,” a spokesman said.