What's Happening With Twitter

It seems so many headlines of late have been about Twitter. Twitter's new homepage. Twittering getting someone sued. The Value of Twitter. So I thought I'd do a little round up of four of the most interesting things happening in the Twitter-sphere.

The Growth of Twitter
Twitter traffic has increased to 44.5m unique users worldwide (in June) - up 19% month-on-month. Users rose from 37.3m in May which represented a jump of over 7m. All-in-all that's an increased of 1,460% from June 2008, when Twitter's worldwide audience was only 2.9m.

An important point to note about these figures is that they only count traffic to the Twitter.com site and don't register traffic to any of the numerous Twitter apps, such as TweetDeck, that are used by many users.

The above data comes from ComScore but Nielsen NetRatings has also released an interesting stat that adults use Twitter twice as much as teenagers do. Only 16% of Twitter users are under 25, and a mere 6.6% of teens have a Twitter account.


Twitter's Skinni Popcorn
MagneticNorth have just launched a really cool movie barometer called Skinni Popcorn. The site provides an insight into real people's opinions about the latest movies within a real-time environment. By analysing Twitter feeds and any comments about films, the site gives a real-time feed on what Twitter users are saying about movies. The site also gives a synopsis of the films, a web link to The New York Times review of the movie, and links to trailers of the movies.

The initial release targets Twitter as a feed but there are already plans to utilise other social media sites and pull in any comments from them to help grow and develop a broader community.


American Footballer Fined For Tweeting
An American Football player has been fined $2,500 for tweeting about his team. Antonio Cromartie was fined by the NFL for commenting about the team's nutrition, saying that "nasty food" was to blame for the Chargers' poor performance last year. His tweet last Friday said "Man we have 2 have the most nasty food of any team. Damn can we upgrade 4 str8 years the same ish maybe that's y we can't we the SB we need."

The NFL is presently formulating a broad policy to ban players from using social media platforms, including Twitter, during games.


Save The Observer, On Twitter
The news is official, The Observer newspaper is facing possible closure by the Guardian Media Group. In a bid to try and boast support for the newspaper a campaign has been launched on Twitter. In just two days the profile has gained over 2,000 followers. The campaign is being spear-headed by opywriter and digital marketer, Callum Saunders. The Savetheobserver Twitter Profile has been posting details of the story.

A Facebook Save the Observer group has also been launched and this has signed up more than 2,300 supporters.

Google in 5 Years

Scott Kurnit, a New York-based tech investor and founder of About.com, talks about the future of Google and his view on how Google stock can triple in the next 5 years. Scott discusses the three major services that he believes will drive this growth:

• Google Voice (GrandCentral)


• Google Wave


• Google Android

Summer at MoMA

The New York Museum of Modern Art have just launched an excellent campaign to promote the museum. The redeveloped website helps visitors plan their visit to the museum through connecting with your Facebook profile. Using Facebook Connect, the site scans your Facebook profile, analyses all your details and matches your social network preference and likes/dislikes to show you which of the current museum experiences would be of most interest to you. You will be given personal recommendations that you can add to your profile and send to friends.

This is an excellent example for every exhibition and event on how to provide a unique and tailored experience to all your guests and visitors.

Sony EyePet

In the latest addition to the fast growing range of applications that Sony are developing to utilise their PlayStation Eye, we see the introduction of Sony EyePet. This family orientated application brings a 3D virtual pet into your home through an Augmented Reality style interface and interaction. As well as being able to play with your pet with real world hand gestures, you can also create objects in his virtual world through 2D drawn objects that then pop to life on-screen.

This is just another example of how Augmented Reality is being brought into our lives. I expect that we'll see a lot more applications being developed for gaming platforms such as the PS3.

CG 3D Animation

I was doing a bit of digging, looking for someone to do a bit of 3D work for a small project that I was asked to lend a hand on, and I found these guys, C4Real. This is their showcase work and it has to be seen to be believed.



Basically this was just done as an example of C4Real's CG capabilities. The process involved storyboarding, previzzing, animation and rendering, which were all done in house. Total production took 4 weeks and rendering was done on an 8 core MacPro taking 4 months. As you can see the quality is absolutely impecable but it's no wonder, every single frame was rendered at a maximum of 1 frame per hour, with some frames taking up to 24 hours each.