Image via CrunchBase
Last weekend the news broke that Facebook was acquiring Instagram for $1 billion. Needless to say the tech news circles were buzzing with this announcement all week.
According to an article on TheNextWeb Twitter had also tried to acquire them, but failed.
And others suggest that Google may have been trying to acquire them ..
Image via CrunchBase
With most social networks the users are the product.
In the case of Twitter one of the problems the company has been struggling with is how to actually make money from it all ..
So selling their content ie. their users’ tweets appears to be one of the solutions.
According to an article on RWW Twitter has sold the data to Datasift and has other companies lined up to buy the same data.
So not only is Twitter claiming ownership of the content, but they’re also happily ignoring any privacy concerns users might have..
Expect privacy advocates to get very vocal on this.
Image by Gustavo Pimenta via Flickr
CoTweet Standard, which is used by a lot of companies to manage Twitter for teams, is being withdrawn on February 15th
From then on CoTweet will only be offered as a paid service under a new name “SocialEngage”
There aren’t much details about SocialEngage on the CoTweet / Exact Target site unfortunately, nor is there any information on pricing. It looks like they’re adding support for tracking Facebook, but without knowing pricing etc., it’s really hard to see if this is going to end up costing companies a lot more than they’ll gain or not.
Their Enterprise product “Cotweet Enterprise” may have been very powerful, but it also came at a very high price.
So are there any viable alternatives?
Guinness Ireland’s Twitter account is a bit odd.
They want to restrict their followers to people over the age of 18!
Guinness Ireland's Twitter account trying to impose age restrictions
Of course I’m not “following” their account, but I can still see all their content!
And here’s the screenshot to prove it:
Guinness Ireland's "over 18 only" twitter account
I think the word I’m looking for is “fail”
They’ve posted a “clarification” of what they’re “trying” to do:
You won’t be blocked as such.You’ll be removed from our followers & you’ll need to verify age before u can follow us again
Seemingly this is similar to the laughable “age restrictions” that alcohol companies put on their websites.
It’s kind of sad really that they’d even try to do this on a social media network. So you can add alcohol companies to the list of those that simply don’t “get” the web..
Looks like one of the Fox News Twitter accounts may have been hacked, as it’s spewing “news” of Obama’s death ..
See screenshot below:
@Foxnewpolitics twitter account
If this is a prank it’s in pretty bad taste ..
So I would assume that the account has been compromised .. and since it’s July 4th in the US it may take longer than normal for people to notice ..
Twitter has released another new statistic
It’s now doing 200 million “tweets” per day. In January 2009 they were “only” sending 2 million / day.
Here’s a nice graphic to show how that all compares with various other things:
Twitter 200 million tweet comparison
There’s a full blog post about it over on the official twitter blog.
Of course they’re still not issuing big media releases about their record earnings are they? Oh wait .. they can’t! Doh!
Nominations are open for the 1st Irish Social Media Awards. There are also full details on how to submit a nomination for the awards and what information you need to supply.
The awards ceremony will be held May 26th 2011 in Dublin’s Mansion House, which is a great venue.
One of the exciting and often scary aspects of Twitter and other social media networks is that your customer service interactions are completely laid bare. You can’t hide behind closed doors. Nothing is sacred.
Earlier today Jason Roe tweeted about how bad his coffee tasted.
It was a statement of opinion. It doesn’t mean that there is anything necessarily wrong with a product or a brand, but that a particular customer (Jason), had a bad experience.
No matter what you do some of your customers will not be happy. In some cases it will be your fault – you’ll screw up. In other cases it won’t be your fault.
It doesn’t matter. It will happen regardless.
So how did this exchange go down and why am I even bothering to write about it?
Have a look at the response from the coffee vendor (screenshot from Tweetdeck as the original tweet was deleted much later)
How not to deal with customer feedback
Here’s the plain text version of the exchange:
Tasted my coffee bean from badger and dodo this morning. They were over roasted! burnt to shit, crumbled when pressure applied. Smelt crap.
And their reply:
@jasonroe nasty & vindictive of you! We have a complaints & refund proceedure you can follow. 40 cafes using same coffee have no complaints!
What makes it all the more amusing (and disturbing) is that the company not only handled this particular incident badly, but also managed to lose an advocate in the process:
@BadgerAndDodo the gas thing is .. I was one of your advocates until 19:04. Well done!
The company in question have since deleted the offending tweet, but they haven’t (as of now) offered any form of apology to Jason (or anyone else)
Now, was Jason being reasonable?
Did the company completely overreact?
I’d say yes to both of those questions.
How about you?
UPDATE: Jason has posted his own version of events as well as an email that the coffee company sent him.
