Thursday dose of Social Media: Mobile, not Internet, access exploding in poor countries

Mobile access far outpacing Internet access – In low-income countries, Internet access grew 700% this decade, while mobile access grew 7000%.

All around the world, mobile is quickly becoming the new frontier to conquer. Smart content producers realize this, especially those who operate globally. In many countries, there is far greater access to mobile products like cell phones than there is to computers.

“If you want to reach the poorest countries in the world, it looks like mobile phones are your best bet.” In the U.S. we see much of the same. While many poorer people in the U.S. do not have computers, most people have a cell phone (pay as you go is exploding right now).

What does this mean? This mean news organizations need to start producing more products and content that work on mobile platforms — and not just mobile platforms like the iPhone that skew wealthy.

Facebook makes it easier to search your inbox — This should be welcome news to all those content producers who have been using Facebook as a way to get in touch with contacts.

Facebook’s inbox was fine for basic communication, especially if you didn’t use it that much. But, become too active on Facebook, and it became a mess. The new Facebook inbox has more powerful search tools, makes it easier to filter messages and, perhaps most importantly, has a way to flag spam.

Hopefully Facebook gets ahead of the spam wagon, because MySpace is plagued by spam and is all but worthless as a personal communication tool because of it. I’m also hoping by having a way to flag spam,Facebook will catch on quicker to phishing schemes.

Google readying microblog search? — “About a month after saying it was taking real-time search seriously, Google seems to be preparing a microblogging search tool.”

Earlier today we reported on the new real time search engine for Twitter, CrowdEye, and rumors are swirling that Google is looking to get into the microblog search game too. It just makes sense.

Twitter is a phenomenal communication tool, and it is helping to change the world right now. But searching Twitter — especially as it grows and grows — isn’t very easy. It’s one thing to search random topics, but it can be very hard to discern what is going on with a major topic.

Every second hundreds of tweets are sent out about Iran. How do you make sense of it all? That’s where better search technology would benefit all of us greatly.

There is a lot of room for real time search, and expect Google to be at the forefront of it.

How to be generous: a guide for social media brands — This simple guide will help you use social media better. The core message of this guide is to forget what you knew in the past, because social media is a totally different kind of media.

The guide implores people and companies to A) celebrate your customers and B) share more of yourself. this means that companies have to take customers seriously and realize that they are human beings (and not just a random person to sell something to). It also means that to be successful on social media you have to be social and offer people something that they couldn’t get otherwise.

Another key point is that if you’re on social media in order to build or promote a brand, you should be having a positive effect. If you go about offending people on social media, for instance, that’s not going to help build your brand.

iPhone 3.0 a cut-and-paste win for Twitter — Copy and paste was the last major feature missing from the iPhone. Now that it is no longer missing, the iPhone has become a pretty complete reporting tool. You can blog from it, send in tweets, snap photos and video and more.

Twitter and Twitter users are going to be big winners with the new iPhone OS. It’s hard to be a prolific Twitter user if you can’t copy and paste. This makes sharing links on the go really hard.

Just uploaded a photo, story or video on the go? Now, finally, it is much easier to share the link to that content in Twitter, Facebook and other social networking platforms while on the go.

Thursday Dose of social media: Microsoft’s Bing to challenge Google

Microsoft’s Bing hides its best features — Bing is a new search engine that shows a lot of promise. Microsoft is again trying to challenge Google in the search space. It’s too early to say if Bing could be better than Google in everyday use, but there are instances where Bing makes more sense to use than Google:

Unlike Google, which generally returns links to mere web sites, Bing crawls listings at review services like Yelp.com and CitySearch. It then summarizes the results and displays a scorecard for each, rating things like service, drinks, food, wait time, lunch offerings, and so on, all laid out in a neat comparative table.

Bing is also great at finding travel information. Activating the travel tab puts you in a full-service reservation system. From there you can book tickets and even get tips about when to buy to get the best price.

The early version of Bing has some issues. But, if used for certain queries, Bing could be a very nice compliment to Google:

On the positive side, we discovered Bing does much more than search for relevant links. It retrieves and processes data, and renders it smartly. That makes finding a great restaurant or an airline ticket, a snap.

But the service is far from perfect. Beautiful data mash-ups coexist side-by-side with perplexing interface choices that make it hard to find the best features. Meanwhile, actual search results were inaccurate in some cases, and disappointing overall in the local search category, one of the areas Microsoft hopes to make its biggest splash.

Users Over 55 Quitting Facebook: The Baby Boom Times Over? — It appears that people over 55 are trying Facebook and not really liking it:

Between November 2008 and February 2009, the baby boomer set (age 55-65) was one of the fastest growing segments on the social network, up 175.3% for females and 137.8% for males, according to the statistics. But that user boom was short-lived, and those users aren’t returning in the same numbers.

In April and May there were actually 650,000 less users over the age of 55 on Facebook than the previous two months — the only age demographic where the site experienced a decrease in users over that period. Facebook grew by over 4% each month over the past two months, according to the blog’s measurements, which are based on data from Facebook’s advertiser tools, but its inability to hold the attention of its older users is interesting.

Social media is still a young(er) persons game. Perhaps the issue isn’t with social media, but rather the fact that most social media sites were made for younger people (Facebook was originally college only). What if someone created a social network aimed at baby boomers?

Is this a segment that newspapers could tap into? Boomers are still very loyal to newspapers.

Typekit aims to make Web fonts suck less — One of the biggest problems with Web design is font support. Web browsers support very few fonts, and different browsers and computers support different fonts. This severely limits typographic options for Web designers, and also makes it hard to predict how Web sites will look on people’s computers.

There are some not-so-desirable workarounds like putting fonts into images or using Flash. Those both have large drawbacks, especially for accessibility. Typekit plans to change all of that:

That’s where Typekit comes in. We’ve been working with foundries to develop a consistent web-only font linking license. We’ve built a technology platform that lets us to host both free and commercial fonts in a way that is incredibly fast, smoothes out differences in how browsers handle type, and offers the level of protection that type designers need without resorting to annoying and ineffective DRM.

As a Typekit user, you’ll have access to our library of high-quality fonts. Just add a line of JavaScript to your markup, tell us what fonts you want to use, and then craft your pages the way you always have. Except now you’ll be able to use real fonts. This really is going to change web design.

Typekit launches this summer. We’ll have more after it launches.

Another Twitter expert who didn’t bother to learn — Listen, before you bash Twitter or any other new technology, at least use it first. Try to understand why people like it.

Is Twitter for everyone? No. But it can help a lot of journalists do their jobs better. To me, it’s at least worth trying.

Steve Buttry argues why news orgs should consider Twitter and why people should try Twitter first before bashing it:

Twitter does pose some threats to newspapers, though I see it as more of an opportunity. As more and more people get their news from Twitter (and not just because journalists and news sources are Twittering, but from people tweeting as they live the news and from Twitter aggregating tweets as news unfolds) and other social media, newspapers need to use these tools effectively and adjust our print products to this rapidly changing world.

Trent Reznor And Twitter Help Raise over $850,000 for Fan in Need — Nine Inch Nails’ frontman Trent Reznor and fans have helped raise more than $850,000 for a fan who needs a heart transplant. The fan was denied a transplant, but through the power of Twitter and social media, Reznor and company were quickly able to get the word out and start raising money.

Very important part of this story was Trent Reznor’s Twitter account, which he used vigorously to draw attention to this cause. Together with his 571,839 motivated followers, many of whom also tweeted and retweeted about this campaign, they’ve shown how powerful a tool Twitter can be.

Still doubt the power of social media?

You can send us tips on social media via e-mail (connect [at] patthorntonfiles [dot] com), Twitter and our Publish2 group. If you submit a tip, we’ll credit you and link to your Web site/Twitter feed/blog or site of choice.

Computational knowledge engine (search engine) Wolfram Alpha is live

Wolfram Alpha, the latest search engine, is live, and it rocks.

It’s a must check out for journalists and anyone doing research. Check that, Wolfram Alpha is a computational knowledge engine.

It’s not a search engine in the mold of Google. It doesn’t spit out search results ala Google, but rather it spits out answers. Its main value is in answering objective queries. This is what Google shows for the query: who was the first president of the United States?

The first result in Google is for John Hanson, the first president of United States Congress under the Articles of Confederation, but not the first president of the United States, George Washington. Here is what Wolfram Alpha displays instead:

If there is a definitive answer to your query, Wolfram Alpha will display it, and there is only one correct answer to my query about the first president of the United States. Not only does it display answers, instead of search results, but it also displays them in a visually appealing way. The Wolfram Alpha results are always well displayed, often with charts and graphs.

So, what’s not to like about this new “computational knowledge engine?” First, it is finicky about what will yield results and what won’t. You have to be careful how you enter your queries.

Many people are bad at using Google, but Google still spits out results regardless (not always good results, mind you). Wolfram Alpha does not allow for poor syntax or poor queries.

The other main issue with Wolfram Alpha is that it can only synthesize answers to specific questions. Open ended queries and searches are much better suited for Google. In that sense, it is a fantastic complement to Google, not a replacement.

Also keep in mind that Wolfram Alpha can only give you answers to objective facts, like “the highest mountain.” It will not yield results to subjective queries like,  ” what’s the most beautiful place on earth?”

Check out this query result on Wolfram Alpha:

Daily Dose of social media: Baby Boomers embracing social media & blogs

Micro Persuasion: Social Networking Demographics: Boomers Jump In, Gen Y Plateaus — Baby boomers are the fastest growing segment of social networking users. So, if you think you can ignore social media because you think only high school and college students use social media, think again. Yes, it is true that social media is still much more popular with younger generations, but Boomers have shown a willingness to embrace social media and blogging.

There has been a belief that older people would stick with newspapers over the Web. Boomers are set to retire and become that older generation, and Boomers don’t appear like they’ll be on the sidelines watching the Web go by. Here are some other interesting tidbits from this post:

According to the study, baby boomers…

• Increased reading blogs and listening to podcasts by 67 percent year over year; nearly 80 times faster than Gen Y (1 percent)
• Posted a 59 percent increase in using social networking sites—more than 30 times faster than Gen Y (2 percent)

iList Micro: Create and Browse Classified Ads Without Ever Leaving Twitter — This is the kind of innovative idea that newspapers should try if they are seriously interested in taking back classifieds:

iList, the classifieds site for instantly broadcasting your listing to your friends across your favorite social sites, has just made itself incredibly useful to TwitterTwitter reviewsTwitter reviews users who hate to go anywhere else with iList Micro.

With iList Micro now all you have to do to create a classified listing is tweet what you are offering and use the hashtag #ihave in your tweet. Likewise, you can tweet that you’re interested in something by using the hashtag #iwant. Your #ihave and #iwant tweets will automatically get picked up by iList and added to their microlisting site, where anyone can search from the available assortment of twittered classified ads.

Plus, if you never want to leave Twitter, you don’t have to. Just follow @microilist to have iList do the classifieds work for you. They scour #ihave and #iwant tweets to find a match for your specific Twitter inquiry and direct message you with info on the matched Twitter user.

Twitter Tweaks Its Title Tags For Better Google Juice – Notice your Twitter feed showing up a lot higher in Google today? It’s no coincidence. Twitter made a simple title tag tweak and received a massive SEO bump from Google.

The old title tag for my account looked like this, “twitter.com/jiconoclast.” Not exactly good for SEO. Nowhere in that title tag did you find my name.

This is what the new title tag looks like, “Patrick Thornton (jiconoclast) on Twitter.” This simple change vaulted my Twitter feed to the No. 2 search result for the search Pat Thornton on Google, just behind my personal site.

This underscore, yet again, how simple changes can have a profound impact on SEO and search results. Better SEO means your content shows up higher in search results. Showing up higher means more page views.

There is a caveat, however. Your Twitter account is now showing up really high in Google searches for your name (many of you will have your Twitter accounts being the No. 1 result). If your account is filled with banality, it may hurt you when it comes to future employment.

Just keep in mind that what you say on Twitter is easily searchable, and if potential employers Google your name, they’ll find your Twitter account. This could be great or really bad. Your move.