| 13% of All U.S. Internet Users Are On Twitter, Pew Research Says We know that Twitter has been growing astronomically. At the same time, Twitter is still an emerging service, spreading its wings in the process of transferring from the early adopters to the Internet en masse. Pew Research reports that since Twitter use has grown 5% since November 2010 to May 2011 from 8% of U.S. adult Internet users to 13%. Pew says that 95% of all Twitter users own a mobile phone and 54% of those users access Twitter via mobile. Black (25%) and Hispanic (19%) people tend to use Twitter more than white people (9%). Twitter use has seen a rise in all age demographics. The biggest jump has come in the 25 to 34 years old age bracket, up 10% with 19% of people in that group now using Twitter.
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e-g8: "The Future of the Internet Wasn't invited" Last week I attended the e-G8 in Paris, France. I arrived with many questions as to the eventual value of the event, some of which I shared in a previous post. Beyond that post my cynicism had grown somewhat, as frankly I was concerned that the event was going to amount to little more than thinly veiled theater intended to push a predetermined agenda at the G8 Summit. I was right to be concerned because it appears this is exactly what it was. While the event itself was of the highest quality - held in the Jardin des Tuileries near the Musée du Louvre with great food and wines at each break - it was not the "discussion" it was positioned as in the run-up to the event. Very little time was allocated for attendees to engage in a dialog with the speakers and it lacked any semblance of a workshop or forum.
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VinPass: Wine Lovers Can Now Check In Today a new social game called VinPass launched. It's an application for wine lovers to "share wine reviews, win badges and earn real rewards." VinPass uses the 'check-in' paradigm popularized by location-based social network Foursquare and extended into other areas by the likes of GetGlue (entertainment) and Foodspotting (food). In a nutshell, you check-in to tasting a certain type of wine. If you write a review, you earn points and eventually unlock badges. VinPass promises that these badges have "tangible value" - including coupons on e-commerce stores, MP3s, ringtones, event tickets and more. Foursquare is still a relatively geeky app, offering little in the way of tangible value in its badges. But focusing on wine should open up plenty of possibilities to offer value for VinPass.
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Study: 60% of Generation Y Leaning Toward Cutting the Cord A survey released today aims to show cable providers how they can keep losing their influential viewers from cutting the cable. Ideas and Solutions, a Los Angeles-based consultant group for media and technology companies, says that 60% of people between the ages of 18 and 29 were either leaning towards or seriously considering giving up paid television. The Ideas and Solutions report, which is greatly skewed to the point of view of the paid television operators, puts the so-called Generation Y demographic of 70 million TV watchers into three groups - "loyalists," "leaners" and "at-risk." Not surprisingly, the "at-risk" group were early adopters of technology much more likely to gravitate towards services like Hulu and Netflix. What category do you fall in?
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Lodsys Moves Forward With Lawsuits Against iOS App Developers Despite a letter from Apple lawyers last week stating that its licensing agreements protected iOS app developers, Lodsys is moving forward with its lawsuits against developers for patent infringement. Lodsys owns four patents that it claims app developers must pay to use, and in a series of blog posts today, Lodsys outlined its plans to continue its legal efforts to obtain those payments.
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Killer Quora Thread is a Treasure Trove for Early Adopters I'll admit I haven't been on Quora as much recently, in large part due to being unceremoniously blocked by the company for subscribing to an excessive amount of RSS feeds (but that's another story). However, today, I stumbled across a great Quora thread started by tech insider Robert Scoble. The question: "Which tech startups currently (June 2011) need and deserve angel funding?" Of course, the resulting list is a lot of self-serving posts from startups hoping to cash in on Scoble's influence, but frankly, I don't care. I'm obsessed with this thread and the startups that keep appearing there, minute by minute. It's startup Disneyland! And if you're an early adopter itching to try new services, you should check it out, too.
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Bing Maps Rolls Out Some Impressive Changes to Its Streetside View Bing has unveiled some changes to Bing Maps today that give users a much better view of the street. The newly improved Streetside feature in Bing Maps doesn't just show you the street, but lets you pan up and down it with a seamless, panoramic view of the surrounding location.
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Pentagon Declares Cyberattack an Act of War Cyberattacks are part of the defense landscape and have been for a while. Among the more high-profile instances in the last year are the Stuxnet attack by the U.S. and Israel on Iranian nuclear facilities, the attacks by the Chinese government on Google and even a hack of a Pentagon project. Now, the Wall Street Journal says a soon-to-be-released Pentagon policy document will announce officially that a cyberattack can be a jus ad bellum, or act of war.
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Twitter Releases One-Click Subscription Button Twitter has begun offering an embeddable button for one-click subscription to a Twitter account associated with any website, called the Follow Button. Previously, a website owner could link to their Twitter profile page off-site but users had to visit that Twitter page and click to follow the account from there. Users interested in subscribing to updates from a website itself can, as always, subscribe to the Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds offered by many sites for years. Those are the orange buttons with the little white lines on them, and without the word Subscribe. RSS requires the use of a different application, called an RSS reader, where a user is probably less likely to encounter poorly written little jokes or the daily ennui of Hollywood starlets. Or your mom, who is more likely to Tweet than knowingly publish an RSS feed.
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Creative Commons Mapping Community GeoCommons Launches 2.0 Version With HTML5 and More Web based mapping platform GeoCommons launched its 2.0 version today with a long list of free, enterprise and API features that bring the service up to date on contemporary web technologies. GeoCommons is a community site run by GeoIQ, a private company that sells software and support to enterprise customers. Data and maps posted to GeoCommons are published under a Creative Commons license. The new version of the platform includes HTML5 display, a visualization engine GeoCommons says is capable of displaying hundreds of thousands of data points, web based editing, time-release views of mapped data and many other changes outlined in the announcement blog post.
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