Facebook Faults

Anna Lamb-Creasey's son has disappeared without a trace. She has no idea where her son has been, and its been a month already. Unfortunately for Anna, the police had notified her through a Facebook message about her son's death. The message was sent to her but it was sent to a message folder called "Other" where any messages received from people you don't know are thrown. This folder is hard to see because of the gray font and the fading color. So the mother had no idea of the whereabouts of her son for a month. After figuring out the news, the police told the mother, "They did the best that they could do." But I'm not so sure of that. What do you think about this? Do you think social media is a good or bad way to find out about this kind of information?

The New Honk App

What do you think about an app that could find your parking spot when you forget where you parked? Do you think people would actually download it and use it? Basically, how it works is you swipe your finger on a scale to set how long you plan on parking for and the app records the location where you parked. Then as time ticks by, it will notify you through honking that your time is almost up so you have enough time to get back before you get a ticket! How accurate do you think it is and would you personally use this? Let me know!

Grammy's!

So if you watched the Grammy's tonight like I did, you would have also been checking Twitter updates every 60 seconds. As the show played on, I found myself glancing at my phone to see what others were saying about the song or award that was just handed out. I wouldn't go as far to say that there were more tweets about the Grammy's than the Superbowl, but I can safely say that I was getting 15 tweets per minute and about 90% of the tweets were Grammy-related. I was then wondering to myself, what if the Grammy's were given out based on how much a band/musician was talked about on social media? What would the results look like and would it be skewed? Just because someone talks or makes a comment about someone on social media doesn't mean they actually like the person, right? Well one could look at it in another light. When someone searches a certain band or artist on Youtube or Facebook, one would assume they are interested in their music. But when it comes to talking about someone or making a comment via Twitter, then that could consist of positive (supporting) or negative remarks which would make it hard for people to really know who is liked (or disliked for that matter) by the people who are the voters anyway. In an article on Mashable, they found results for some of the most popular songs/artists based on presence on social media. Some of the results were Album of the Year being Mumford and Sons Babel with 3,650,951 followers on Facebook. This number blew out every other artist in the running for the award. And Song of the Year would have been "Gangnam Style"with 1,275,457,758 Youtube hits. That is more than Carly Rae Jepson and Justin Bieber's top hit song!! So as you can see that is a little taste of how the Grammy's would have been run if they were based on presence on social media. What do you think about it?

Superbowl Blowout

February 4, 2012

To everyone who was watching the Superbowl last night, it was a HUGE success in the world of Twitter! It was reported that over 24.1 million tweets about the game and halftime show were posted by you all! Can't you see how capable the world is of bonding over one thing? Social media has become a tool for everyone to use to click somewhere with another person. It has helped spread the word about something, get people's attention towards an event, or simply to make someone laugh. The halftime show which included multiple songs by the gorgeous Beyonce generated 268,000 tweets per minute. That is a crazy influx of tweets per minute, and its all about one thing (or person I should say)...Beyonce. Also, another interesting note was that commercials were able to change their advertisements during commercials to make them relevant to the blackout during the Superbowl. Some companies like Oreo and Tide produced ads in minutes and posted them on Twitter about the blackout that happened. It was quite funny and got the attention of millions of followers. The power of social media and Twitter specifically has become revolutionary and we, the people of the US, can use this to our benefit! Learn more about something, get updated and current news, or simply voice your opinion on something...because everyone has one!! What did YOU mainly tweet about during the Superbowl?