London 2012 Olympics Offers New Contest: Competitive Tweeting

The forthcoming London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games just got more exciting, as it highlights a new contest that aims to figure out which country has the largest number of online fans. The said contest will be choosing its top 20 countries based on the most numbers of YouTube videos, Flickr photos, and Twitter tweets.

As of now, fans already submitted over 20,000 tweets — placing Great Britain on the number one spot, followed by Brazil, U.S., Canada and the Netherlands.

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Twitter to Launch Facebook-style Pages for Brands

According to reports by Marketing Magazine, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo and President of Revenue Adam Bain are spearheading the move. Its goal is to primarily give brands their own page on Twitter where they could deliver tailored messages while encouraging Twitter users to follow them.

The currently limited promotional opportunities for brands on Twitter pushed the site’s management to start considering the improvement, particularly now that similar social media sites are offering promotional tools for businesses.

Meanwhile, the launch of Twitter’s branded pages is seen to roll out in the US first, as its first ads on the platform was introduced in the same location on April 2010. It partners included Starbucks, but such opportunities are yet to be offered in the UK.

However, some reports stated, “a spokesman for Twitter confirmed that ‘strong interest’ from brands meant it is now looking to set up a UK office. He declined to comment on specific advertising plans.”

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Everyday is April Fools Day on TweetForger

The holiday may soon be over, its not too late to treat your friends to an April Fools Day prank.

Enter someone’s Twitter username into the form at Tweetforger.com, generate a crazy tweet, send your victim a link to the resulting page and let the fun and amusement proceed.

The graphics created by the site really looks as if it was genuinely from Twitter.  But like the saying, if it’s too good to be true, it probably is; the ‘tweets’ generated by TweetForger aren’t real. Once the prankster enters his victim’s Twitter handle on TweetForger, the site simply scrapes up the prank victim’s twitter background and then re-creates it almost perfectly with the chosen text inserted within.

While this looks pretty scary, users must know (specially the victims-to-be) that it’s just harmless fun. Here’s how the creators of Tweetforger explain it:

“TweetForger is a fun way to make it appear as if a Twitter user has tweeted something. You can pick any user you want, enter some text, and TweetForger will create an individual, look-alike tweet. Nothing you do here will appear in anyone’s Twitter stream, even your own. TweetForger is just for fun. Please don’t be a jerk.”

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Twitter Welcomes its New Search Engine

I was awoken by Twitter’s new and outstanding architectural framework. In layman’s term, I’m referring to the all new Twitter. The micrblogging site unveiled its Twitter Search.

Twitter is definitely experiencing many upgrades these days. It scales 100% better than the old one, more tweets per second and a lot more improvements. And no, Twitter is no longer under Summize. The 2008 acquisition has long been expired. The search architecture is no longer MySQL based. Six months ago, Twitter decided to make the switch to Lucene, a 10-year-old open-source information retrieval software.

“We rewrote big parts of the core in-memory data structures,” said Busch. “Especially the posting lists, while still supporting Lucene’s standard APIs. The team also improved garbage collection, added lock-free data structures and algorithms and a few other niceties.”

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Share your Stories on Twitter Tales

Twitter launched a new feature on their website that makes you grow more fonder of Tweeting. Twitter Tales, a great collection composed of “examples of great Twitter use [that] will also likely inspire others to use the service in innovative and interesting ways.”

On the site’s official blog, Carolyn Penner, Twitter’s communication staff, said that Twitter tales is for “a growing set of articles that highlights creative individuals and businesses from all corners of the world that help make Twitter awesome.” Twitter users are encouraged to share their stories and send it to tales@twitter.com.

The highlighted accounts were as follows, @natashabadhwar a New Delhi filmmaker, @caltrain, a community-written account for SF commuters; and @thebloggess, a well-known digital humor writer.

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Press the Twitter Button Now

Okay , this is something good. Twitter officially launched its “Twitter Button”.

Twitter Button is an application used for web publishers to count the retweets and let their consumers easily share their contents.

It is more or less, as AllWeLike reported, it is an easy way to share stories, URLs and websites that maybe relevant to your followers. All it entails is just a simple copy and paste code to start the Twitter Button app.

But, TweetMeme isn’t all left out. In fact, in a recent blog post Twitter said that, “We’re pleased to be working closely with the good folks at TweetMeme and, from here on out, they will be pointing to the Twitter Tweet Button.”

While TweetMeme also blogs, “We will be assisting Twitter with the technical challenges involved with the button and secondly we will be working even more closely in the future on delivering real-time duration of the Twitter Firehose. This will manifest itself in the launch of a number of new products and the first of these is being unveiled today.”

We are very much sure that we’ll love Twitter more after this.

Here’s a video on how to use it.

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Tweetmeme vs Twitter Buttons

Twitter is launching its all new Twitter Button. It is an application that lets you share articles on websites and counts how many times the URL has been shared. Twitter Button is launching as early as Thursday.

We still don’t have the exact details but we can show you how it is done. Basically, the Twitter Button is designed to be the most comprehensive counter of retweets. It will show how many times they share a specific article. A single line that is composed of codes to be copied and paste into your website. As of the moment there are 3 versions of the button (110×20, 55×20, 55×63), each with 5 customization.

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