Researchers from the Princeton University and the School of Biological Sciences at Royal Holloway have conducted a study as part of their social experiment, where they analysed clique activity on Twitter. They examined more than 200 million tweets from January 2007 to November 2009 from an average of around 250,000 users. Through this data, they put different Twitter users into various respective groups based on what they said on their tweets.

The researchers found Twitter users who used a lot of slang words which are unmentionable in a decent gathering, then there are users who are much interested into hi-tech world and then there are those users who are more socially and politically active and aware. One of things that the researchers noticed was the use of language, spelling and grammar, and most users being very negligent of their language, have made many mistakes.

However, there are those Twitter users too who keep notice of what they tweet and make sure that their language is both decent and grammatically correct and spell-checked. Experts believe that the evolution of language through Twitter is one way to reflect upon how the language has changed in the environment itself.

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A man, by the name of Rodrigo Ferrari Prieto, had been accused of identity theft over a Twitter parody account that was made to impersonate Chilean business mogul Andronico Luksic and his family. He is now facing 18 months imprisonment due to his online crime. Often people don’t realize how serious it could be to pretend to be someone else.

Even no criminal intent be involved as some people impersonate other people merely for fun, though it is a silly approach, but they are also committing the same crime. And if found out, they can too face serious charges. According to the businessman’s lawyer, the imposter posted personal photos and also tweeted inappropriate comments that has damaged the man’s reputation. The criminal created around three Twitter accounts, but claims he was behind only one of them and did it as a joke.

However, what seemed as a joke to him was somebody’s real life and reputation, and such jokes are never afforded lightly. There are Twitter accounts made by fans, but according to the guidelines of the microblogging website, to clear their name and to be legal, they must clarify that they “unofficial” and merely fan-created. Same goes with other social networking sites, like Facebook, where many such unofficial fan pages exist, but they get away because they clarify that they are not real.

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There had been earlier studies and research on this subject, but this is the first time a progress has been made toward determining the gender. The previous study by the researchers led to 75.5% accuracy in identifying the tweeters from 184,000 Twitter users from the United States of America that were selected for the study. Now, they have reached 88.8% accuracy by deciphering gender-based lexicon in a different way.

The researchers found the both men and women have various styles of speech, both within them and compared to each other. When a man speaks to a man, they use words specific to their gender and same goes for a woman, but those who have a balance between same number of male friends or acquaintances as females, they use a language which is less easy to determine their own gender.

Twitter is now used in around 33 languages of the world, but most tweets are in English language. Just a general identification points for an American male Twitter user is swearing, technology, sports, and when talking about relations, using numbers. Those specific to an American female user had words related to family members a lot. It would be interesting to see if other languages of Twitter can also be identified and researched in the similar manner.

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The study concluded from these 10 million tweets that states in the Western United States are happier than states in the Eastern side of the country. Although users are encourages to express themselves openly, freely and in whatever way they want, except being rude hopefully, while they tweet, but if you tweet such words like beauty, hope, and wine, they would indicate to these researchers that you are a happy person. And to think of you as a sad person, if your tweets contain such words like smoke, hate, and other negative words, then it shows unhappiness.

Regardless of the context, the code to determine your state of mind has been this simple usage of language. A lot of the internet users have become more frequent with the profanity they so openly use online, especially American online users, but researchers say that it does not mean that they are sad people.

Similarly, those who don’t use profanity can be sad people too. Another factor that can’t really reveal the state of a person’s emotional level is because not everyone discusses their personal lives online and people have a tendency to rather craft their online persona as much positively as they can.

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Twitter sure seems to be very excited for having these U.S. politicians on board that it has shared two lists for Senate and House politicians. This trend of having only some politicians might change real soon when in the very near future, all of the politicians in the US will be seen tweeting. Through Twitter accounts as well, these politicians are criticised often for what they say out loud and sometimes for what they fail to mention.

Some of the politicians in Pakistan can also be seen on Twitter, but that trend is not so much. Whereas, Twitter officially “approves” account of many politicians and public figures from the U.S., but it rarely does so for other politicians from around the world. However, despite not having that “approval” tag on their accounts, it is really them tweeting away.

Some politicians even reply to tweets when a user sends them a message, while other times, they do not engage. These public figures accounts are followed by many users very closely, while others who are not that active on the site, get less attention. It seems that sometimes users forget to update their tweets with newer stuff happening around them round the clock.

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However, Twitter is also bound by its privacy policy to protect the identity of its users. But, Twitter has said that it is reviewing this order by the French court. Being based in America, Twitter is bound by the American laws only and thus an order from an American court will not be under review, but will directly be followed. Since Twitter is not bound by the French laws, it can choose to ignore the French court’s order.

In the past, Twitter had blocked a neo-Nazi account when a request was made from Germany. Since Germany has had a history of Nazism, it now seriously dispels all things related to it. Most of the European countries feel much the same way about Jewish communities too, who have suffered at the hands of the Nazis. But the freedom of speech requires by its very essence, that a different point of view be tolerated.

Never the less, any incitement to hate speech and hate speech itself is an abuse of the freedom of speech, and thus should be taken action against. Twitter had received many such complaints regarding protecting the interests of the Jewish community from France too, but it had not complied with those so far. Twitter revealed that it complied with only 63% of the government requests made to it.

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The outside observers will measure the amount of data being used by technology companies and will place taxes on them accordingly. It is said that personal data of users is of utmost importance to technology companies whose main marketing campaign works online and who earn through online sources. Facebook and Google, amongst others, are working to provide such personal data, but all for free. The only thing they get in exchange are the services these companies provide.

If this French law comes into force, technology companies based in France might get a relief in their tough competition from American based companies who dominate them, but get away from paying taxes. Google has been blamed for tax evasion, whereas the company spokesperson obviously denies any such charges against its practices.

Google operates in Pakistan, but it does not get taxed here. The government of Pakistan is trying to find means to tax it as the company has no official representation in the country, but earns billions of dollars in profits annually from its 20 million internet user-base. This French law, even though not pleasant for technology companies, will surely be a better move to keep in line the practices of some American technology companies.

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Health officials can detect trends and proceed to provide further strategy for controlling them. The accuracy of such a data from tweets is around 15% as only those tweets can be considered which have GPS data. The researchers studied around 24 million tweets from 10 million unique users and arrived at their findings. Those tweets about health problems where a user self-medicates or self-diagnose a condition cannot be considered because they have not been confirmed by a health professional.

However, those tweets where a user says that he or she has been told by the doctor that he or she is suffering from this or that, can be considered for data monitoring. Around 250,000 social media users in the U.S. said recently said that they are suffering from flu, which indicated an outbreak of it in particular areas in the U.S.

Twitter is being used by such countries as Brazil to locate the outbreak of dengue fever with real-time surveillance of such data coming from different cities and analyse it by comparing it to Global Public Health Intelligence Network and other news sources. Even in Pakistan, Dr. Umar Saif has suggested the use of social media in tracking down outbreak of diseases and he has been using such method to monitor dengue fever outbreak in the Punjab.

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Recently, researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta studied how Twitter users are making up news words and adding them into our language every day. In the US, often cities with large African American population have been found to be the evolving grounds for new words.

The researchers looked upon some 30 million tweets from various cities in the US from December 2009 till May 2011 and have come to the conclusion that African-Americans are most active in tweeting newer words never heard of before. Words like “bruh”, which has evolved from “bro” for brother.

One could argue very validly that rather than taking them as new words or internet lingo, they can be considered misspellings and shortened words for the actual words. They are in a way replacements and cannot be given their own new places in English. With the lack of proper spelling checks on Twitter and the limitation of a tweet’s length based on 140-characters, it is a need of the situation rather than a permanent fix.

However, another aspect that this report highlighted was the fact that these “new words” on Twitter came from cities that are similar in their economy and ethnicity rather than in geographic proximity. Usually closer geographic location has been known to be an effecting factor on a language’s evolution, besides on dialects and accents.

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The Most Liked Photo on Facebook Ever!

Four More Years – The Most Retweeted Tweet Ever by @BarackObama

Obama’s tweet – “Four more years” – is now the most retweeted tweet ever on Twitter with over half a million 815k retweets.
Obama’s team uploaded the same photograph on his Facebook page as well with a similar caption and that has become the most-liked photo of all time with over 4.4 million likes.

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The account has been censored in Germany only and its tweets can be viewed in other countries.  It is the first time that Twitter has carried out a censorship only specific to one country. Twitter announced its local censorship policy earlier in January this year and faced a lot of controversy and criticism on it. Twitter has said that it will only block those Twitter accounts or specific tweets if there is a legal request which is valid and applicable.

Many government agencies, including the police are using social media sites for tracking criminals and their gangs. This has also led a lot of criminals to be caught in their planning with incriminating evidence through Facebook statuses or tweets. Governments are also suspicious that terrorist networks could also be checked into through these social networking sites. However, no terrorists have been tracked down through using social media as a means.

Nazism and any link to its philosophy and its followers is considered a serious offence in many parts of Europe and especially so in Germany, which has had a history of dark fascist rule. However, in all of this, the question of freedom of expression can be brought into focus, something about which the West is known to have double standards.

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Indian cricketer Suresh Raina claimed that an offensive tweet from his Twitter account, which landed him into the middle of Twitter storm, was apparently put up by his nephew, Cricket Next reported on Friday.
A tweet from Raina’s account following Pakistan’s exit from the World Twenty20 tournament read
“Ek do din late gaye ghar !!!! Woh bhi besharam ki tarah Gaye… Bye bye Pakistan!!!!” (Went home a day or two late!! But dishonourably … Bye Bye Pakistan).
The tweet was subsequently deleted.
Raina’s Indian cricket team was knocked out of the tournament earlier in the week after Pakistan comprehensively beat Australia, and India failed to restrict South Africa’s run rate.
People from India and Pakistan picked up on the tweet and attacked the cricketer for his seemingly unsporting manner.
On Friday, the under fire cricketer claimed that his nephew had managed to figure out how to access his twitter account through the cricketer’s smartphone. He said in a tweet:
“Smart phones r dangerous. Discovered it last night after my nephew posted random tweets. I’m a sportsman and would never disrespect,”
Twitter then descended into a frenzy blowing from condemning Raina for his tweet, to jokes about his nephew after the clarification came. Others yet compared Raina’s tweet to Shahid Afridi’s comment about Indian’s not being “big-hearted.”
A number of twitter hashtags then began to trend from #Rainanephew to #replacemovietitlewithnephew to joke about or discuss the controversey.

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Usain Bolt

Track and field superstar Usain Bolt not only holds recognition as fastest man in history for holding world records in 100m, 200m, and 4x100m running events, but also now adds the title as the record holder for fastest Olympic tweets.

After Bolt’s expectedly victorious attempt at the 200m final the other night, tweets about the 25-year-old Jamaican sprinting icon blasted off to over 80,000 tweets per minute (tpm), as monitored by Twitter administrators in the company’s official account.

The micro-blogging network’s tweet about the record-breaking updates, said,

Record alert! @usainbolt sets a new Olympic Games conversation record with over 80,000 TPM for his 200m victory. #Olympics

— Twitter (@twitter) August 9, 2012

Usain Bolt’s Twitter account already has 1.3 million followers and he usually tweets directly to fans about anything. The night after he bagged the 200m gold medal, he tweeted, “Thanks to all my real fans and people who believe in me. I am now a living legend that’s for sure.”

That tweet got retweeted over 8,000 times and around 2,000 people made it a favorite.

The “social media Olympics”, the moniker give to the London 2012 Olympic Games, had viewers posting an astounding 9.66 million tweets on the opening ceremony alone, which surpassed the total number of tweets for the whole duration of the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games.

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Pervez Musharraf

Former President of Pakistan retired General Pervez Musharraf joins another social media site Twitter. Pervez Musharraf is the only politician of Pakistan who has crossed the milestone of 450,000 fans  on Facebook although Imran Khan’s fan following is not to far but right now his facebook page has 437,000 fans. Pervez Musharraf started tweeting on july 2nd, and today 08 july 2012 pervez musharraf have more then 700 followers.

Its not the first time when a political person of  Pakistan joins social media site but there is one thing important to note that Pervez Musharraf joins twitter just few months before the elections.

You can follow Pervez Musharraf @P_Musharraf

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Currently, Twitter is still accessible by means of mobile phones and secure browsers such as Opera Mini.

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