Twitter’s revolution blues

That’s the trouble with announcing a revolution. If you fall short of your lofty ideals, you’re left looking somewhat exposed.

And while Twitter didn’t explicitly proclaim the music service it launched last month to be revolutionary, it certainly sailed pretty close on its official blog:

Time to check your privacy settings, Facebook’s Graph Search has landed

The impact of Facebook’s new Graph Search feature will likely take some time to appreciate, not least because it is currently in “very limited beta”.

The initial launch is restricted to just four areas – people, places, photos and interests – but already it feels like the feature is intended to be all things to all people.

Indeed, the disparate suggestions from the social network on how Graph Search could be used, ranging from dating to music suggestions to restaurant advice, give an indication of the scale of Facebook’s plans, if not users’ actual desire to search their friends’ information on such a fine level.

One audience group the company is particularly keen to win over is journalists and it looks at how journalists can use Graph Search in some detail.

Twitter – so much quicker than a press release

The interview announcement was first made on Oprah Winfrey’s Twitter account on Tuesday, and confirmed when Armstrong retweeted it 15 minutes later.

From the BBC’s story this morning on Lance Armstrong’s forthcoming interview by Oprah Winfrey:

World of Mouth: the social media revolution continues

Erik Qualman this week released the next installment of his social media revolution video series (HT: We Are Social), once again recording the tremendous increase in global use of social media.

Digital Intelligence in PME, September and October 2012

Time for a quick roundup of my recent, new look, Digital Intelligence columns from PME.

The magazine got a gentle redesign in September and, in keeping with this, I started taking a longer, more thoughtful look at issues in Digital Intelligence.

First up was a critical look at the usability and discoverability of pharma content in September’s PME followed, in the October issue, by some thoughts on Boehringer Ingelheim’s Facebook game Syrum.

The digital pharma news that previously made up the Digital Intelligence section can still be found online in the Digital Intelligence blog and, playing around with Delicious tag bundles, links to blog highlights are featured each month.

Ping: say goodbye

There will surely be few people who will mourn the demise of Apple’s music social network Ping.

That the ‘walled garden’ within iTunes didn’t “gain traction”, as CEO Tim Cook put it in July, is little surprise.

It offered a poor user experience within iTunes’ familiarly clunky interface, with little reason for visiting. Bands more often than not used it as a somewhat perfunctory news feed and this, combined with Ping’s small and unenthusiastic audience, meant it felt like a slow-moving, neutered network.