Betabeat » tweets

WikiLeaks Seems to Think Attacks on U.S. Embassies Are All About Them

Steve Huff — Thu, 13 Sep 2012 12:49:17 -0400

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With an ill-advised tweet posted Wednesday, WikiLeaks may have won the tacky self-interest sweepstakes. The tweet, which was quickly deleted, suggested a deadly attack aimed at the American Embassy in Benghazi, Libya was justified by Julian Assange's refugee status inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London.

The Guardian assumed the tweet was written by Mr. Assange. Whoever posted the statement, they clearly weren't looking much further than their own navel, writing:

By the US accepting the UK siege on the Ecuadorian embassy in London it gave tacit approval for attacks on embassies around the world.

This was met with immediate harsh criticism by many who follow the account. Twitterer @GoldieSev responded, "Oh for fuck's sake Julian, everything isn't always about you! *Facepalm*." Another tweeter, Gareth Winchester, wrote, "There is no seige (sic) on the Ecuador embassy in Knightsbridge. Stop lying."

The Telegraph quoted New Statesman and Vanity Fair writer and editor Jemima Khan, who called the tweet "absurd and shockingly offensive."

WikiLeaks posted two more tweets saying the same thing with different wording.

By the UK threatening to breach the Ecuadorian embassy in London it helped to normalize attacks on embassies, in general. It must retract.

— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) September 12, 2012

By the US accepting the UK threat to storm the Ecuadorian embassy in London it helped to normalize attacks on embassies. — WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) September 12, 2012

The whistle-blowers followed up with an explanation of the deletion that implied the controversial post was deleted because perhaps people were too stupid to get it:

We have deleted and rephrased a previous tweet with the word 'tacit' in it, since the word is rare and was being misinterpreted.

— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) September 12, 2012

This certainly didn't help much, as at least one follower replied, "You're still assholes."

Julian Assange has more serious issues to worry about than pissing off his Twitter following. If he puts a toe outside the Ecuadorean embassy, he will be subject to arrest and extradition to Sweden, where he faces allegations he sexually molested two women during a junket there in 2010.

Just What You Never Wanted: A Weekly Newsletter of Tweets

Jessica Roy — Mon, 14 May 2012 15:22:31 -0400

(blog.twitter.com)

Twitter is, by nature, a swiftly flowing torrent of information. You can step away for lunch and miss everything from major national breaking news to weird, niche culture stories to--yes--what your high school boyfriend had for breakfast. It's just part of how the platform works--you have to learn to be okay with missing some stories, and obsessively Storify-ing others.

Well, not anymore. Twitter announced on its company blog today that it will be sending out a weekly email of tweets.

According to the company:

Starting today, you can discover the best of Twitter in a weekly email digest delivered to your inbox. This summary features the most relevant Tweets and stories shared by the people you’re connected to on Twitter.

"Finally!" said no one.

A week is a long time to wait for tweets to be delivered. We'd venture to say that a daily digest would be much more helpful, but we don't want to give them any more ideas for clogging up our inbox.

Judging from the tweets below, many Twitter users are none too fond of the new service. For the record, you can unsubscribe here.

Twitter Apparently Not Handing Over Jack Without A Search Warrant

Kelly Faircloth — Tue, 08 May 2012 16:18:12 -0400

(Photo: Scott Beale, Laughing Squid)

When last we checked in with the legal struggle over Occupy Wall Street and Twitter accounts, it didn't look great for anyone looking to keep their DMs out of court. At issue: The state wants data associated with a protestor charged with disorderly conduct. A judge ruled the defense can't fight a subpoena, because--as the legal thinking went--the information on Twitter belongs to the company, not to the individual user. And Twitter's policies seem to suggest they'll hand material over in the event of a subpoena.

But it appears it won't be quite that simple for the DA's office. Rather than complying with the order, Twitter just filed a motion to quash it.

We reached out to Twitter for comment and received a statement from Legal Counsel Ben Lee: "As we said in our brief, "Twitter's Terms of Service make absolutely clear that its users *own* their content." Our filing with the court reaffirms our steadfast commitment to defending those rights for our users."

The motion identifies several problems with the order, starting with the idea users don't own their tweets. Apparently, according to the company's terms of service, users do retain rights to the content posted on the site, and the document "expressly permits users to challenge demands for their account records." The motion also alleges that the order for Twitter to produce "basic user information" compels the company to violate the Fourth Amendment (that would be the one regarding search and seizure), as well as the Stored Communications Act.

The document concludes that, "Twitter respectfully requests that the Court quash the Order and direct the District Attorney to request a search warrant for the desired records."

Translation: Come at me, bro.

The ACLU's blog explains the implications:

This is a big deal. Law enforcement agencies—both the federal government and state and city entities—are becoming increasingly aggressive in their attempts to obtain information about what people are doing on the Internet. And while the individual Internet users can try to defend their rights in the rare circumstances in which they find out about the requests before their information is turned over, that may not be enough.

For the curious and/or legally inclined, the motion is here.

Let’s Monetize! How LocalResponse Turns Social Media Emphemera Into Mobile Ad Inventory

Ben Popper — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 13:24:37 -0400

Nihal Mehta

Betabeat is pretty sick of "big data" as a buzzword, but the amount of personal information that consumers are throwing up on the web is staggering. Facebook has had some success advertising against this information, Twitter less so.

LocalResponse was born out of the ashes of Buzzd, a city guide that mashed up Foursquare and Twitter to help users find local hotspots. Founder Nihal Mehta learned a valuable lesson in defeat, and this week raised a $5 million round from new investors Cava Capital, Vodafone Ventures, Advancit Capital and Progress Ventures, along with its existing investors

Buzzd was a consumer facing platform, but failed to attract enough users. LocalResponse, by contrast, take the massive amount of public data being shared on Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare, and turns that into ad inventory.

"Our Verizon campaign has been one of the top performers," said Mr. Mehta, who chatted with Betabeat by phone earlier this week. "When we see people tweeting out 'AT&T suck' or 'Singular is killing me' we can respond to that with a tweet from Verizon's account offering them a $100 discount to switch carriers. That's relevant, contextual advertising and the conversion rates have been off the charts."

For now the only insight we have into performance comes from Mr. Mehta himself. But LocalResponse has secured 40 clients and some very big names: Verizon, Coca Cola, McDonalds, Walgreens and more. Several of these companies have run repeated campaigns on the service, a sign that they are seeing a positive return on their investment.

"The click through rates on promoted tweets are still quite low. By comparison our campaign for Walgreens saw a 60% click through rate."

Back in August LocalResponse acquired social TV startup Philo, which added a number of engineers to their team, including their current CTO, Jessica Lowe. The new funding will be used to build our sales and marketing and to deepen the R&D the company is doing on semantic analysis.

The key to keeping their service from being spammy is only sending consumers messages that are highly relevant in terms of time, place and sentiment. LocalResponse is responding to a user's status update, tweet or check in, which gives them a great context to target their add. And because most people have these services set up with push notifications, they don't have to be in the specific app to get the message, they only need to own a smartphone, which often provides a great picture of their location. "SMS is a powerful and ubiquitous service," Mr. Mehta said.

To prove their point, LocalResponse pointed to a campaign Manhattan restaurant Baohaus, which was sending out tweets to promote its business, but seeing little response. When they started running a LocalResponse campaign, they got 40,000 retweets, and 340 people saw their discount offering for every person that sent a tweet.