Do You Twitter When You're Happy, or Does Twittering Make You Smile: Twitter Hedonimeter

Using Twitter as a Collective Mood Ring - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com

Twitter has been described many ways. At its best, it has been called a revolutionary political tool and a low-cost marketing machine. At its worst, it has been dubbed a waste of time.

Now, two researchers are calling it a hedonimeter, a device that measures happiness.

Peter Sheridan Dodds and Christopher M. Danforth, a pair of statisticians from the University of Vermont, are hoping to harness the stream of messages flowing through the popular microblogging platform at any given moment to read public opinion and sentiment in real time.

The goal is to establish an index, akin to the Dow Jones industrial average, that can “give an overall sense of how a collective body of people are feeling at any given point in time,” Mr. Dodds said.

“The goal is to take the public’s pulse on certain topics,” Mr. Dodds said.

Technorati Tags: Twitter, hedonimeter

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Guatemalan Twitterer Arrested

Jean Anleu was so fed up with corruption in his country that he decided to vent on the Internet, sending a 96-character message on the social-networking site Twitter.

That message has now earned him a potential five-year prison sentence and the unfortunate distinction of becoming one of the first people in the world to be arrested for a tweet.

Writing under his Internet alias "jeanfer," Anleu urged depositors to pull their money from Guatemala's rural development bank, whose management has been challenged in a political scandal: "First concrete action should be take cash out of Banrural and bankrupt the bank of the corrupt."

These words illegally undermined public trust in Guatemala's banking system, according to prosecutor Genaro Pacheco. Authorities proved Anleu sent the message by searching his Guatemala City home, and then put him in prison with kidnappers, extortionists and other dangerous criminals for a day and a half before letting him out on bail.

link: Guatemalan fears a tweet will make him a jailbird - washingtonpost.com

Twitter Tug Of War: Iran

Twitspam has published a list of “fake Iran election Tweeters,” whose fraudulent Twitter feeds spread disinformation, and try to incite violence. “Buyer beware,” The New York Times warns:

Nothing on Twitter has been verified. While users can learn from experience to trust a certain Twitter account, it is still a matter of trust. And just as Twitter has helped get out first-hand reports from Tehran, it has also spread inaccurate information, perhaps even disinformation.

Other Tweeters work for the “good guys,” calling for their on-line comrades to Tweet false reports of protesters’ locations, in order to send Iranian cops on wild-goose chases.

link: Perils of Iran’s Web-Driven Revolution | Danger Room | Wired.com

Twitter Security Policy: Government 2.0

James Jay Carafano writes:

Events in Tehran and Washington are clearly moving faster than White House policy. Iran’s Supreme Leader declared the election valid and ordered demonstrations to end. The next day protests continued and violence escalated. Much of the global pushback against the regime appears to be driven by what is often called Web 2.0, social networking tools like Twitter, You-Tube, Flickr, and Facebook. Heritage Scholars have written on the national security implications of these technologies before and discussed how they are impacting events in Iran. In “The Iranian Elections and Public Diplomacy 2.0: A Tale of Untapped Potential,” Heritage’s Helle Dale wrote that while the Obama administration has been quick to adopt these new technologies during the campaign on the White House Web site, “if the political will is not there to project a positive message in defense of political freedom and values that the United States has promoted for decades, it will matter little how effectively this new media is used.”

Beyond today’s headlines the world of Web 2.0 has significant implications for US national security. These are discussed in “Social Networking and National Security: How to Harness Web 2.0 to Protect the Country.” The report concludes fundamental reforms will be required for conducting national security in a world driven by global listening. Washington cannot fully adopt and exploit social networking systems without profoundly changing the process of governance. First, the government must understand and develop the means to interact in the new world in which it lives. The Administration should: (1) Restructure the government's means for conducting strategic communications; (2) Create human capital programs to prepare national security professionals and decision makers with new skills, knowledge, and attributes; and (3) Direct national security agencies to establish research and development programs focused on threats and competitive advantages of social networking tools.

link: Iran in Twitter Turmoil - GovLoop - Social Network for Government 2.0

Spying On Themselves?

Eric Pape writes:

In a crackdown, the video, photos, and blogs used to rally international support can help Iranian authorities identify protestors for arrest. Sophisticated Web users might know how to reduce this risk by adopting pseudonyms, masking the identity of their computers, and creating proxy servers that make information harder to trace to its source. (Some are even savvy enough to do the obvious: avoid posting photos and video, or giving names, that clearly identify individuals, especially if the video shows them clashing with authorities.)

But the truth is that many people are not taking such precautions--especially when confronted by more immediate concerns such as someone bearing down on them with clubs or guns, or a basij militia member aiming his motorcycle into a crowd. The cell phones the protestors are using to transmit text, photo, video and some Tweets are also easy to pinpoint geographically by the authorities who control the service. CNN reported this morning that some demonstrators were being told to remove the SIM cards in their phones to avoid being tracked.

This should be a concern, because the fact is that most revolutionary moments don’t succeed. And when they fail, authorities usually move to consolidate their power, methodically ferreting out dissenters and punishing them with jail sentences, exile, disappearance, or death. In the old days, authorities relied heavily on informers and spies—and they still do—but to some extent the age of the camera phone, Twitter, Youtube and Facebook mean that protesters are now spying on themselves.

link: Marked for Death by Twitter - Page 1 - The Daily Beast

The Twitter Conundrum

John Webster writes:

Think back 10 years ago today. eBay outages were in the news on an almost daily basis and Sun Microsystems wound up wearing the blame. Yes eBay was charting territory in a brave new world and therefore offered no service or availability guarantees. And yes there were more vendors in the mix at the time (Oracle and Veritas to name two). But the outages were very visible and Sun's image suffered disproportionately. While not explicitly stated, eBay users nonetheless had an implicit expectation of quality of service from eBay, a level that was never formally agreed to, but understood and expected.

Fast forward 10 years. Twitter is in uncharted territory, too. The temporary and periodic "system busy" messages are tolerated by users, but not without complaint. Jokes about Twitter's Fail Whale are common. Hey, it's not a critical app. We're all just having fun here, right? However, the elections in Iran have changed that perception. Twitter and other social-networking sites have become windows on a pivotal event with worldwide implications. The world wants to watch. Indeed, what the State Department's request says is that the whole world needs to watch. As a infrastructure vendor in this new and uncharted environment, do you now want to be blamed for an outage? For data loss? For a security breach?

This all adds up to the Twitter Conundrum. The owners of Twitter and other social-networking sites aren't likely to buy highly available, highly secure, redundant systems and storage of the type common to 24 by 7 production data centers. Their business models simply won't support big enterprise gear. But does that stop the federal government from stepping in and saying "sorry, you can't go down right now, not even for a few hours?" No. Twitter, YouTube, and FaceBook have created windows on the world, windows that could in fact change the world for the better. You can't fail (whale).

Here's the conundrum: No one presently pays a fee for posting to these sites. You get what you pay for or, in this case, you don't get what you don't pay for. You don't pay for and therefore don't get guaranteed availability or data integrity. Is the federal government now willing to subsidize Twitter so that it can function like a production data center? Probably not. Are users willing to pay a fee to get a guaranteed level of service? Again, probably not, at least not in the near future.

link: CNET News

The Dark Side of the Force

There's a potential dark side to the Twitter revolution. The New Republic's Jason Zengerle points to an Ethan Zuckerman interview on NPR's On the Media from April in which Zuckerman, a fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for the Internet and Society, talks about his study of Moldova's Twitter revolution. Zuckerman found evidence that several days into that rebellion, Twitter was "being used as a disinformation channel by forces who might have been aligned with the government, essentially trying to scare people away from demonstrating again." How long before the secret police start sending out organizational tweets—"We're massing at 7 p.m. at the Hall of the People for a march to the Hall of Justice!"—and busts everybody who shows up?

link: Let's not get carried away about Twitter power's role in Iran's demonstrations. - By Jack Shafer - Slate Magazine

Fine Distinctions Matter

"I wouldn't know a twitter from a tweeter, but apparently it is very important," [U.S. Secretary of State Hillary] Clinton said.

link: Cyber-sympathizers aid Iran protestors online by AFP: Yahoo! Tech

What Thou Lovest Well Is Still Limited by Your Server Capacity

“We don’t have the heart to cut off the Iranians,” said Shiyu Zhou, a computer scientist and leader in the Chinese effort, called the Global Internet Freedom Consortium. “But if our servers overload too much, we may have to cut down the traffic.”

link: Op-Ed Columnist - Tear Down This Cyberwall! - NYTimes.com

Pandora's Keyboard

When Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams and Biz Stone founded Twitter in 2006, they were probably worried about things like making money and protecting people's privacy and drunk college kids breaking up with one another in 140 characters or less. What they weren't worried about was being suppressed by the Iranian government. But in the networked, surreally flattened world of social media, those things aren't as far apart as they used to be — and what began as a toy for online flirtation is suddenly being put to much more serious uses.

link: Iran's Protests: Why Twitter Is the Medium of the Movement - TIME

". . . The Merging of Facebook and Twitter with a Potent Opposition Leader. . . ."

Egypt, Saudi Arabia and other Sunni nations have tense relations with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the Shiite-led theocracy ruling Iran. But they don't want protests in Tehran to inspire similar democratic fervor in their countries -- especially the merging of Facebook and Twitter with a potent opposition leader like Iran's presidential challenger, Mir-Hossein Mousavi.

link: Global Development News