Twitter’s major new design includes brand pages

Twitter has developed an entirely new version with simpler design and the ability to connect much easier with others. In addition, Twitter has ramped up its monetisation strategy with the creation of brand pages for advertisers.

The new design and range of capabilities – including embeddable tweets – will manifest themselves across mobile and web. The new design will be rolled out in the coming weeks.

TweetDeck has also been glammed up to be consistent with the new shape of Twitter.

Four new tabs

The design features four key areas that will dominate the shape of Twitter going forward:

·        ‘Home’, where tweets from people you have chosen to follow will appear

·        The ‘Connect Station’, for seeing who has followed or mentioned you and join the conversation and act on interactions

·         ‘Discover’ lets users tap into customised information streams based on location and what is going on in the world

·         The ‘Me’ tab is a new profile section that allows users to develop a richer profile than just the few words and picture that has existed to date

Monetisation

As part of the redesign, Twitter has introduced enhanced profile or ‘brand’ pages that in its own words allows marketers to create “an even more compelling destination on Twitter for their brands.”

The new brand pages allow advertisers to control the messages visitors see when they visit the pages and gives marketers greater flexibility in terms of highlighting particular content, such as expanding on particular promoted tweets.

Photos and videos can also be expanded on the brand pages.

Major brands that have signed up to start using the new promoted pages include Intel, Chevrolet, Coca-Cola, Dell, HP, JetBlue, McDonald's, Best Buy, Bing and American Express.

Embeddable tweets

Twitter has also come up with an interesting new way of bringing tweets to various websites.

Embeddable tweets are dynamic media that allows users to add a particular tweet to their website by copying and pasting a line of code.

Readers can then follow the author of that tweet, retweet, or favourite it without leaving whatever page they are on.

Has Twitter become more like Facebook?

That seems to be the conclusion that a lot of media are drawing and while there are similarities in terms of greater sharing and profiling capabilities, I think this is the culmination of a lot of work at Twitter to strike out on its own and control its own destiny.

It has looked inside itself, studied its capabilities and has come up with a dynamic set of services that will only enhance its unique character and offering.

It is also addressing problems that, in my opinion, don’t help it to grow its user base as fast as it would like. Facebook and LinkedIn sometime resemble rambling country lanes compared to the high-speed, high-octane flow of information and often users, myself included, struggle to get a sense of context, or join in the conversation. Unless you have nothing else to do and are glued to your screen, sometimes context flies out the window when you arrive at Twitter and get a sense of direction.

Twitter appears to be aware of this boundary and if anything is attempting to help users make sense of the mass of information.

The embeddable tweets function, however, is a bold strike in a new direction – the power to just put a tweet on any web page and keep the dynamic ability to favourite, retweet or follow the author. This is definitely something that will make Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+, not to mention all the many other me-too social sites, including the multitude of photo-sharing apps, sit up and pay attention. In doing the embeddable tweets thing, Twitter has set a new standard.

But the bigger question is, will the monetisation strategy work? Judging by the brands that have so far signed up, it looks like it will. Promoted tweets on their own just aren’t enough and brands need to have a sense of control amid the constantly buzzing traffic. Picture, if you will, Twitter’s brand pages existing as highly visible traffic islands or service stations amid the ebb and flow of tweets and conversations.

For a long time, people have wondered how Twitter will monetise and drive its audience to levels that will reach Facebook’s proportions – Twitter has 300m users while Facebook is hurtling towards 1bn – and it’s likely Twitter has found its answer.

How will Twitter’s new features stack up against Facebook’s Timeline? I consider this new set of capabilities a just-in-time intervention in that it modernises Twitter for a dynamic new age and opens the door for an interesting opportunity for app creators to brainstorm and bring apps into the Twitterverse rather than just developing reader apps.

Simply put, it’s a platform for the future.

http://www.siliconrepublic.com/new-media/item/24914-twitters-major-new-design/

Social Consumers & the Science of Sharing.

If you’re buying a car, do you check Facebook? Or do you read up on Kelley Blue Book values and scour the company website for every spec, from horsepower to miles per gallon? What about music — do you check Top 40 radio charts or scope out what your Facebook friends are actually listening to on Spotify?

Social media has infiltrated the purchasing funnel, helping consumers make informed decisions, from what to have for lunch to where to go on vacation. Depending on the decision, sometimes you turn to your social graph, and sometimes you turn to Google. So, as a brand marketer, you want to know what online channels you should be targeting in order to reach the perfect audience for your product.

But regardless of what kind of consumer you’re trying to reach or what you’re selling, your SEO better be top notch — search is the most important influence on the web.

The infographic below, featuring data from M Booth and Beyond, analyzes the differences between high and low sharers and various purchasing decisions, helping brands to understand how should be targeting consumers.

What kind of consumer are you?

http://mashable.com/2011/10/25/social-consumer-sharing-infographic/

Touch sensitivity on gadgets and robots is nothing new. A few strategically placed sensors under a flexible, synthetic skin and you have pressure sensitivity. Add a capacitive, transparent screen to a device and you have touch sensitivity. However, Stanford University’s new “super skin” is something special: a thin, highly flexible, super-stretchable, nearly transparent skin that can respond to touch and pressure, even when it’s being wrung out like a sponge.

The brainchild of Stanford University Associate Professor of chemical engineering Zhenan Bao, this “super skin” employs a transparent film of spray-on, single-walled carbon nanotubes that sit in a thin film of flexible silicon, which is then sandwiched between more silicon.

After an initial stretch, which actually aligns the randomly sprayed-on conductive, carbon nanotubes into microscopic spring-like forms, the skin can be stretched and restretched again to twice its original size, without the springs or skin losing their resiliency. Darren Lipomi, a postdoctoral researcher who is part of Bao’s research team explained, “None of it causes any permanent deformation.”

This unique makeup allows the malleable skin to measure force response even as it’s being stretched, or “squeezed like a sponge.” Researchers noted that it can also sense touch and force at the same time.

This super skin is not simply a thicker, more flexible version of the touch screen on your iPhone 4S. Virtually all touch-sensitive smartphones feature transparent films that sense touch. However, these capacitive screens are only responding to the tiny electrical charge in your fingertips and do not actually know if you’re touching lightly or hammering the screen.

Flexible touch screens for computers and smartphones is one obvious super skin application idea, but the Stanford researchers have larger goals. They envision future robots wearing this flexible touch and pressure-sensitive skin. From there, the next logical step is replacement of skin on people, especially burn victims or those who have lost limbs.

http://mashable.com/2011/10/24/artificial-super-skin/

Google & Microsoft a little unhappy with Siri...

By now we're all used to the "soap-like" goings on at the top of the technology industry so the news that Google and Microsoft had a couple of dig's about Apple's new Siri will come as a huge shock to well...none of you.


With Siri's upcoming launch, and speculation on how much of an impact the voice-controlled application will have within the industry, it's obvious fellow industry leaders are beginning to feel the strain. Google's Head of Android - Andy Rubin was quoted as saying: "I don't believe your phone should be an assistant...Your phone is a tool for communicating," further adding, "You shouldn't be communicating with the phone; you should be communicating with somebody on the other side of the phone." - Fair play, apart from Google's numerous app's unrelated to telecommunication whatsoever and it's Google Voice-Search & Goggles, Google's alternative voice- and image-based ways of interacting with your phone....maybe it slipped his mind? 


Microsoft's Windows Phone president, Andy Lee had also mentioned that Siri "isn't super useful." At the same time, he noted that Windows Phone 7 has a degree of voice interactivity in the way it connects to Bing, and thus harnesses "the full power of the internet, rather than a certain subset."

Perhaps its not just being well ahead in the technology race in getting Siri to the table, but the threat that the application poses on technologies where Google and Microsoft are respected leaders. Siri allows searches of Google and Bing when it can't find an answer that merges Wolfram Alpha's natural language query responses with its own easy-to-use, natural language interface.

Siri also acts as a first sift "layer" for users seeking information over the Internet. When you ask Siri the data gets whizzed off by Apple to its cloud servers, where the speech is processed and then interpreted. It is then found if the question is "intelligible, being answerable by Apple itself and thus severely limiting the ad revenue both Google and Bing could see in the future.

There's no way in denying that Siri will change the way we look at our smart devices, and offers a fantastic foundation on which to grow from. Google and Microsoft may well be snubbing the much anticipated Siri, but there's no doubt they'll be working intensely on their own voice controlled applications, if they do indeed find time away from the development of a "handbags at dawn" app.

Laugh as they may, it could come back to haunt them, and comments taken into account - Putting constraints on technology only hinders innovation - a race which Google and Microsoft will surely like to shorten the lead in.