Tag Archive for 'Twitter'

New hedge fund to use Twitter to predict stock market.

Published on December 22, 2010 in Twitter, business, social media and technology. View Comments

Further to my recent post on social media in relation to financial matters, but quite different, is appears that a new British hedge fund in planning to track Twitter in order to attempt to predict the direction of the stock market.

The initiative appears to be based on a recent paper by the University of Manchester and Indiana University, which found that the frequency of certain emotional words could be used, with a high degree of accuracy (87.9%), to predict daily moves in stock markets, between two and six days later.

An exclusive deal has been signed with Dr. Xiao-Jun Zeng, a doctor of computer science at the University of Manchester, to research trading models.

Are you skeptical about how successful this will be? I don’t blame you, but I’m going to try and follow this up to see how well they do in the markets. Apparently the fund is set to start trading with an initial 25 million pounds. Stay tuned.

Twitter reveals Top Trending Topics and Most Powerful Tweets for 2010.

Published on December 15, 2010 in Twitter, environment, politics and social media. View Comments

In what’s becoming an end of year tradition, if you can call two years in a row a tradition, Twitter has revealed its Top Trending Topics for the year.

The company has also compiled a list of the Most Retweeted tweets, what it asserts to have been the 10 Most Powerful Tweets of 2010, and a tree timeline of some notable people who have joined Twitter over during the year: Who’s New On Twitter.

Twitter 2010: Year In Review

Unsurprisingly, ‘Gulf Oil Spill’, ‘Haiti Earthquake’ and ‘Pakistan Flood’ made it to number 1, 2 and 3 respectively in the News Events section. ‘Wikileaks Cablegate’ appears to have made it to number 7 on the list, even though that particular global brouhaha is still in full swing.

In other topic areas, Apple took out four of the top ten spots in ‘Technology’, and Justin Bloody Bieber took out top spot in ‘People’. Again, no doubt Julian Assange is rocketing up that list at the present time.

Below is a rundown of the Overall Top Trends, if you can’t be bothered clicking the link above and going all the way over to Twitter. I have to say, Inception has been my favourite film for the year too.

  1. Gulf Oil Spill
  2. FIFA World Cup
  3. Inception
  4. Haiti Earthquake
  5. Vuvuzela
  6. Apple iPad
  7. Google Android
  8. Justin Bieber
  9. Harry Potter & the Deathly Hollows
  10. Pulpo Paul

A few of the listed 10 Most Powerful Tweets are certainly debatable, but in my book, this one from hit parody account @BPGlobalPR was a real doozie at the time:

Catastrophe is a strong word, let’s all agree to call it a whoopsie daisy.

What’s your favourite trending topic for the year, or favourite Most Powerful Tweet?

Is social media being used to manipulate financial markets?

Published on December 13, 2010 in Facebook, Twitter, business, social media and technology. View Comments

In India, the financial regulator, SEBI (Securities and Exchange Board of India), is planning to use a new suite of software tools to analyse conversations about financial markets in social media.

The software will analyse networks such as Facebook and Twitter, as well as blogs and more traditional social media such as forums. It is thought that some people may be using social media to try to manipulate markets. There has been a sudden rise in the number of cases of alleged manipulation.

SEBI has warned investors against websites offering stock tips, adding that people may expose themselves to undue risk by using unconfirmed information on websites and in social media.

I wonder if the use of such software by regulators to monitor conversations about financial markets and specific stocks will catch on in other countries too?

via The Economic Times

Twitter and Facebook have not abandoned Wikileaks, yet.

Published on December 8, 2010 in Facebook, Twitter, politics and social media. View Comments

Amazon Web Services, PayPal, Visa, Mastercard, its DNS server and its Swiss bank account have all abandoned Wikileaks, presumably after Senator Joe Lieberman called on corporations to stop doing business with Wikileaks. However, two notable outlets for the organisation’s communications still appear to be accessible as I write this post: Facebook and Twitter.

Facebook Wikileaks

Are Twitter and Facebook going to shut down the Wikileaks accounts? It appears not, well at least not yet. ReadWriteWeb reported that Facebook has made the decision to keep Wikileaks’ Facebook page live. Andrew Noyes, Facebook’s Manager of Public Policy Communications is quoted as saying:

The Wikileaks Facebook Page does not violate our content standards nor have we encountered any material posted on the page that violates our policies.

Facebook also asserted that it hasn’t received any official requests to disable the Wikileaks page (as of the writing of that post), or any notification that the articles posted on the page contain any unlawful content. They also maintain that they are continuing to monitor the situation. This seems to imply that if Wikileaks is found to be breaking the law, Facebook might change its mind.

Wikileaks Twitter

Twitter has also said that it is not censoring Wikileaks from ‘Trending Topics’, after it was questioned by reporters and users on the issue. Twitter was suspected of removing the hashtags #wikileaks and #cablegate after the heavily used tags were no longer trending.

So despite taking a number of serious hits over the past couple of days, including the arrest of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange in London on sexual assault charges, Wikileaks is still able to communicate via social media.

Additionally, to make it very difficult indeed to remove Wikileaks from the Internet, with the aid of many supporters, multiple (1289 at the time of writing) mirrors of Wikileaks have been set up.

Do you think Wikileaks’ social media accounts will eventually be disabled, if it’s found that any laws have been broken by the organisation?

Can we move as one using social media? Twitter’s Biz Stone thinks so.

Published on November 25, 2010 in Twitter, business, mobile, politics, social media, technology and video. View Comments

Here’s an interesting recent video interview with Twitter co-founder Biz Stone.

One point grabbed me as I was listening to the interview. He says:

One particular event opened our eyes to what we had on our hands. That was in March of 2007 at a festival called South by South West….We had about 75,000 users at that point and many of the people at the festival were using Twitter, and this was the first time we were able to see Twitter in the wild, so to speak. And there were a couple of things that happened at that festival that made us realize that people were using our service to come together and move as one…We rushed right back to San Francisco and formed Twitter Incorporated.

I find this interesting in the light of my recent thoughts on what a global civilization, aided by an increasingly social web, might start to look like. Is it possible that sometimes (only sometimes) we may be able to use the social web to come together and act as one, on a larger scale than anything previously achieved? Twitter has certainly become a lot bigger since then.

« Older Entries