Tag: Twitter

US Navy embracing social networks

While reading this article, I was really amazed by how much US Navy embraced social networks.

Over 90 documents relating to Navy social media use were made available online that give a window onto recommended military security practices for popular services and how naval culture squares with the anarchic world of Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. More importantly, it also reveals how the Navy keeps tabs on sailors via social media.
In one case, the Navy shared a poster of sexual assault prevention tips on their official Facebook page at the request of the Defense Department’s Sexual Assault Prevention and Response office. The poster was a repurposed graphic that the Navy copied from Slutwalk Austin’s Facebook page.
The idea was to intentionally spur a debate among Navy personnel on sexual assault and to bring discussion of the topic into a semi-public forum. According to the Navy’s own report, “many thought [the poster] was funny, ‘dumb,’ or a joke, others were outraged, a few recognized the tone and intent” and Navy social media personnel managed the resulting comments thread. They moderated the discussion, noted how sailors treat discussion of sexual assault online and attempted to keep a respectful tone. In one case, the thread even uncovered what appeared to have been the sexual assault of a former sailor.

I wish more companies and organizations did the same.

Twitter WTF of the day

Here is my WTF moment of the day.  I directed my browser (Google Chrome, if you must know) to open Twitter.com.  What did I see?  Not a Twitter page.  Not even a famour Twitter fail whale.  I saw an empty page with this error message.

Can someone throw an idea or two as to what that might mean?  I’m just curious, you know…

Social networks and referrer URLs

Pretty much every social network out there is building a custom front page for each user.  Such front pages are customized with preferences and previous activity of the user.  This is an excellent functionality.  But one thing such approach often breaks is a referral URL.  Have a look at something I saw in my statistics today morning (click for larger version).

This tells me that someone somewhere on Facebook linked to one of my posts.  I know which post was linked to.  But I have no way to figure out where exactly on Facebook the link is.  I’d like to do so very much – I’m interested to see the discussion and context in which my post came up.  I’ve tried Googling for the post, but that didn’t help.  I examined logs of my web server and that didn’t help either.  I think that’s broken.

And just to be clear, this problem is not specific to Facebook.  I’ve had similar issues with Twitter and other social networks.  Some of them make the discovery job easier than others.  But all of them don’t make the source obvious.  And I think they should.

I’m not following anyone on Twitter. Or do I?

Twitter, it seems, is going through some rough times. I’ve seen plenty of Twitter fail whale in my time. But today there is something new.  My Twitter feed is empty with a message that I’m not following anyone.  Even though a counter to the right of the message shows that I’m following quite a few people.