Social Media

How many of your Twitter followers are fake?

Twitter users who want to know how many spammy or "fake" accounts are following them can check out a new service called Fake Follower Check.

Designed by a group named StatusPeople, the service looks at your Twitter account to scan a certain number of followers. In return, it tells how many of your followers are good, inactive, or fake. In my instance, it informed me that 77 percent of the accounts were good, 19 percent inactive, and 4 percent fake.

You can also get results for other Twitter accounts. Just plug in the name of the account, and … Read more

The disappeared tweets of Michael Dell's daughter

It's not easy being a wealthy parent, especially if your kids want to do the same things as the kids of other wealthy parents do.

You know, like, um, constantly feeding your Twitter account.

Wayne Gretzky seems to have been one modern patrician who became frustrated with his daughter's Twitter postings, reportedly shutting down his daughter's Twitter feed twice. She does like a racy shot or two, does Paulina Gretzky.

Now I hear there might have been another marginal breach in Twitterdom in the bosom of Michael Dell.

As Bloomberg Businessweek reports it, Dell's 18-year-old daughter … Read more

Olympics score more than 150 million tweets

People who didn't follow the Olympics on TV or streaming media could still keep up with all the action via Twitter.

The micro-blogging site saw more than 150 million Tweets about the summer games, the company blogged yesterday. Now that the games have ended, which athletes and events won the most interest among tweeters?

Jamaica's Usain Bolt win of the gold medal in the 200-meter sprint scored a record on Twitter with 80,000 tweets per minute. His gold medal for the 100-meter sprint came in second with 74,000 tweets per minute. Bolt also was tops on … Read more

Mark Zuckerberg's topless photo stirs emotions

If there's one thing Vladimir Putin has shown the world, it's that a topless photo can add truth to power.

It can make a man seem more of a man, more 5'4" than 5'3".

Perhaps Mark Zuckerberg also feels the need to appear a little taller, stronger, and manlier.

For a photograph has emerged of Facebook's CEO topless.

My deeply religious reading of TMZ suddenly revealed yesterday the sight of Zuckerberg with his right hand on his bare chest, as if to say: "Sexy? Moi?"

It is impossible to know why … Read more

Zynga's new Gems With Friends puts spotlight on mobile

Zynga's latest game, Gems With Friends, launches today and it may give some hope for the game-creator's mobile future.

As the series' first arcade-style and first non-word game, Gems -- available in Canada with a worldwide rollout to follow in the coming weeks -- features gemstones of different colors and numbers that can be combined to score points.

"They combine and they create these epic combos," said Paul Bettner, vice president and general manager at Zynga. "It's a thrilling game and very, very addictive."

Zynga is introducing this mobile-only game amid criticism of … Read more

The spoken hashtag must die -- here's how

It's time to take a stand against the spoken hashtag. You know, that awkward habit some of the Twitter-dicted have of saying things like "hashtag are you kidding me?"

Believe me, I understand the yearning for words to convey that something is so awesome or horrendous that you'd rather be tweeting about it with your legion of Twitter followers than simply jawing with your analog flesh-bucket "real" friends.

If you happen to witness, say, a squirrel jumping on to the back of a golden retriever the moment the dog takes off after a tennis ball -- that's something obviously worthy of a hashtag, right?… Read more

Did Twitter alert NBC to Adams' Olympics criticism?

The drama surrounding Twitter's suspension of a U.K. newspaper reporter over his criticism of NBC has taken a rather surprising twist.

The Daily Telegraph is reporting today that it received an e-mail from Christopher McCloskey, NBC Sports vice president of communications, who told the news outlet that his company was alerted to tweets The Independent reporter Guy Adams sent out criticizing NBC over its Olympics coverage by Twitter itself.

"Our social media dept was actually alerted to it by Twitter and then we filled out the form and submitted it," McCloskey told the Daily Telegraph.

Adams … Read more

Minding your manners when sharing in social media

Since this is a column about "Common Sense Tech," I thought I'd take that name and run with it in terms of social-media sharing. Sometimes I see a lack of common sense, politeness, and manners when it comes to personal sharing. Consider this a "things not to do" list.

Some of the suggestions below are things I personally try to follow. I love to share on social media, but I also try to be mindful of people's privacy. Some of the suggestions come from others whom I asked through... social media!

The suggestions are … Read more

How the world's biggest companies are doing social media

The graphic above show the 10 most-often mentioned companies on social media among the Global Fortune 100. That's according to the third annual Global Social Media Check-Up Study of how Global Fortune 100 companies are using social media, conducted by Burson-Marsteller and Visible Technologies. You can find the full study at BM.com/social, including the executive summary and an infographic.

Here are five findings highlighted by the authors of the study:

1. The Fortune Global 100 were mentioned a total of 10,400,132 times online in one month. Gone are the days that companies and brands … Read more

Can Digg make a comeback?

Digg's painful downfall has finally hit rock bottom. Does that mean Digg can only go up now?

As you've probably heard, the once-mighty social news Web site has sold to Betaworks for a paltry $500,000. The total price of the acquisition was around $16 million, if you include The Washington Post's acquisition of the team and LinkedIn's acquisition of the patents.

That price is still a far cry from the $200 million that Google was ready to spend to acquire Digg in 2008. And those numbers seem paltry in comparison with the billion dollar deals … Read more