Teenagers use Facebook by far more than any other social media site and have over 400 friends on it. But Twitter and Instagram have massively increased their usage in the past year, according to a new survey from the Pew Internet & American Life Project, together with Harvard's Berkman Center. The new report covers US teens and social media. There are an enormous number of findings in the document, which was compiled using both surveys and focus groups. You can read or download the full report online. Facebook Tops, Twitter & Instagram Growing According to the report, 95 percent [...]

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Twitter's expansion into the wider content world beyond 140-characters continues with news today that it will be showing highlights of NBA playoff games inside tweets. And, as Bloomberg reports, the deal also includes video ads that will show along with the highlight videos. The NBA will post highlights from the current NBA playoffs using the #NBARapidReplay hashtag, and ads will show from sponsors including Sprint Nextel, Taco Bell and Sony Pictures. Adam Bain, Twitter's head of global revenue, declined to discuss financial details with Bloomberg. Earlier this week, Twitter and ESPN [...]

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Yahoo announced a partnership with Twitter today to include real-time tweets from media outlets, politicians and celebrities in the Yahoo homepage newsfeed. In a post titled "@yahoo delivers #bestoftheweb," Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer said users will see "relevant and personalized Tweets alongside stories from Yahoo! and other sources." Users will be able to follow tweet sources by clicking on the "Follow" button displayed in the tweets. It is not yet clear how the tweet personalization will function, but one would think that users who are signed in to Yahoo and or Twitter will be served mor [...]

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Twitter has scooped up Lucky Sort, a two-year old start-up in Portland, Oregon, that developed TopicWatch, a contextual analytics engine designed to discover patterns in real-time data streams -- including Twitter data. Lucky Sort CEO, Noah Pepper announced on the company website that it will be closing down, and he and other team members will be joining Twitter's "revenue engineering department" in San Francisco. TechCrunch reported that Jesse Smith and Daniel Fennelly will join Pepper in the move. Launched in February 2012, TopicWatch offered analysts a big data visualization tool f [...]

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Two days after the May 7 dissolution of TweetDeck, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo resigned from his role as UK Director. TweetDeck's failure to file 2011 accounts led to its forced dissolution by Cardiff-based Companies House, followed by Costolo stepping away from the role of UK Director on May 9. Dublin-based accountant Laurence O'Brien was selected to takeover Costolo's UK Director role, and will serve alongside current UK. Directors Alex Macgillivray and Ali Rowghani. Macgillivray also holds the role of Twitter's general counsel and head of trust, while Rowghani is Twitter's COO. O'Brien has [...]

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Twitter has hired Cynthia Gaylor as its new head of corporate development. Gaylor has been serving as a managing director at Morgan Stanley, where her recent focus has been in the tech sector. Notably, according to her LinkedIn profile, Gaylor's background includes IPOs. Most recently Cynthia is leading Morgan Stanley's technology execution effort, advising clients across a broad array of strategic financing activities including IPOs, follow-on offerings, equity linked, private placement and debt security transactions. Cynthia has advised on transactions for Workday, ServiceNow, Palo Alt [...]

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(screenshot via CNN) Twitter is warning media outlets to be "extra vigilant" in light of today's incident involving a fake tweet sent out by hackers that had gained access to the Associated Press' Twitter account, @AP. It's also good advice for brands and marketers -- and for all Twitter users, actually. Shortly after 1:00 pm EST today, the AP's account sent out a (fake) tweet saying that President Obama was injured after "two explosions in the White House." The Dow Jones stock market index momentarily tanked almost 150 points. The AP disabled its Twitter accounts, at least temporari [...]

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The Financial Times (FT) is reporting that Twitter has struck a major deal with agency Starcom MediaVest Group (SMG), which is part of agency holding company Publicis. The deal, according to FT, is worth "hundreds of millions of dollars over a multiyear period." SMG clients include major brands such as Burger King, Comcast-NBCU, Honda, P&G, Coke, Microsoft and many others. The deal is being characterized as a "partnership." Years ago Publicis announced something similar with Google. As the FT points out, this announcement comes just ahead of the TV "upfront" where advertisers commit [...]

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Next week, Comedy Central is launching a unique 5-day comedy festival that brings comedians directly to their audience. Well, directly to their audience's Twitter stream. Next week, a Twitter-only festival will be released that features some of comedy's elite including Mel Brooks, Amy Schumer and Carl Reiner. The event starts next Monday and will use the  hashtag #ComedyFest. The event will leverage mixed media and tweets, thanks to the collaboration between Viacom and Twitter. #ComedyFest will feature live-streaming video, snippets from comics on stage and the sharing of 6 second Vines. [...]

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Twitter's music app is live today and can be downloaded from the App Store or used via the Web version which can be found at music.twitter.com. Based on a user's activity, the app will offer recommendations on popular tracks and emerging artists. Users will be able to locate and listen to specific artists' music from the artists' profiles, as well as tweet the songs directly from the app. Twitter #music songs are sourced from iTunes, Spotify and Rdio, but the default application to preview songs is iTunes. To hear full tracks via Spotify or Rdio, subscribers must log into their Spotify or R [...]

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The music discovery service We Are Hunted has announced that it's joining Twitter. The news hit almost at the same moment that American Idol host Ryan Seacrest tweeted about "playing with @twitter's new music app." Together, those two items should open new marketing opportunities for artists to be found and connect with fans on Twitter. In a follow-up, Seacrest said that the Twitter music app "shows what artists are trending" and "also has up and coming artists." In its announcement, We Are Hunted only hints at what's in store as it joins Twitter: While we are shutting down wearehun [...]

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Twitter's contentious relationship with developers took another turn today when it shut down a new product from Ribbon that enabled in-tweet payments for products, services and more. Ribbon announced the new product at 11:00 am PT today and immediately captured a fair amount of buzz in tech and marketing circles. Less than 90 minutes later, co-founder and CEO Hany Rashwan wrote an update announcing that Twitter had already shut the product down: At around 12:24 PM PST, with no heads up, our integration of Twitter Cards was taken down, and now Ribbon links go back to Ribbon.co without the i [...]

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'Tis the season of mobile advertising forecasts. Within the last week three have been released from eMarketer, BIA/Kelsey and now IDC. Emarketer said that US mobile advertising was worth $4.1 billion in 2012, BIA estimated $3.2 billion and IDC now asserts that US mobile ad revenues came in at $4.5 billion for the year. IDC expects mobile advertising to reach $7 billion by year end, compared with eMarketer's $7.29 billion and BIA's $5.39 billion. The IDC forecast also says the following about 2012 mobile ad revenues: Search: 61 percent of mobile ad spending  ($2.8 billion) Display: [...]

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In just 3 years, it's estimated that Twitter's global ad revenue will have increased by nearly tenfold. In 2011, the popular social networking service raked in 139.5 million dollars, while the newest projection from eMarketer is for $950 million in global revenue in 2014. While the revenue number is skyrocketing, the overall growth of Twitter ad revenue is not surprisingly retarding over time as it matures. The near $1 billion ad revenue in 2014 will signal a 63% growth from 2013, down from the 102.2% estimated growth this year. The biggest revenue driver on Twitter's ad growth is� [...]

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Twitter is inviting developers to a private "mobile-oriented platform event" next week at its headquarters in San Francisco. "We've been working on some exciting new features for the Twitter platform," the registration page says, "and we'd like to share those with you." Twitter has had a contentious relationship with some developers since it began to tighten its API rules last summer. The company eventually explained its developer ecosystem vision, which gave developers a road map for the kind of products the company wants to see going forward on the Twitter platform. Members of the p [...]

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A huge percentage of TV watchers (as much as 80 percent) are now on a "second screen" during a program, though they may not necessarily be engaged in a "social conversation" about the show they are watching. They may be shopping, writing emails or reading news, instead. However, a new study from SocialGuide (and Nielsen) found that Twitter activity and conversations were positively correlated with TV ratings. Twitter was one of three "statistically significant variables" associated with positive TV ratings. The other two were past ratings and TV advertising (on behalf of the show). Ni [...]

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Twitter confirmed late Tuesday what several news outlets had already reported: its acquisition of Bluefin Labs, a company that helps brands measure and connect social media conversations with TV shows and commercials. Twitter says the buy will help the company "create innovative new ad products and consumer experiences" in social TV. The acquisition follows on the December announcement that Twitter is partnering with Nielsen to create the "Nielsen Twitter TV Rating," the first industry-standard metric for second-screen activity. In today's announcement, Twitter says it'll work with Niels [...]

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While it appeared to me that she was still lip-syncing yesterday, Beyonce Knowles was one of the big winners of yesterday's social media buzz bowl. The not-so-single lady's celebrated halftime performance generated more than 250,000 tweets per minute (TPMs). Overall, according to Twitter, her performance drove 5.5 million tweets -- and perhaps shut down power at the stadium for a half hour thereafter. Other top TPM winners were the following: Power outage: 231,500 TPM 108-yard kickoff return for Ravens TD by Jones: 185,000 TPM Clock expires; Ravens win: 183,000 TPM Jones catch [...]

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Twitter says a group of "extremely sophisticated" hackers may have recently accessed limited user information for about 250,000 users accounts, prompting the company to reset the passwords associated with those accounts and remind all of its users to create a stronger password. The investigation is still going on, but Twitter says the hackers might've accessed some users' personal information: This week, we detected unusual access patterns that led to us identifying unauthorized access attempts to Twitter user data. We discovered one live attack and were able to shut it down in process mom [...]

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Don't use our platform to copy what we do without permission. That seems to be the core issue in a Platform Policy change that Facebook announced on its developer blog about an hour ago. The change, according to Justin Osofsky, Facebook's Director Platform Partnerships, means that the "vast majority" of developers should "keep doing what you're doing." But, in light of Facebook's decision to cut API access to Vine and Voxer within the past week, Osofsky offered this clarification of Facebook's policies: For a much smaller number of apps that are using Facebook to either replicate our fu [...]

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