As mentioned on The Bivings Report, last Thursday we launched a new instance of Slurp140 to track discussions on Twitter surrounding Facebook’s fairly well hyped “Project Titan” which CEO Mark Zuckerberg clarified is in fact, not a “Gmail Killer.”
Looking at the results of http://www.slurp140.com/titan/ a few things stand out:
1. Discussion about Facebook’s announcement were largely confined to a small and specific set of people.
In other words, total insider baseball.
For the Facebook announcement, the ratio between total number of tweets (13,813) and people tweeting (12,257) is much closer than breaking news stories we have tracked. When we used Slurp140 to track the story of a armed man holding hostages in the Discovery Channel building, there were a total of 16,665 tweets by 9,639 people- The majority of which happened in a shorter 3-hour time frame.
As for the reaction to the Facebook announcement, while @petershankman, founder of HARO was certainly not impressed, from reviewing the stream majority of tweets were informational in nature or related to questions about privacy and possible Facebook data mining: via @jeffsayre: “Facebook email? All they’ll need now is an online bank, restaurant and bathroom. No one will ever leave. #bigbrother #privacy”
Secondly, just like a photo rumored to be of the Discovery channel shooter circulated widely, misinformation and rumors about the Facebook email system did as well. While I agree with Peter’s sentiment that applying for jobs with your new @facebook email account generally isn’t a good idea- In the strict sense this really isn’t possible. As Zuckerberg explained in the Q&A- the Facebook email system & spam filters are configured for communicating within your current network of friends. In most instances, you’re probably not Facebook friends with your future boss. If on the other hand you are, it might actually be a good idea to shoot them an email over Facebook inquiring about the job opportunity.
Third while concerns about privacy and data mining are of course legitimate, in comparing Facebook email to Google, Facebook is actually less intrusive. As Zuckerberg explained, Facebook’s ad targeting is based on what users list as their likes and interests, while Google actually does search the content of your email in order to display ads. In this case, Facebook is technically the more private option.
2. Spikes in conversations correspond to live video / main stream media coverage.
This seems obvious, but at the same time it has some interesting implications- Namely that while a topic which originates on Twitter can certainly gain momentum and become a trending topic, most people don’t tune in or join the conversation until the ‘traditional’ media picks up on the story. Secondly for any kind of press conference, seminar or major announcement, having some kind of live video stream will almost certainly lead to a bump in conversations. This is evidenced by the smaller bumps in traffic when news outlets such as Reuters filed their first reports about the announcement.
Slurp140 stats for Project Titan are on the left whereas Discovery stats are on the right. In the near future we will be analyzing the entire archive of Tweets to determine sentiment analysis.
