Modern Metrix

Differences in content preferences across the social networks

The online advertising network Chitika compared the genres of sites that receive traffic from the major social networks (Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and Digg) and found differences in the content preferences across the networsk. In particular, according to the analysis of over 280,000 links, Twitter users are more like to consume news (47% of traffic), Facebook users are interested in news (28% of traffic) and community (17%), MySpacers prefer video games (28% of traffic) and entertainment (23%), and traffic from Digg is almost equally distributed between news, entertainment, technology and video games categories (~18% each).

Via Mashable

 

How friendly is Twitter when it comes to real research?

Twitter API Team just rejected my request to be whitelisted for no apparent reason:

Hi *****,

Thanks for requesting to be on Twitter's API whitelist. Unfortunately, we've rejected your request. 

Here's why: 

Please address the issues above and submit another request if appropriate. 

The Twitter API Team 

Go figure!

PS the request was for a small pet project that I and my colleague are currently working on. The objective is to persuade the management of a very traditional research company with a very conservative mindset that Twitter could be used to conduct research on influence and alternative news audience measurement. The openness of Twitter was supposed to be one of the main strengths of this approach. Well, it looks like Twitter is not so open to researchers, after all!!!

UPDATE: our request has been approved!