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A recent survey by an analytics company has revealed that Twitter, one of the leading stars in mobile website accesibility and technology may not be as entrenched in the mobile web as we might expect. When asked about which brands they want to see on their mobile phones, respondents to this research placed the microblogging service as low as 16th, behind Weather.Com and even the dying dinosaur Myspace.

But what implications will this have for Twitter as a company and as an online brand? Is this good or bad news for the Web 2.0 superstar?

Twitter’s mobile brand not as big as previously thought

This means two things for Twitter. The first is that they clearly have a long way to go if they are to get the right amount of mobile market penetration that a service like this needs to compete with the likes of Facebook and Google. This last year has seen Twitter embroiled in a number of controversies, including their site being hacked embarrassingly on a number of occasions and sensitive user data potentially stolen from their servers.

The second thing for Twitter to take from this data, on a more positive note, is that the predicted demise of their service due to Facebook’s increase in its mobile service is short sighted. Since they are not dominating the mobile world (as once suspected), they have nothing to fear from an unrelated increase in Facebook’s mobile activities. They should be more worried, perhaps, that Facebook will be able to take the ground and the initiative which they themselves may want to occupy first.

Either way, this year promises to be an interesting one in social networking, with the established brands trying to win the hearts and minds of users moving into the the new decade, and new pretenders on the horizon. The web has never looked so interesting!

An internet campaign was the impetus behind the Christmas number one single competition in the UK being won by Rage Against The Machine, and not the widely expected winner of the popular X Factor television show, Joe McElderry.

In recent years, the winner of the televised talent show has been the most popular single in the Christmas chart, usually beating its opponents by numbers ranging in the hundreds of thousands. But this year, the power of Facebook, social networking and MSN has been harnessed by a couple working from their kitchen.

Facebook and Twitter campaign wins Christmas number one in UK

The campaign began because they viewed Christmas as a sacred time, and they thought that the race for Christmas number 1 had been all but destroyed by the popoularity of the television show. With this idea in mind they created a Facebook group encouraging people to boycott buying the X-Factor single and directing people to buy the Rage Against The Machine effort instead.

The messages were sent in large part via Facebook chat, and support was also shown in people’s status messages and updates. Myspace was also leveraged in the plan to good effect, as was Twitter – with thousands of tweets during the week urging people to go out and buy the single, or download it. The Rage Against The Machine single set a new record for single sales in its first week in the UK.

With more than 600,000 tracks bought, the only true winners in this case are the record companies, who have made a bundle of money on the back of both campaigns. What is most suprising is that people were so quick to buy the RATM single which does not seem to be extremely ‘Chistmasey’ in spirit.

The power of social networking is clear when it comes to situations such as this, where mobilizing large numbers of people to act is just the click of a mouse away. It remains to be seen if this sort of mobilization is anything more than a fad, or if can be used for something more constructive such as raising money for charity in the coming months and years.

Google have found themselves in deep water after being found guilty by a court in Paris, France of digitizing books without the permission of the authors. The plan by Google was to try to make all of the world’s information sortable and digital – but their latest try (which involves scanning millions of books into their archive) has been riddled with controversy.

Google loses French legal case over book digitization

At the heart of the argument is the question as to whether Google has the right to scan and use the extracts from books in its online searches. Some people believe that by making the texts of some literature available to people over the web, they are depriving publishers of the right to sell those books on to customers, which in turn will make those publishers lose profit.

Google does not agree, and they claim that they do not actually make the whole book available, just extracts which can be found in short snippets. They say that there is no difference between going to a library and reading through the archives there and checking online for a quotation from a printed book – it may even be better for the publisher if they make their books more available on the web.

The court was not convinced, however, and this leads to a bigger question – will Google’s quest to put all of the books in the world online fail due to the court actions of publishers across the globe? It is possible the benefit to Google of this experiment may start to be outweighed by expensive legal action and fines – and they could even consider slowing down or stopping entirely.

Twitter recently introduced a feature called Lists, which integrates user made collections of Twitter users into its system. At first glance this seems to be another popularity contest from Twitter, trying to reinvent itself as it is facing stiff competition from Facebook and Friendfeed.

If we peel back the layers, however, we can see that it is actually a very well thought out way of adding a layer of user-based vetting to Twitter accounts. Follower numbers have increased hugely recently, sparked by the Ashton Kutcher v CNN Twitter race to 1,000,000 – and so have the number of accounts which have tens of thousands of followers. This makes it difficult for normal users to tell who is worth following and who is simply ‘making up the numbers’.

Twitter lists

The list function also allows a large amount of customization to each person’s account – you can show what or who you are interested in, in different categories and fields. The possibilities are endless.

Twitter lists just recently also introduced a description field – 100 characters for you to describe your list and the criteria for adding to it. This type of innovation is very good for people who are trying to market their lists or get other people to follow them. The lists previosuly seemed a little bit too lacking of information, especially if the titles of the each user’s list was cryptic or not straightforward. Now we can see the background and justification – it’s another good update from the Twitter team!

Recently many people have started using special chat symbols in their MSN and Facebook chats, and also in blog comments. These special symbols are free to use for everyone, and you don’t need to download anything or pay for anything – just copy and paste them from websites!

Some people, however, have taken this even further – to the next level! They have begun to combine symbols to create new pictures, larger images which can then be put into Web 2.0 comments sections and on Myspace pages and Facebook walls. The creativity of these individuals is amazing – and you can see from the example below that there are some really amazing pictures!

Home Simpson ascii art

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So what would you put into your Facebook chat or on your website if you could make a picture of anything? Here are some ideas:

- Make a special character image of yourself, using an old photograph! It will look really cool in black and white!
- Draw the robot from Wall-E! He’s really cool and obviously would fit very well in any technology blog or website.
- The Windows 7 logo in special characters – this might be good to show to people who made the mistake of installing Windows 7 before it was properly tested what they really should have done instead – copied some special characters or symbols from here!

If you know of any other special characters or symbols that can be made into cool faces, paste them in the comments section here!