Twitter soon available in more languages

Twitter announced today that its popular micro-blogging service will be available in more languages — with a little help from the public. While it is currently only available in English and Japanese, the social network said in a blog post that Twitter will soon have support for French, Italian, German and Spanish (FIGS) with the help of volunteer translators.

Starting today, Twitter is offering a new tool for people with experience in other languages to suggest translations for the Twitter Web site. The company plans to follow up technically by inviting a small group of people to become volunteer translators, with the hopes of accumulating enough material so that its micro-blogging service will soon have support for FIGS. Twitter also plans to distribute the translations to its platform developers, making it easier for developers to provide multiple language support as well.

“No matter how sophisticated technology gets, we’re reminded daily that it’s about people and that’s something we’ve taken to heart regarding translating Twitter,” said Twitter Co-founder Biz Stone.

Estee Lauder offers social media makeovers

Are you ready for your social media close-up? Estee Lauder is hoping that you are as they undertake a unique marketing plan. Hoping to use the fact that the majority of hardcore social media users are women to their advantage, the make-up brand is offering women free makeovers and photos to use as their social media icons and avatars.

The makeovers and pictures will be done at department store cosmetic counters throughout the country. Pictures will be turned into electronic images – with the Estee Lauder image in the background – that the women can then use as their profile photos for Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

The promotion will be available at Bloomingdale’s, Macy’s and Saks stores in New York, Los Angeles, Miami and Chicago and includes a free 10-day supply of foundation. A company spokesperson told AdAge that Estee Lauder hopes the promotion will “contemporize the brand for younger women while recognizing that somewhat older women have rapidly embraced social media, too.”

Google continues growth while Yahoo! And Bing drop

Google accounted for 71.08 percent of all U.S. searches conducted in the four weeks ending Oct. 3, 2009, according to Hitwise data. The search giant saw a one percent gain from last month, while both Yahoo! and Bing dropped in September from last month, down three percent from 19.96 percent to 16.8 percent and down five percent from 9.48 percent to 8.96 percent respectively. Surprisingly, Ask.com showed a big increase of eight percent, from 2.37 percent to 2.56 percent of the market early in October.

In addition, Hitwise revealed that one-word queries accounted for the majority of all searches, amounting to 24.32 percent of all queries. In addition, longer search queries, averaging searches of five or more than eight words in length, increased two percent between August and September 2009. Searches of eight or more words increased 6 percent.

The findings also showed that search engines continue to be the main way Internet users navigate to key industry categories. In their share of traffic coming directly from search engines, Automotive, Business and Finance, Entertainment, News and Media, Online Video and Sports categories showed double-digit increases last month compared with September of last year.

FTC imposes big fines on dishonest bloggers

The Washington Post reported on Tuesday that the Federal Trade Commission, looking at cracking down on what it considers to be unfair advertising practices, has issued new rules that will require bloggers who are paid to endorse certain products to reveal these arrangements or face penalties of up to $11,000 per violation.

“Given that social media has become such a significant player in the advertising area, we thought it was necessary to address social media as well,” said Richard Cleland, assistant director for the division of advertising practices at the FTC.

The move – which is the first update of the agency’s endorsement rules in more than 30 years – has been applauded by consumer rights group concerned about what they considered to be abuses of the concept of “honest opinion.”

Twitter to launch lists

Twitter has announced it will be launching a way for users to curate lists of Twitter accounts. The new feature will allow users to create custom lists of Twitter accounts such as the funniest Twitter accounts of all time, athletes, local businesses, friends or any other compilation.

The lists are public by default; however users can change the filter to private. The new feature allows other Twitter users the opportunity to subscribe to your lists which, according to the Twitter blog, means lists have the potential to be an important new discovery tool for interesting tweets and accounts.

Although the new feature is being tested with a small subset of users, it will be available to all accounts once the testing phase is complete.

« Previous Page