RAAK

Twitter has been promoted to "serious business"

A year ago everybody and his dog was musing on how Twitter was directionless, and wondering how on earth it was going to make money. Uhm, not us. Promoted Tweets is a rather obvious way. And now it seems the first results are in and it’s a huge success. Silicon Alley Insider is running articles on how Twitter is building a "huge business". And the web is awash with stories of how Promoted Trends have exceeded expectations. Twitter will keep on growing, it will be able to target far more on interests and in a timely way than Facebook.

iPad is King (of conversion)

In data taken from 81.9 million visits, and 1.57 million online sales, the iPad appears to have double the conversion rate of desktop, and almost double that of other mobile devices. Over and above this fact, it also has the highest average order value at £69.94, compared to £65 on desktop, with all mobiles below the £50 mark. And with sales of these devices rising, retailers will soon overlook iPad at their own peril.

Setting up shop is the new Farmville

It's a fast changing playing field. Yesterday it was Farmville, but which apps are raking in the highest numbers of installs on Facebook today? It seems the top spot has shifted to Facebook Page creation tools. By quite a margin. So, it seems all of a sudden, building pages is the new Farmville. An indication perhaps that Facebook is becoming more grown up and that businesses and organisations are intent on setting up real world shops, instead of just playing business.

I'm a network therefor I am

The New Scientist reports on an interesting mapping of the Occupy Wall street versus the Tea Party Tweets and how they differ:

Those tweeting about the Tea Party emerge as a tight-knit "in crowd", following one another's tweets. By contrast, the network of people tweeting about Occupy consists of a looser series of clusters, in which the output of a few key people is being vigorously retweeted.

Does this difference elude to some fundamentals about nature of the social structures of the two movements and how they communicate? We think so.

Payment war goes global and social

Facebook credits and the Google Wallet are both looming on the horizon. But an old player played a significant card this week. Visa launched its Paypal competitor, V.me – allowing users to make online Payments using a username and password. Not to be outdone, Paypal launched a new Facebook app that allows you to send money to friends.

Tumblr: the 38,000-posts-per-minute platform

Yeah, you've read right. Tumblr is currently clocking 38,000 posts per minute. That's one post for every 5 Tweets sent! Not only that, 58% of its users visit at least once a month. That is quite an impressive engagement! Mashable correctly notes that Tumblr is now bigger than WordPress.com – however, if you take self-hosted WordPress sites into account, Tumblr still has some way to go before it catches up.

Is I Like actually I Want?

A new global survey shows that for most brands the top reason for following or liking a brand, company or celebrity is to receive discounts and special offers. Def Leppard was right … love bites.

Foursquare Desktop finds a purpose

Since the dawn of location – which also happened to be the dawn of Foursquare – we've been puzzled by Foursquare's attitude towards their desktop site. It didn't do much, or show much. In fact, it didn't really have any specific purpose. Foursquare has changed that now. On your desktop view of Foursquare.com you can now see all your friends on a map, as well as places that it deems noteworthy, color coded by its noteworthiness. On top of that, you get a small location aware list of places you should go to right now. We like this. This shows purpose, and clear thinking.

Creative of the Week – Luke Jerram

Turning the ugly into something beautiful, that's what Luke Jerram does well. After a sound piece based on a sample of the Hiroshima explosion, he's now turned the devastating Japanese earthquake into a sculpture. The piece is called Tohuko Japanese Earthquake Sculpture and is a 3D-print of the seismogram that represents 9 minutes of the tremor. Hauntingly beautiful.