Datasift – Twitter track on steroids

Curation and filtering are becoming increasingly important in today’s data tsunami, especially on a fast-moving and ephemeral medium like Twitter.

Datasift, which was announced yesterday, seems to be a great tool for that. It’s a service from the people behind TweetMeme that allows you to capture tweets based on a wide spectrum of parameters (like location, links,…) and filter them accordingly. Example: you can get all the tweets from each Premiership stadium, filter out swearwords and output it as one stream. It’s open, aimed at developers and works on a graphical interface like Yahoo Pipes. So when it launches – within the next month, they say – we’ll soon see some very exciting applications.

Yet again it was the snifferdog that is Robert Scoble that brought it to our attention with a video interview. And as he says around 08:32, “Thaat’s reaaally cooool!”.

The Ad Clash of the Titans

Apple is set to launch its iAds platform for the iPhone and iPad in the UK this September. Something Google will definitely love. Reports the UK Guardian:

“Separately, Google has adopted what its chief executive, Eric Schmidt, calls a “mobile first” approach, prioritising investment in a medium that has become “fundamental to everything we do”. With the iPhone moving into mass market territory and the iPad selling 200,000 units a week, Apple’s decision to start selling mobile advertising seems likely to concentrate a few media minds.”

They continue:

“There are early signs that mobile advertising, like everything else touched by Cupertino’s genius, will turn to gold. During the eight weeks leading up to the presentation in San Francisco, Apple sold $60m-worth of iAds to the likes of Unilever and Disney. This compares with the $250m mobile online display revenue generated across the whole of 2009 in the US.”

But the Guardian points out that like with Google, Apple’s ad service is not necessarily good news for the traditional media owners.

1 in every 10 phones an iPhone

So how mass market is the iPhone really? In a seperate report, MobileSquared says that by the end of this year Apple’s share of the handset market will rise to 7.9% to 6.4 million users, up 195% from the 2.17 million at the end of 2009. And by 2012 one in every 10 phones in the UK will be an iPhone.

The MTV TJ – Twitter kills the video star

If you’re your company’s Social Media Administrator, it’s time to start arguing for a pay-rise. Because MTV have just put a rather high value on ‘the person-that-tweets’.

This week the tv network hired the first ever Twitter Jockey. In true reality tv style, they ran a competition and picked @gabifresh, a ‘plus-size fashion blogger’, to be their official Twitter voice and face. Value of the job: a whopping $100,000!

Search like a man – the Real Old Spice numbers

W + K, the agency behind the spectacular Old Spice campaign, took down a video case study with a blow by blow account of how they managed to increase sales. But US marketing man Bud Caddell hunted it down (without breaking a sweat, naturally – nudge nudge wink wink). Here’s an interesting stat from that.

“More people watched its videos in 24 hours than those who watched Obama’s presidential victory speech.”

Google Wave gets killed

Not for the first time Google has pulled a high profile product of theirs after it failed to perform as expected. Wessel opined on our blog about the difference between Google and Facebook, and their respective engineering, social & media nous.

“On all accounts Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is very smart. But it’s an open question whether he has the mathematical wherewithal to build something as complex as the Google algorithm. Lucky for him he did not start university in 1995 when the web could not support a Facebook and needed a Google Search.”

Foursquare visualisation

In the section ‘not everything needs to have a function’, comes WeePlaces, a service that visualises your Foursquare check-ins on a timeline. in a beautiful way. So go back in time, see where you hang and re-trace your steps in style.

Creative of the week – Luciana Haill

The other day we saw musical chameleon Matthew Herbert do some amazing things with live sampling at the East London Field Day festival.

But taking live electronic music one step further is Luciana Haill, who creates music based on brainwaves. Using EEG she scans her or the audience’s brain activity and translates that live into both visuals as well as soundscapes.

Tech insight of the week – the art of designing Error Messages

Progressively more money and effort is being thrown into beautiful, usable and mind blowing web sites. Too often, however, the critical task of writing and designing error messages are left to the developer to improvise. This is a huge mistake. So Adriaan wrote a great blogpost about it.