According to a report today from the BBC, Iranians are able to text message one another for the first time since the day before the presidential elections.
SMS service, which political dissidents had used to spread messages and organize protests, has been restricted since June 11, causing many Iranians to use Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and other social sites to broadcast and communicate.
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The BBC report stated that, according to Iranian news outlets, SMS capabilities are now unblocked but that users are experiencing massive technical problems. Some messages as old as three weeks were just now being received, and some messages were delivered multiple times.
Iran's broken digital communication infrastructure caused many Iranians to turn to services such as Twitter, using proxies to work around government restrictions for web use. Twitter became so integral to Iranians' communication, particularly with the wider global community, that the U.S. State Department asked Twitter to postpone scheduled maintenance which would have occurred in the immediate aftermath of the election and resultant protests. Other services rushed to add Persian translation features.
Hopefully, the unblocking of text messaging in Iran is a sign that communication channels are returning to normal. So, does this mean that everyone's new favorite color, "Solidarity Green," will begin to fade away from social web avatars sometime soon? Once the country and its government emerge from crisis mode, what news will come from Iran, and what will the Internet have to say about it?
Discuss
by Addison Wiggin & Ian Mathias B-list data points from this morning’s jobs report were equally lousy: The average hourly workweek fell to 33 hours, but hourly wages stayed the same. Those out of work for six months or more now exceed a record 4.4 million. And continuing claims for unemployment benefits remained at 6.7 million, just below an all-time high. By the government’s count, a record 14.7 million people are now unemployed. That makes for a 9.5% unemployment rate, a 26-year high. Even more amazing: One in five mortgage borrowers are “underwater,” meaning the value of their loan is worth more than the price of their home. That’s nearly 20 million homeowners. “In Britain as in America, the real economy is falling off just as investors, analysts and commentators think they see a recovery. They think rising stock prices – U.S. stocks are up 40% since March 9 -- predict and precede a growing economy. Stocks, they say, ‘look ahead.’ “People will believe anything. If stocks had been watching where the economy was going, they never would have traded at such high levels in '07. They clearly had no idea what was ahead. Nor do they now… “What we see is this: The United States prospered in the 20th century not because of the Roosevelts, but in spite of them. The American economy was expanding... it was still young, strong, competitive and prosperous. The empire grew with economic power. “But the years ahead are not likely to resemble the post-Roosevelt years. America's position relative to the rest of the world is weak and in decline. She is not a creditor; she is a debtor. She is not a low-cost competitor; she is a high-cost competitor. She no longer has a free and flexible economy; she has one freighted with central planners, regulators and busybodies.” Year in and year out, Bill is a consistent crowd favorite at our Investment Symposium. This year might top them all, as we help him celebrate The Daily Reckoning’s 10-year anniversary. There will be speeches, libations, food, music, friends and much more… but only if you’re with us in Vancouver. If you haven’t signed up yet, the time is now. Please join us at our annual Investment Symposium. If you’re looking for work over there, steer clear of Spain. Spaniards rank at the top of the EU’s jobless list, with an unemployment rate of 18.7%. Job seekers are better served in the Netherlands, where only 3.2% are unemployed. (How one currency can represent all these nations is still beyond us.) “If you lived through this roller-coaster ride as an investor -- especially as an investor approaching retirement -- the experience is seared into your mind, and it has probably left a few scars on your heart as well. So we have to ask ourselves, what has changed so dramatically in the ability of capital equipment to generate profits or houses to generate rental income to homeowners over the past decade and a half? Alternatively, what has changed so dramatically in the long-run yield on Treasury bonds, considered the default risk-free rate, and therefore a key component of the discount rate on future cash flows? “The answer, my friend, is indeed blowing in the wind, because the answer is basically as empty as air. What changed was the approach toward a decidedly asymmetric directive (no intentional popping allowed, just mopping up the mess afterward), and the remarkable skewing of the incentive structure facing investment professionals -- incentives that basically encouraged the pursuit of asset bubbles regardless of the state of the fundamental factors like reasonable estimates of future cash flows and reasonable discount rates on those cash flows. As evident in the opening chart, there was no Great Moderation in asset markets -- only a greater corruption of asset-pricing mechanisms. In retrospect, it is truly remarkable that the financial system held together as long as it did through the last years of Dr. Richebächer’s illustrious career.” For Rob’s 2009-2010 forecast, be sure to check out his latest special report. “If/when the dollar collapses, the losses Madoff incurred will be a speck of fly s%*$ compared with what happens to U.S. investors. Thanks for a great read.” The 5: Amen. For years, we’ve been sending our readers to EverBank, which has a truly unique array of products that help everyday folks attain true financial diversification. They’re currently putting the final touches on a product that’s garnered our attention: The MarketSafe BRIC CD. In short, it’s a principal-protected CD that allows investors to gain exposure to the real, ruble, rupee and yuan. If you’re interested too, stay tuned… details will emerge in the next few weeks. (Our legal department would like to remind you that we have a business relationship with EverBank. We know that may shock you, but yes, we like to partner with people that sell useful things.) Cheers, Ian Mathias P.S. The market is closed tomorrow, so we will take the day off as well. We wish you a revelrous Independence Day. P.P.S. By the time we write you again, we may run out of Byron King’s limited-edition report -- Set for Life: Eight Keys to Getting “Miserable Rich” With Gold. We only have a few handfuls left on our virtual shelves… grab yours here before we run out.
We’ve said it before: This depression will be defined by two measures. Housing -- most people’s largest store of wealth and employment -- the backbone of any economy. Millions of people without jobs stuck in homes they can’t afford will not be able to “put the economy back on track,” as the current administration likes to say. This morning, we see big news on both fronts… and it’s not so good.
First, as we forecast yesterday, the Labor Department issued a worse-than-expected jobs report this morning. The U.S. economy shed 467,000 jobs in June, they claims. As this chart shows, the Street was betting on the current trend to stay intact. Job losses have decreased every month since their January peak… until now.
On the housing front, mortgage applications have fallen to a seven-month low. According to the Mortgage Bankers Association, requests for new home loans fell 19% last week while refis plunged 30%, both to levels unseen since November. While mortgage rates are well off March’s 4.6% record low (30-year fixed), they’re still at a reasonable 5.3%, a full 100bps below the average rate this time last year.
And since it worked so well the first time around: The Obama administration announced they will expand the “make home affordable” program to an even wider range of deadbeat borrowers. Previously, homeowners with mortgages worth more than 105% of their home’s value did not qualify for President Obama’s manipulated refi rates. That limit has been bumped up to 125%… incredible.
“Housing and jobs are the two cornerstones of American middle-class wealth,” reiterates Bill Bonner. “If they can't hold the weight of a building economy, there is little chance of a broad recovery in the United States... or Britain.
The unemployment scene in Europe is turning ugly too. The unemployment rate in the 16-nation eurozone hit 9.5% in May, the EU statistics office announced early this morning. That’s a 10-year high.
The European Central Bank chose to keep lending rates at 1% this morning, a record low.
China wants to add a new global reserve currency debate to next week’s G-8 meeting. Unnamed Chinese officials asked the organizers of the G-8 gathering to include such a discussion yesterday. Whether or not they’ll get it, we’re not so sure… but that’s not the point. Last year, we heard little hints here and there of China’s dollar unease. Now they are practically shouting it from the rooftop. This could get interesting soon.
In a similar vein, the IMF announced today it will issue more bonds denominated in Special Drawing Rights -- a fancy phrase for a basket of global currencies. After much demand from BRIC nations, the IMF said it will print bonds worth $150 billion, each denominated in a basket consisting of the dollar, euro, pound and yen. China, Brazil and Russia have already promised to buy $70 billion worth of the bonds… a convenient way to diversify out of the dollar and gain some say in the governance of the IMF’s war chest.
China’s call for an alternative global reserve currency put the dollar index down almost a full point. But traders refuse to leave their recent range… after falling as low as 79.5 yesterday, the dollar index is already back up to 80.1.
The American stock market reacted harshly to this morning’s jobs report… no surprise, given the Street missed the number by nearly 100,000 jobs. The Dow and S&P 500 opened down over 2%.
“If asset prices accurately reflect all the available information,” writes Rob Parenteau, “about future cash flows and the appropriate discount rates on those cash flows, as is required under the efficient market view, then we have to ask ourselves, what has the roller-coaster ride of the past decade and a half been all about? Compare the difference between the ratio of household net worth to disposable income before and after 1995 in the chart below.
The California budget crisis continues. Gov. Schwarzenegger declared a state of fiscal emergency today and ordered many state offices to close for three days each month (without pay) until June 2010. His administration will also issue a new swath of IOUs today… if you get one, let us know.
In the oil patch, light sweet crude finally fell out of its recent range. The front-month contract is down two bucks and change as we write, to $66 a barrel. That’s no matter to you, of course, ’cause you followed Byron King’s advice last week to take some oil profits off the table.
Gold is still consolidating. An ounce goes for $930 as we write.
“The comments of your readers,” writes a reader today, “regarding having all of their eggs in one Madoff basket and the stupidity of doing so is curious. How many Unites States investors have diversified their investment portfolio away from all dollar-based investments? If you think about it, our life insurance, stocks, bonds, real estate, Social Security and other retirement programs are all dollar based. A few of us might have a little gold/silver or some foreign bonds, but I bet over 80% of your readers have made the Madoff mistake and not recognized it.
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FriendFeed, the multi-network activity aggregator co-founded by GMail creator Paul Buchheit, announced today that it has entered the crowded field of real time search. FriendFeed was already the best way to learn what early adopter social media users were saying about any topic across blogs, Twitter, delicious and other diverse social media sites. If FriendFeed wants to step it up to the next level and challenge business-class conversation trackers, we believe there are four steps the company needs to take.
We think that would make a whole lot of sense. In fact we think that if real time search were turned into a business tool it could challenge social media monitoring services like Radian6, Scout Labs and Sysomos. Here's what we think needs to happen in order for that to become a possibility.
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We already use FriendFeed to keep track of who quietly touches out blog posts out around the web. For example, our recent post Google Updates Blog Search - Where's The Innovation hasn't gotten any comments yet - but FriendFeed shows us that leading marketing blogger Andy Beal shared it with his network on Google Reader. That's good to know.
We think FriendFeed could offer some of the most sophisticated social media conversation tracking on the web, if it just took a few steps in particular.
Right now FriendFeed tracks what users say and do across more than 40 different social media sites and any RSS feeds (like blog feeds) that users input as part of their profiles. It's a great way to track people and topics on networks you yourself don't participate on.
Because FriendFeed is such a high-profile startup, many people have set up accounts just to try it and have their activities pulled into the site automatically even though they no longer use FriendFeed itself. That adds to the richness of the site's search function.
If FriendFeed wants to offer full-service conversation tracking, though, it is going to need to go beyond the early-adopter crowd that has opted in to having their activities imported into the site. FriendFeed is going to need to proactively discover and import feeds from users of Twitter, Delicious, SlideShare, BrightKite,etc. and bloggers who have not set up FriendFeed accounts. This will increase the usefulness of the site's search function by orders of magnitude.
That's no small task! Many startups have tried to do social-media-wide search in the past but few can achieve the scale and speed needed to pull it off well. Two things make us think FriendFeed can do it. First, who better than the creator of Gmail to achieve new hights in rapid, scalable information delivery? Buchheit isn't the only former Googler on the team, either. Second, FriendFeed has been engineered from the start to import massive amounts of data. A number of the streams FriendFeed pulls in aren't even from RSS feeds as you'd expect, the company's co-founders told ReadWriteWeb in an early interview that they have built to import from a wide variety of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) beyond RSS.
Right now there's a fair amount of spam on FriendFeed and we imagine it's only going to get worse. There's also a lot of people who use the service as their RSS reader - so blog posts and search results show up in your search results even though no one has touched them.
This wouldn't be a difficult problem to solve. FriendFeed is just a few steps away already from allowing searchers to query all sources except for manually imported RSS feeds except when a feed item has one or more comment or "like" added by a user.
There are all kinds of ways that FriendFeed could become more business savvy. One way we would suggest is through making more use of LinkedIn.
FriendFeed users were able to associate their LinkedIn profiles with their FriendFeed accounts since the start of the service and job changes used to be displayed right along with Tweets and other online activity. It was great. Unfortunately, LinkedIn knows what a pot of gold it sits on and took the noxious step of cutting off these kinds of importing functions by obscuring the HTML on its profile pages. FriendFeed was scraping those pages for changes and it was a great service for everyone. It was pure folly by LinkedIn, it wasn't specifically targeting FriendFeed, but as a result FriendFeed users no longer see when their friends change jobs and click through to LinkedIn to learn more.
Fortunately FriendFeed hasn't removed LinkedIn as a field that can be viewed for users, it just doesn't update anymore. When you see that someone has said something in your search stream you can many times click through to their LinkedIn profile to see what they do for a living and what their job title is. FriendFeed could display job titles by default on a business version of FriendFeed if LinkedIn was more agreeable, or FriendFeed could look to the much friendlier and social media savvy Google Profiles instead.
Knowing the job titles of people who have bookmarked your web page in Delicious or shared it in Google Reader would be really valuable.
Some other business oriented rules, like alerts when certain discussion thresholds are past, would go a long way too.
When FriendFeed launched it offered some great data visualization showing which other users you "liked" content from the most and who "liked" your content the most. It showed which services most of your content came in through in a pie chart.
Unfortunately in a recent redesign aimed to make the service more mainstream-user friendly those visualizations were eliminated.
Bring that and more back and you've got a viable competitor for services that businesses pay hundreds or thousands of dollars a year for. Add some sentiment analysis, made easier by FriendFeed's "like" feedback function, and you've really got a desirable product.
Will FriendFeed take these steps though? That depends on whether it continues its Quixotic quest to capture more everyday consumer users for a cross-network, real-time conversation aggregator (!) or whether it finds audiences that appreciate its value and start building out features that they will pay for.
Discuss
This was WTF at so many levels.
A "WHITE flight" to Facebook has turned MySpace into a black ghetto, according to a social analyst in the US. anah Boyd said Facebook's arrival sparked a migration from MySpace of white users, the educated and the wealthy, while non-whites had stuck together on MySpace.
MySpace is owned by News Corp, the parent company of the publisher of NEWS.com.au. "It wasn't just anyone who left MySpace to go to Facebook," Ms Boyd, who works with Microsoft Research New England, told a crowd at New York's Democracy Forum. "We might as well face an uncomfortable reality ... what happened was modern day 'white flight'." Ms Boyd said MySpace had become a digital "ghetto".
"The people there are more likely to be brown or black and to have a set of values that terrifies white society," she said. Her interviews with American teenagers since 2006 showed that online migration mimicked the patterns of class groups' movements across cities.Farcebook of Perth
She found teens who preferred Facebook were far more likely to talk down to those who use MySpace than vice versa. Ms Boyd said her research showed high school students found Facebook "more cultured" and "less cheesy" than MySpace. "Any high school student who has a Facebook page will tell you MySpace users are more likely to be barely educated and obnoxious," she said.
Ms Boyd also warned that the class divisions on social sites will harden over time. "Their decision to (move to Facebook) was wrapped up in their connections to others, in their belief that a more peaceful, quiet, less-public space would be more idyllic."
Twitter is all about facilitating conversations, but until you’re following some people, it’s just a blank page. Once you find people to follow and talk to, however, Twitter becomes exceptionally useful. You can share thoughts, ask questions, get updates about news, music, brands, and businesses, and discover helpful links and information. Finding good people to follow, especially for new users staring at a blank page the first time they log in, can be a bit daunting, though.
Thankfully, there are a number of ways you can find people on Twitter. Here are ten sites you can use to locate “tweeps” to follow. Let us know in the comments if you know of any others.
1. Twitter People Search – Twitter’s built in people search isn’t the greatest way to find people on Twitter, but it’s probably where you should start. Twitter searches the “real names” people enter in their bio fields, but because there isn’t much accompanying bio information and because Twitter doesn’t have any sort of requirement to use your actual name, that can make it a bit difficult to find people, especially those with common names. It also makes it hard to verify that the people you find are actually who you’re looking for. Still, it’s a good place to begin your search.
2. Tweepz – Because the biographical information Twitter collects is minimal, no Twitter people search engine can improve on Twitter’s that much. Third-party site Tweepz does an admirable job, though. Tweepz lets you limit searches to specific parts of Twitter’s user information (like name, bio, and location), filter results by follower/following numbers, location, and other extracted terms, and greatly improves on the layout of the search results.
3. TweepSearch – TweepSearch lets you search by Twitter name or location, or search a specific username to get a list of all friends and followers. However, if the “indexing” number listed on their main page is accurate, they’re crawling about 600,000 less Twitter user profiles than Tweepz.
4. TwitDir – TwitDir is another search engine, but if the crawling stats are accurate, it’s well behind the curve, searching about 3 million fewer users than Tweepz. Still, it’s not a bad people search engine, and has some helpful “top” lists if you’re concerned with who the most popular or prolific people on Twitter are (then again, they’re also not that up-to-date — the site doesn’t seem to know who @aplusk is, for example).
5. Twellow – Your best bet for finding like-minded Twitter users might be to use a directory, and Twellow is certainly one of the most complete. Nearly 6 million Twitter user profiles are indexed in Twellow and placed into a huge number of categories. You can search the entire lot of profiles, or confine searches to a single category. Twellow also operates a local directory called the “Twellowhood.”
6. WeFollow – Created by Digg founder Kevin Rose, WeFollow is a Twitter user directory that organizes people by hashtags. WeFollow is user-generated and anyone can add themselves by tweeting @wefollow with three #hashtags that describe them.
7. Just Tweet It – Just Tweet It is another user created Twitter directory. It’s not quite as well organized or easy-to-use as Twellow or WeFollow, but it is certainly large enough that you should give it a browse when trying to locate people in your interest areas to follow.
8. Twubble – Twubble recommends people to follow by spidering the people you’re already following and recommending users that they’re following. The idea is that the people you’re following are interesting to you, so if more than one of them are also following another person, that person might also be interesting. Of course, that means that Twubble can’t be your first stop when finding people to follow — you already need to be following some people for the service to work.
9. Twitterel – Twitterel attempts to find people you might be interested in following by doing keyword searches of tweets. The service can update you by email, direct message, or @reply when it finds new people it thinks you might be interested in following. It’s kind of like Google Alerts for Twitter follow recommendations.
10. Who Should i Follow? – Enter you Twitter username into Who Should i Follow? and the service finds users who are similar to those you’re already following. The site doesn’t disclose information about how it works, but in my experience it is pretty accurate at finding users whose tweets are similar in content to your followers. The results can be filtered by how popular the people are, and how close they are to a specific location.
BONUS: Mr. Tweet – Mr. Tweet is a very popular Twitter app that lets you give and receive recommendations about Twitter users. The app also provides more helpful statistics about users, such as tweets per day or the percentage of tweets containing links. To get the most out of Mr. Tweet, consider installing the Firefox plugin, which gives you access to statistics and user recommendations while you’re browsing Twitter.
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Tags: Just Tweet It, people search, tweepsearch, tweepz, twellow, twitdir, twitter, twitterel, twubble, wefollow, who should i follow
