Message from Michael - Twitter - March 30, 2011

Message From Michael                                 

                                                                                                                        March 30, 2011                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               

      THE TITAN TODDLER KNOWN AS TWITTER

      THE GOOGLE OF INTERNET MOVIES

      FACTOID OF THE WEEK – BILLIONS OF VIDEO

      COCKTAIL CHATTER – BILLIONS OF STARS

 

 

      THE TITAN TODDLER KNOWN AS TWITTER.  Having just celebrated its fifth birthday, that’s what Twitter would be considered in human terms… a toddler.  But this is one ginormous toddler.  Hard to believe it’s just five years old, especially when you look at some numbers.  For example, after founder/ creator Jack Dorsey sent his first tweet on March 21, 2006, it took three years, two months and a day to reach a Billion tweets, and more than 18 months to reach the half Million mark in subscribers.  Now, according to its blog site, there are a Billion tweets posted every week and more than half a Million new accounts added every day.  A year ago, the service was averaging 50 Million Tweets a day.  Last month it averaged 140 Million Tweets a day.  The land speed record in Tweets came the day Michael Jackson died when there were 456 “tweets per second.”  The new record was set four seconds after Midnight in Japan on New Year’s Day when there were 6,939 “tweets per second.”  More pragmatically, the company has gone from eight employees three years ago to 400 employees now, which is still remarkably low considering the volume of messages.

There are 366 Twitterers with more than a Million followers, according to unofficial but semi-official website, twittercounter.com.  Most of those are  -- no surprise, no surprise – celebrities; Lady Gaga -- no surprise, no surprise -- tops the list with more than 9.1 Million followers, semi-closely followed by -- no surprise, no surprise -- Justin Bieber with 8.4 Million followers.  Britney Spears comes in third (7.3 Million), followed by President Barack Obama (7.2 Million) and Kim Kardashian (7 Million).  The first non-human to make the top list is Twitter itself at number 12, with 4.7 Million followers.  Interestingly, Twitter en Espanol comes in 14^th with 4.4 Million followers.  And, yes, it would be easy to dismiss some of the Twitter hype when you look at the celebrity-dominated top 100 list.  But then we’re reminded of the role Twitter played in Iraq and Egypt and Haiti.  In fact, the Haiti Earthquake came in number four in the list of top Twitter trends of 2010.  The top issue Tweeted was the Gulf Oil Spill.  Of course Justin Bieber and Pulpo Paul, the Nostradamus Octopus who predicted the World Soccer Cup winner, also made the list.  And then again, you learn about people through Twitter that you might never have heard of – such as Wired Magazine’s recently profiled Rafinha Bastos, Brazil’s answer to Jon Stewart.  A comedian and journalist with 1.8 Million followers – a fact even more remarkable when you consider he tweets in Portuguese.  Then again, there’s Rebecca Black, a 13-year-old singer from Orange County, California, who has made the Twitter ‘hot’ topic list as well as Facebook where her song has been viewed…. drum roll, please… 46 Million times.

Disclaimer:  I am on Twitter (#MessageMichael), but I have not really adopted it, like you would expect some tech savvy, cool, with-it kind of person to do. Proving that I am not as tech savvy, cool or with-it as I probably should be.  I keep promising myself to do better.  But to show that I am not a complete Luddite, business-focused social networking site LinkedIn recently announced that it has passed the 100 Million user mark.  And I, along with thousands of others, received a nice little email, noting the milestone and thanking me for my involvement.  No big deal there… but, in the email, it noted that I was member number 168,043.  So, see, I am an early adopter… on some things.

      THE GOOGLE OF INTERNET MOVIES.  A recent report from market research firm NPD Group shows that Netflix has become the Godzilla of paid (a very important word) movie providers online.  The report says that Netflix accounts for six out of every (sort of, but not really) ten movies streamed or downloaded.  The group has since had to clarify that report to say its measurements do not include free movie services, like Hulu, or movie services that come with your subscription, like HBO on-demand.  It does include Electronic Sell Through (a concept I am still trying to understand) along with IVOD (Internet Video on Demand) as well as “transactional” purchases of movies – in other words movies that aren’t part of your package deal.  Even with those qualifications, the bottom-line is that Netflix has become ginormous.  (Yeah, I had to use that word again.) And here’s a tip for you future movie mogul investors – Aspera.  As reported by Beet.TV, the small, and at this point privately-funded, start-up has become the standard bearer for delivering movies for all the big companies in Hollywood and everywhere.  The reason is it has developed a protocol for delivering huge files faster than FTP and other TCP-type protocols.  The company offers a ‘consumer’ version of its software for smaller publishers and journalists.  As a side note, while trying to figure out what EST is, I came across this interesting factoid.  The Clint Eastwood movie, Gran Torino, is Warner Brothers Home Entertainment’s most successful VOD movie, garnering $60 Million in sales worldwide, compared to the $148 Million it took in at the Box Office.      

      FACTOID OF THE WEEK.  According to a study by Intel Corporation, by the year 2015, there will be 500 Billion hours of video the Internet.  I say this way too often, but I’m going to say it again anyway – Think about that.  500 Billion Hours.  That’s more than 70 hours of video for every man, woman and child on Planet Earth.  On a very similar note, according to product manager Hunter Walk of YouTube, if the three major U.S. Networks were to have broadcast 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year for the past 60 years, they still wouldn’t have broadcast as much content as is uploaded to YouTube every 30 days.  Now, ain’t that a wowser of a factoid?  In an interview with TechCrunch, he says there are 35 hours of video uploaded every minute.  That’s up from 24 hours a minute just a few months ago.  And YouTube provides Two Billion playbacks every day.  And from a previous Message, this factoid reminder – ten years ago it cost $300 to transfer a Gigabyte of video over the Internet; Today it costs about 30 cents.  A disclaimer here.  The first figure attributed to Intel is cited by Internet backbone provider Cisco in a report on its efforts to keep up with the growing demand.  I have not seen the original cite.         

      COCKTAIL CHATTER.  Somewhere about 11 Billion miles from earth, there are two space ships winging their way through outer space carrying two records made of gold-plated copper.  The records contain a variety of sounds, ranging from a dog barking to a chimpanzee’s call, along with music ranging from Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto to Chuck Berry belting out Johnny B. Goode; Peruvian wedding music to a Navajo night chant; photographs of everything from a plane taking off to an astronaut walking in space; and diagrams showing the atoms making up DNA and maps of Earth.  A recent article in the progressive magazine, Utne Reader, noted that the first craft, Voyager 1 just recently passed a key barrier, the official edge of our solar system, meaning that it has “broken free of their human influence and moved one step closer to unknown worlds.”  The record was put aboard the craft at its launch in – get this – 1977.  It was part of a project by astrophysicist Carl Sagan.  This is the same person who created SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence.) Coincidentally I was reading some old columns by newspaper humorist Dave Barry, one of which was about the Celistis Group which created a project in 1984 whereby you could launch your cremated ashes into space.  Astronaut Gordon Cooper and Star Trek actor James Doohan (aka “Scotty”) have been launched into space.  Much to my surprise, upon investigation, it turns out the project is still going with the next launch scheduled for May of this year.  BTW, costs range from $695 to have your ashes just flown around the earth to $9,995 to be ‘buried’ on the moon and $12,500 to be sent into ‘deep outer space.’

      MORE COCKTAIL CHATTER.  Mama Mia, MTV’s Jersey Shore ‘dropped’ to a season low in the last couple of weeks, but with more than 6.6 Million viewers, it is still one of the most popular series on basic cable.  But when MTV introduced the series about young Italian Americans to Italy, the homeland of my father BTW, it caused an outrage, with one columnist saying it perpetuated the worst stereotypes of Italians, “multiplied a thousand times and Americanized.”  As I write this, I should note that I am wearing my cornicello (Italian horn of plenty) around my neck to protect me from the evil eye.        

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