India’s leading mobile service provider Bharti Airtel has decided to give free access to popular social networking site to all its subscribers for 2 months. This will benefit around 13 crore airtel mobile subscribers in India.
Airtel Customers can access mobile version of facebook in English, Hindi, Malayalam, Tamil, Telugu, Punjabi and Bengali.
To activate this service offer just send an SMS ‘FACEBOOK’ to 54321.
As per the latest comScore report the Social media giant Facebook reached a major milestone in November 2009 by surpassing 10 crore US visitors/month limit.
This is a major achievement for Facebook because it is the first time a Social Networking site crossing this limit. In November 2009 Facebook displaced AOL and reached the fourth position. Google, Yahoo and Microsoft sites are in the first 3 positions respectively.
Facebook almost doubled it’s US visitors in last one year and now facebook accounts for 5.5% of all time spent online in the US (last year it was 2.5%).
More details available comScore Site
Twitter yesterday released "Top Twitter Trends of 2009”.
Iran and Iran Election were dominated the News section in 2009. Other major hot topics discussed in news section were Swine Flu, Gaza and AIG.
In Technology Google Wave was the hottest topic followed by Snow Leopard, Tweetdeck and Windows 7.
In movies Harry Potter, New Moon, District 9 and Paranormal Activity were the top discussed keywords and Michael Jackson was the hot topic in the people’s section followed by Susan Boyle and Adam Lambert.
More details available at Top Twitter Trends
Finally search engines realized the power of real time web and partnered with twitter to display real time searches.
All major three search engines – Google, Yahoo and Bing are now equipped with real time search integration with data from Twitter and similar sites.
Google launched its real time search last week and it is fully live now. In Google when you search for a hot news topics like Andhra or Telangana you will get a search results with real time updates blended with other results.
This real time results keep on updating and there is pause link in case if you want to pause updating.
Google includes results from Twitter and other partner sites like Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed, Jaiku and Identi.ca. In addition to that Google also displays data from newly updated web pages.
Displaying a real time result is easy but the main challenge in real time search is picking up the relevant and useful content. Millions of pages are getting updated every minute and most of these pages are either too personal or not good enough to show in search engine result or may not satisfy the visitor.
For eg when you search for "India” in twitter you will get so many tweets with keyword India but they wont fully reflect the actual happenings in India at that moment.
The basic idea of real time search is to display happenings at that moment for that keyword.
In real time search with its own algorithm Google is picking up the most relevant pages from Twitter and newly updates sites.
Yahoo embedded Twitter as a separate tab in the search result with news, photos and videos tabs. When you click on the Twitter tab Yahoo will display some recent and relevant tweets with that keyword.
Microsoft’s Bing created a new section for twitter : http://www.bing.com/twitter with a list of hottest topics on twitter like a tag cloud.
When you search for a keyword in Bing+Twitter, it shows two separate results
* Most recent tweets about that keyword.
* Top links shared in tweets about that keyword.
It is a really tough to sort out the most recent and relevant data from billions of pages available online today but with amazing technological enhancements in both software and hardware we can expect more friendly and useful real time searches in near future as most probably 2010 is going to be year of real Real Time Search.
Twitter’s Director of Platform Ryan Sarver announced today that Twitter is going to allow developers to access its core data stream called Firehose by early next year. Even though now developers are able to access twitter tweets and other data via twitter API, currently it is limited.
Twitter developers will get more power once the Firehose becomes publicly available. Sarver also said that total number of Web Applications based on Twitter API reached 50,000.
Twitter will be launching a new website for developers with dashboard and tutorials. Also Twitter is going to increase the current Twitter API OAuth request limits soon.