The micro-messaging service Twitter Tuesday suspended the accounts of users don_draper and peggyolson. If those names sound familiar, you’re probably a fan of the hit AMC show “Mad Men.” Those two Twitter users take their names from two of the main characters on the show, and over the past several weeks had been providing updates, mostly in character from what I could tell.
In yet another powerful showcase of Twitter’s potential power as a disseminator of information, today several people received the first information via the service that NASA has confirmed that its Phoenix Mars Lander has, in fact, found water on Mars. It’s still not on CNN.com, not on MSNBC.com, not on Fox.com. But a Twitter search query reveals it’s all over Twitter.
As a result of the news spreading quickly through Twitter, it’s also now all over FriendFeed, where some discussions are taking place on the subject. This is the kind of stuff these services are built for.
The water was found in ice-rich soil. Tests confirmed the ice was water-based.
OK, the title may be a slight exaggeration, but the data from a new study by the social-contact search site Rapleaf is nonetheless interesting.
In what they claim is the largest social-network study ever done, Rapleaf looked at the social connections of both men and women. All told, they collected data from over 30 million people on sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Flickr, Hi5 and others.
Interestingly, when you focus on users with fewer connections (well, relatively speaking–we’re talking about one group of people with between 1 and 100 connections, and another with between 100 and 1,000), women tend to have more friends than men. However, when you get to a really large number of connections (1,000 to 10,000, and also 10,000-plus), men have more friends.
Social networks like Facebook and MySpace are often just one click of a bookmark away on users’ Web browsers. Google looks to be one-upping them by turning its personalized home page, iGoogle, into a social network of sorts. With the new developer sandbox for iGoogle, Google is offering hints of what could be a very grand scheme. The video Google has released is front-loaded with what seem to be routine updates for what developers can do with iGoogle. However, toward the end we’re hit with code for accessing friends’ data and yes, creating an all important (in this day and age of social networks), friends’ activity stream.
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