Tag Archives: Twitter

Twitter Study Tracks When We Are :)

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According to the article: Drawing on messages posted by more than two million people in 84 countries, researchers discovered that the emotional tone of people’s messages followed a similar pattern not only through the day but also through the week and the changing seasons. The new analysis suggests that our moods are driven in part by a shared underlying biological rhythm that transcends culture and environment.

Read about the study here: Moods on Twitter Follow Biological Rhythms, Study Finds – NYTimes.com.

Covering the Vancouver Olympics

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In November 2009, I was tasked with creating embeddable news modules to share USA TODAY’s coverage of the Vancouver Olympics across the Gannett network and beyond (several outside news outlets have also licensed access to our news packages and widgets).

Several meetings resulted in the creation of Vancouver news widgets to fit many of our popular news templates. UPDATE: Screengrabs are shown since the widget is no longer dynamically updated with new information.

We decided to include a default tab with the latest Vancouver headlines from USA TODAY; a results tab to show which teams have won, sorted by most recent game; a medals tab with a total medals count for each country, sorted by most medals; and a Twitter tab with tweets from USA TODAY reporters covering the Games live.  I also included static links to photos, videos and a TV schedule for the Games.  Some widgets included a link to more coverage from the respective websites promoting this module. About 8 custom variations of this widget were made (see versions below) to allow sites to chose which content they want to promote on their sites. Flexibility was key in giving sites options for the content they needed most for Olympics coverage.

About the Design and Development:

The Vancouver Olympics widgets were developed using ActionScript and XML feeds for headlines, medal counts, results and the Twitter feed. Everything from the scrollbar to the custom coverage buttons were developed from scratch in ActionScript 3.0. Flash was chosen because of the ease of use for 3rd-party news sites using the content modules.

I used Tweetr, an AS3 Twitter API library and PHP proxy class in order to circumvent Twitter’s crossdomain Flash security issues. I highly recommend Tweetr for Flash/Twitter integration.

Promotion:

We launched these widgets in early February at the start of the Vancouver Olympic Games and promoted them throughout the Games and for two weeks after. For obvious reasons, this widget is no longer live on any of our sites and has not been updated.

Here’s how some of Gannett’s news sites promoted the widget: