Using Twitter To Do Market Research

If you are a company selling products and services, would you use Twitter to do your market research? Some do but it does not seem to be such a good idea.

Twitter is a very popular, simple and easy to use social networking and micro-blogging service. Due to that, a lot of people are using it. Of course, people mean consumers and lots of people gathering together definitely mean lots of potential customers. So, it did not take long for companies to put one and one together to conclude that Twitter is where it’s at. The place where the pulse of the market can be felt.

Due to this, some companies do their market studies using Twitter. They listen to what customers have to say, what products or services they like and do not like, and what people say of their products or services and that of their competitors.

Listening to what people tweet about your product and that of your competitor’s is obviously a wise thing to do. You can learn a lot from that exercise. However, doing a market research there will not give you reliable results.

An article in Reuters said that just a few on Twitter do all the tweeting. That article mentioned a Harvard study which found that only 10 percent of Twitter users generated more than 90 percent of the content. These are the more active and vocal users. Therefore, much of the information you gather will only come from a select few people.

So, by doing your market research on Twitter, you are actually basing you market research on just approximately 10 percent of the total Twitter users. A far cry from even just the majority. Still, it is not a fruitless exercise. Companies can still glean a lot of helpful information that way. Just don’t expect a scientific outcome.

Care For An Ubuntu Netbook?

Netbooks are currently coming in strong. And why not? These netbooks let you do most of the things you need to do without the bulk, weight and price of a full-pledged notebook.

But the small size of netbooks means smaller memories, storage capacities, and computing power. Enter Ubuntu Linux. Ubuntu Linux is one of the most popular Linux distributions around. From nowhere, Ubuntu Linux skyrocketed to the top. And since it is a Linux OS, it requires fewer resources. This means that Ubuntu Linux and netbooks are truly meant for each other.

“What about the hardware compatibility problems?”, you ask. Well, not only did Ubuntu Linux help netbooks by providing a stable and powerful OS while using less resources, netbooks also return the favor by playing within the strengths of Ubuntu Linux. Being small devices, netbooks do not have  a lot of devices for Ubuntu Linux to be incompatible with. The graphics card is definitely not top of the line with a lot of features so, not much incompatibility there either. And since it is a portable device, not much external devices are attached to it. With netbooks, the strengths of Ubuntu Linux are highlighted and its shortcomings, downplayed. In short, Ubuntu Linux or any other Linux distribution could really shine in this portable platform.

A New Online Pastime—Scam Baiting

Many have received that email from somebody which spins a tale of unclaimed money waiting to be claimed if only the recipient is willing to help. And of course, send advance payment to the scammer. This email scam has been going on for quite a while in the internet. But that is not the sad part. The sad part is that still more people fall for it. It is not only a loss for those people but also an encouragement for the scammers to continue doing their despicable work.

Enter the new online pastime—Scam Baiting. With this new kind of online gaming, scammers are being scammed. They travel for miles, sometimes thousands of miles, in search for non-existent cash, go to dangerous places that could get them killed, risk dehydration in a very hot and humid place, meet people who will not be there, get arrested in the airport, spend cash along the way, and go back home empty handed after getting stranded.

These online vigilante group called scam baiters said that this has two beneficial effects. One, while the scammers are busy getting scammed, their efforts, attention, energy and resources are redirected from real victims; Two, it will hopefully discourage them from scamming people again in the future because that prey might in fact be a predator. In addition to those reasons, I also think that another side benefit is that the scammers will feel how it is to be scammed—how it is to be on the receiving end of the scam. Another thing is as a petty punishment for all the hassle and grief they had caused.

Now, another online game is in cybertown. And the victims are fighting back.

When Google Goes Down, The Web Panics – What This Means to Cloud Computing

Well, that could be a very strong statement, I agree. But we can’t deny how we are very dependent on Google and all it’s services.

You know, Blogger, where this blog, along with other blogs, is hosted on; Feedburner, which ensures that our readers get fed; Picasa, where all the images in our blogs are hosted; Gmail, which gets the mails delivered and received; Google News, for our daily read; and of course, the one and only Google Search.

So, it does not come as a surprise that Google became quite a bit of a sensation in the micro-blogging platform Twitter when it suffered a failure last May 14 in the morning EST. I do not know if the cause of failure is already publicized by the time this post is published but at the time this is being written, there is no clear explanation yet.

There are rumors that Google security was compromised. I have not confirmed this. But if it were true, then it is very troubling. It is something we need to consider very closely before we can even attempt to take computing up into the cloud. I already mentioned this in a previous post that security is a major consideration in cloud computing.

Even if it were not true, and that it was just a reliability problem, it is still something to consider in cloud computing. As long as it’s down, it’s down regardless of the cause.

If this can happen to the mighty Google, it could happen to anybody including vendors of cloud computing. If it does and cloud computing goes down, your business might go down with it.