Category: Social Networking

Twitter Mainstream WalMart/Coke Commercial

Posted on by Sol Young with 2 Comments

It took Walmart 2 1/2 weeks to publish their co-created Coke commercial on YouTube (originally aired before the previews before The Quantum of Solace). I’d been looking for it online since catching it before QoS on opening night. Oddly enough, nobody cam’d it or ripped it for upload on any major sites. Enjoy!

“… my MySpace friends and Twitter list…” (0:32) is a double-take moment for those of us who got in on Twitter when it was only used by the geek crowd. Twitter mentioned in a mainstream ad!? S’wut?

Figured it had to be expensive product placement, so asked Biz Stone:

@biz Did Twitter pay for placement in the new Coke pre-movie ad? 10:21 AM Nov 18th

And received:

@sol no, it just showed up which is totally cool 10:41 AM Nov 18th

Side note: Walmart has plenty of room for improvement in their online and social media presence. They could have auctioned that product placement off for some decent VC supplied money and should be getting their videos out to many many many more services more quickly…

Posted in Social Networking, Twitter, Video

Average Twitter Age – Demographics

Posted on by Sol Young with 5 Comments

Age Demographics from Quantcast – Twitter.com

On Wednesday my wife and I were out at Flavor by Thai Pepper, enjoying some insanely good food and drink. Two conversations took place in adjacent booths, too loud to ignore.

In the booth behind Galina a group of late-twenty-somethings laughed loudly about replacing the contents of a box of chocolates with rocks and giving it as a gift (WTF?!) Behind me, a senior couple dropped the “T” word.

You don’t usually hear random people, especially outside of the tech community, drop Twitter in conversation. However, that’s been changing…

“Twitter? What’s that?” she asked, laughing.

“It’s this web site where you answer a question, ‘What are you doing right NOW?’ – You send a message on your phone, ‘I’m standing in line for a latte’ to everyone.” he described, emphasizing NOW.

She said she was fearful of a greater and greater generational gap forming, to which he disagreed and assured her they could keep up.

Their convo reminded me of a post by Zena Weist, in which she unscientifically found the average age to be ~37. My own findings were similar but I didn’t keep track of demographics.

Most folks on Twitter are not in the high-school contingent, and judging by more scientific methods the average age is indeed in the mid-thirties. 48% fall in to the 18-34 range, but 21% are over 50. That’s a huge difference compared to Facebook and MySpace having only 8% being over 50.

Don’t let age come between you and your tweets…

Follow @sol on Twitter

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Posted in Demographics, Facebook, Featured, MySpace, Social Networking, Twitter

An 84 year-old German Buddhist tenant

Posted on by Sol Young with Leave a comment

One of my tenants is an 84 year-old Buddhist woman from Germany. She has lived in her apartment here for more than half of my life. Looking back at my buying of the building, she was one of many reasons I wanted the property. She, on fixed income, would not be able to afford increased rent and more likely would be evicted straight-away (if someone else bought the building).

She’s proud of not being late on the rent for sixteen years and is one of those ideal persons you would want to have as a neighbor. She’s become a wonderful character in my wife’s and my lives.

We lived downstairs from her while we renovated an apartment there, and out of the blue she left a can of salmon treats for our cat. The next month we reciprocated by giving her a large gift basket close to Christmas. I give all my tenants gifts of some sort around Christmas – usually movie tickets – but she doesn’t get out much and something for home was better.

When we came home the next day there were bottles of sake and raspberry brandy at the door. She wasn’t sure what kind of alcohol we’d like, so she hedged and covered as much culture as she could with two bottles.

She called a couple weeks ago about a leaky faucet in the bathroom. She’s consistently worried about bothering us when she calls and often apologizes for doing so at the end of the call.

I’ve been working some intense projects at Ingram Digital, so my first opportunity to visit was today to see what I could do about the sink. She explained that professionals who tried to fix it over the years had described the faucet as not fixable.

The plumbers and contractors were right. The faucet can not be repaired, and replacement of only the faucet requires replacement of the sink, too. To correct the problem requires disconnecting the faucet fittings and the drain, removing the sink from the wall, installation of a new pedestal sink, installation of a new faucet, and then reconnection of the fittings and drain. Bummer!

Tomorrow I’m installing a new sink and faucet. I hope she likes it.

UPDATE: paragraphs of sugarcoated fluff snipped/removed from this post

Posted in Landlord, Real Estate, Social Networking, Tenant

Philly Geek Dinner is Wednesday Night (September 3rd, 7pm)

Posted on by Sol Young with Leave a comment

Useful links:

I finally went for a bike ride to see Privé in person. What I found was better than imagined, even after reading Michael Klein’s enticing description and having high expectations.

During my drop-in visit I met Kevin Landon, who abandoned a staff meeting to give me a tour (the video below doesn’t do the restaurant any justice, the place is fabulous). From talking with Kevin I learned Privé opened only two weeks ago and has been doing wonderful.

We’ll be one of the first groups there, and probably the first blog-heavy group. He showed me around and I got to see the impeccable cut white stone walls, attractive furniture, sleek lines and spotlit mural. He promises the food to be as good or better than the looks.

And he’s probably right. They’ve hired the young Peter Karapanagiotis, 23, who performed as saute-saucier at Buddakan as well as Brasserie Perrier. It’s going to be a real treat to experience his work while he’s fresh and the restaurant is brand-spankin’-new.

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Posted in Bicycling, Facebook, Geek Dinner, Philadelphia, Podcasting, Social Networking

Returning to “Traditional” use of Twitter

Posted on by Sol Young with 6 Comments

After using Twitter as my push-based latest-news system for five months, I’ve gone back to the “traditional” use of Twitter. Without IM and large follower functionality, Twitter offers no way to experience a flow of tweets.

“What have I done!?”

I’ve gone back to the traditional use of Twitter. The method more than 95% of the userbase uses it for. I now use it to stay in touch with the people I’ve met and know personally, rather than using Twitter as a medium for info aggregation. It’s not possible to use Twitter how I did in the past.

If you know my series on flow (it kicked off here), you know what I was doing and how cool it was. I got the idea partially from Robert Scoble’s entry, The Secret to Twitter. His use was brilliant and it worked amazingly well!

Back in March of ’08 I began following any interesting person I thought to be intelligent and putting out informative tweets. Primarily I found people in the software development, new media, aviation, library science, and management arenas. I ended up following 6,218 people at the high (last week). Everyone’s updates were viewed in IM and I would see an amazing flow of information.

Usually hundreds of tweets per minute, forcing me to read very quickly and get a quick read on the blogging, technology, and media areas in a short period of time. It allowed me to find articles and posts that would have filtered in slowly on RSS (arguably, if I had more than my 632 RSS feeds I’d find more information here, too).

It was great. Flip on iChat over breakfast and watch the flow while eating granola and yogurt. An ideal start to the day.

But in the last week I’ve culled over 4,000. The removed are people who don’t follow me and who I never met in real life. The chance of our interaction is very small, and if we meet I’ll follow.

I’m looking forward to having more intimate interaction with friends and followers. Focus will shift more towards FriendFeed and Google Reader (RSS).

Posted in Blogging, Flow, FriendFeed, Micro-blogging, Microblogging, RSS, Social Networking, Twitter