This article titled “Twitter is harder to resist than cigarettes and alcohol, study finds” was written by James Meikle, for The Guardian on Friday 3rd February 2012 10.37 UTC

Tweeting or checking emails may be harder to resist than cigarettes and alcohol, according to researchers who tried to measure how well people could resist their desires.

They even claim that while sleep and sex may be stronger urges, people are more likely to give in to longings or cravings to use social and other media.

A team headed by Wilhelm Hofmann of Chicago University’s Booth Business School say their experiment, using BlackBerrys, to gauge the willpower of 205 people aged between 18 and 85 in and around the German city of Würtzburg is the first to monitor such responses “in the wild” outside a laboratory.

The results will soon be published in the journal Psychological Science.

The participants were signalled seven times a day over 14 hours for seven consecutive days so they could message back whether they were experiencing a desire at that moment or had experienced one within the last 30 minutes, what type it was, the strength (up to irresistible), whether it conflicted with other desires and whether they resisted or went along with it. There were 10,558 responses and 7,827 “desire episodes” reported.

“Modern life is a welter of assorted desires marked by frequent conflict and resistance, the latter with uneven success,” said Hofmann. Sleep and leisure were the most problematic desires, suggesting “pervasive tension between natural inclinations to rest and relax and the multitude of work and other obligations”.

The researchers found that as the day wore on, willpower became lower. Their paper says highest “self-control failure rates” were recorded with media. “Resisting the desire to work was likewise prone to fail. In contrast, people were relatively successful at resisting sports inclinations, sexual urges, and spending impulses, which seems surprising given the salience in modern culture of disastrous failures to control sexual impulses and urges to spend money.”

The academics, who included one each from Florida State University and Minnesota University, said the subjective reporting of desire was relatively low for tobacco, alcohol and coffee, apparently challenging “the stereotype of addiction as driven by irresistibly strong desires”.

They added: “Resisting the desire to work when it conflicts with other goals such as socialising or leisure activities may be difficult because work can define people’s identities, dictate many aspects of daily life, and invoke penalties if important duties are shirked.”

Hofmann told the Guardian: “Desires for media may be comparatively harder to resist because of their high availability and also because it feels like it does not ‘cost much’ to engage in these activities, even though one wants to resist.

“With cigarettes and alcohol there are more costs – long-term as well as monetary – and the opportunity may not always be the right one. So, even though giving in to media desires is certainly less consequential, the frequent use may still ‘steal’ a lot of people’s time.”.

Hofmann added: “We made clear to participants that answering the BlackBerrys did not count. Also people really did not feel a desire to use them – they only beeped once in a while and, if anything, that was more annoying than pleasing, I guess. And there was nothing else they could use the devices for.”

Würtzburg had been the testing ground because he had worked there as an assistant professor until recently.

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Last year, the star became the first person to tally 10 million followers on Twitter. Gaga outranks Canadian pop star Justin Bieber by nearly two million fans, and American performer Katy Perry, who takes third with 13.9 million followers.

Gaga has more than 46 million followers on Facebook, and yesterday she announced her new Google+ page, with some 10,900 followers so far.

Her latest album “Born This Way”, released in May, reached No. 1 on album charts in 28 countries.

This article titled “Twitter followers are worth $2.50 each a month? I’m rich at last” was written by Paul Carr, for guardian.co.uk on Thursday 29th December 2011 15.00 UTC

Like you, I’ve long dreamed of my “Antiques Roadshow moment”. The life-changing – probably televised – discovery that the creaking old rocking horse which formed the cornerstone of my childhood cowboy games was once the formative plaything of a young Catherine the Great. “Conservatively,” some kindly old rocking horse expert would smile, “I’d put its value at around £200,000.” “Gosh,” I’d blush, before insisting, “but, of course, I could never part with it.” (Two hours later: eBay.)

Until yesterday lunchtime, though, my Antiques Roadshow moment remained a wonderful fantasy. And then, just after boarding my flight home from Heathrow to Las Vegas, I heard my iPhone beep.

“We’re interested in getting some comment on the story below,” began the email. I almost didn’t click the link – we’d just been told to turn off our electronic items and I didn’t want to be Alec Baldwinned off the plane. But the name in the “from” field belonged to an editor at the Guardian and – yunno – could be an easy hundred quid, I thought.

Click.

Holy shit.

My moment had arrived.

The “story below” concerned PhoneDog, an obscure phone review website that is suing former employee Noah Kravitz for $340,000 over a “stolen” Twitter account. During his employment Kravitz had set up the account – @Phonedog_Noah – to tweet the usual brand-humanising nonsense that these people tweet. On leaving the company, Kravitz insists, PhoneDog were happy for him to keep the (now renamed) account, on the understanding that he would occasionally tweet out links to their phone reviews. At some point, though the relationship got messy. Now PhoneDog wants its followers back, and it also wants a third of a million dollars in damages: $2.50 for every one of the account’s 17,000 followers, multiplied by the number of months since Kravitz left his job.

When the Guardian emailed me to ask if I wanted to write something about the lawsuit, I expect it was hoping for something along the lines of: “Sheesh. It’s as if companies have learned nothing since the late 90s when CEOs blithely entrusted the construction of their website to the teenage son (always son) of their next-door neighbour, without stopping to consider, say, the intellectual property implications of non-employees registering domain names, building databases and suchlike. The specific circumstances behind Phonedog v Kravitz remain murky but I wouldn’t be at all surprised if this is just the first of a cavalcade of lawsuits – and a parade of retroactive rights grabs – that we see as it once again dawns on companies that they should take all aspects of their online identity seriously.”

Maybe the Guardian hoped for even more than that. I am, after all, an expert in this bullshit. Perhaps a history lesson: how employees often spot the potential of technology before their bosses. How the first draft of the Economist’s website was a home-brewed affair, knocked up by one of its correspondents for $120 in 1996 – or how, as long ago as 1991, New York Times tech reporter John Markoff registered nyt.com on behalf of his employer, well before anyone thought to also buy nytimes.com. How, given that Twitter accounts tend to be directly associated with a single person, there are real dangers in a individual employee – simply by virtue of being the most web-savvy person in the office – becoming the de facto spokesperson for an entire company. Pseudonyms are déclassé on Twitter, but it’s possible to make a compelling argument in favour of companies creating fictional spokestweeters – “Geoff from XYZ widgets” – inhabited by whichever staff member holds he social media reins on any given day. Other staff are welcome to tweet too, of course, but following the BBC model where employees must make it clear they don’t speak for the corporation.

Recalling that I never miss an opportunity to mention that I briefly studied law at university, maybe my editors would permit me make some woefully ill-informed stab at the strength of PhoneDog’s legal position. The company seems to regard its erstwhile Twitter followers as a sort of mailing list or customer database, which brings it neatly under the heading of a trade secret. Ker-ching! But, unlike mailing lists, Twitter follower lists are publicly displayed, so a PhoneDog victory in this case could bring about an exciting new legal precedent. Or not. The case might just be tossed out. I have no idea.

The point is, when I clicked on the link and read about Kravitz and his Twitter account, I didn’t immediately think about history repeating itself, or whether companies should use shell tweeters or even if this might be a chance to trot out some half-remembered fragment from a lecture in company law. No. What I thought was this…

“This is it! This is my Antiques Roadshow moment!”

You see, I have 10,000 or so followers on Twitter and, until yesterday I had regarded them much like I might have regarded that hypothetical old rocking horse: if the rocking horse was made up of pornographers, spammers and maybe half a dozen normal people who haven’t yet got round to unfollowing me. Sure they were fun to play with: but valuable? Please.

But now, thanks to PhoneDog, I discover that all those people – my wonderful, important, mission-critical database of followers – are apparently worth somewhere north of $25,000 a month. That’s three hundred grand a year! Sorry, I’d love to write a comment on all of this, but there’s no way on Earth I’m missing out on my big payday for a lousy hundred quid. Not when I can use this opportunity to make a much more important statement …

PhoneDog – if you really, truly believe that Twitter followers are worth $2.50 a month each then this is your lucky day. I’ve got three hundred grand’s worth just lying around taking up space! I mean, of course I could never bear to part with them but – shall we say $150,000 for cash?

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This article titled “From Fukushima to Charlie Sheen – the Twitter hashtags that dominated 2011″ was written by Josh Halliday, for guardian.co.uk on Tuesday 6th December 2011 17.26 UTC

From Charlie Sheen to the Arab spring, Twitter has revealed its most talked-about hashtag topics for 2011.

The top hashtag this year was #egypt, following the downfall of president Hosni Mubarak in February. The second most popular was #tigerblood – the phrase coined by Sheen following his acrimonious axing from hit US sitcom Two and a Half Men in March.

News events dominated Twitter’s hashtags this year, including the Japanese earthquake in March, the Egyptian revolution and the Super Bowl.

Sheen was the most tweeted about actor of 2011, according to Twitter, as he quickly attracted millions of followers on the social network amid the media frenzy around his high-profile firing. The momentous downfall of Mubarak, which many saw as the tipping point for the Arab spring uprising, was the most talked-about news story of the year on Twitter.

Top hashtags of 2011

1 #egypt

2 #tigerblood

3 #threewordstoliveby

4 #idontunderstandwhy

5 #japan

6 #improudtosay

7 #superbowl

8 #jan25

Top world news stories of 2011 on Twitter

1 Mubarak’s resignation

2 Raid on Osama bin Laden

3 Japanese earthquake and Fukushima nuclear disaster

4 Shooting of Gabrielle Giffords

5 Colonel Gaddafi’s death

6 Swine flu outbreak

Top 10 actors, according to Twitter

1 Charlie Sheen

2 Macaulay Culkin

3 Ryan Dunn

4 Ricky Gervais

5 Pete Postlethwaite

6 Tracy Morgan

7 Jake Gyllenhaal

8 Ashton Kutcher

9 Colin Firth

10 James Franco

Top 10 actresses, according to Twitter

1 Elizabeth Taylor

2 Mila Kunis

3 Anne Hathaway

4 Raven Symone

5 Natalie Portman

6 Elisabeth Sladen

7 Jennifer Lopez

8 Nina Dobrev

9 Emma Watson

10 Fernanda Vasconcellos

Top 5 music topics

1 Rebecca Black and Friday

2 Nate Dogg

3 Femme Fatale

4 Gerry Rafferty

5 Gil Scott-Heron

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The image was created by self-confessed “information design nerd” Miguel Rios (who also happens to be an engineer and data visualization specialist at Twitter).

Miguel Rios (@miguelrios) tweets that the visualization was put together in Photoshop and depicts more than 1,000 Tweets with the hashtag #thankyousteve ordered by the number of retweets, from top left to bottom right.

The full size image can be downloaded from Flickr.

The image was created by self-confessed “information design nerd” Miguel Rios (who also happens to be an engineer and data visualization specialist at Twitter).

Miguel Rios (@miguelrios) tweets that the visualization was put together in Photoshop and depicts more than 1,000 Tweets with the hashtag #thankyousteve ordered by the number of retweets, from top left to bottom right.

The full size image can be downloaded from Flickr.