Twitter talk and social baby boomers

16/06/10 posted by Annie

Last week, Twitter rolled out a its new geo-location service just in time for the World Cup. With Twitter Places, you can see the specific place or venue a tweet comes from - including all the World Cup stadiums in South Africa - and you can also check out recent tweets from the same place just by clicking the location name. Integration with Foursquare and Gowalla mean these two check-in services can display Twitter's location information, and vice versa. They also added additional support for browsers including Safari, Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer so there'd be nothing stopping your location-loaded tweets.

However the fun stopped when Twitter reached maximum capacity, reporting downtime and constant errors due to "failed enhancements" of the site. Although the players can't tweet, hype around the World Cup saw "record traffic and unprecedented spikes in activity". While the team behind the site had been avidly working to improve its service in anticipation of the World Cup frenzy, Twitter's Sean Garret noted in a blog post that the company only uncovered deeper issues with its architecture and several mistakes in the network's internal maintenance. According to Garret, "it's been Twitter's worst month since last October". It also didn't help that while all this was going on, Twitter was also getting hit with spam attacks of a new breed. Even though Twitter's problems reflect their rapidly growing international popularity, the company expects downtime to continue for at least another two weeks while repairs are carried out.

In social media news, a new study from the AARP (which stands for American Association of Retired Persons) has found that almost 50 percent of baby boomers between ages 50 and 64 are comfortable using the internet, and a large majority are on Facebook. Facebook was found to be the networking website of choice, far outranking Twitter, LinkedIn and MySpace. And out of the 1,360 respondents, 83% knew about the iPad, and almost 15% had plans to buy one. It's an important thought for businesses which don't target today's youth: social media can help you tap into your target audience no matter what age group they belong in.