It was a bit tl;dr though so some bright spark made it into a snazzy video.

Et voila…

The World Is Obsessed With Facebook from Alex Trimpe on Vimeo.

Personally I had no problems voting. My polling station was fairly quiet at 6pm. However, a friend of mine, @mikeedge who voted at the more central Barlow Moor road Parkfield Road South station, West Disbury witnessed queues all evening.

After deciding the queues were getting longer not shorter he took the plunge at about 8.30pm.

Mike estimated there were 150 people queueing when he joined. It took approx 45 minutes to get through these people. 3 people per minute.

As he left after 9.15pm the queue was longer than when he joined, about an hours queue at the pace he experienced with more people arriving.

The BBC is reporting more than 200 people were turned away from Withington as a whole. No indication if this is at multiple polling stations or just one.

Some constituencies are blaming large numbers of students turning up without polling cards or without having registered but although Withington has a significant student population this situation was not observed at the Barlow Moor road Parkfield Road South polling station.

In such a critical seat, this story could run and run. We could be the Florida of the 2010 UK election.

——-update———

Or not. Incumbent Lib Dem MP John Leech held withington and actually extended his narrow lead from the last election.

Labour’s so-called and much lauded social media tsar,  yesterday committed a potentially disastrous gaffe when she tweeted results of postal votes for the upcoming election.

Kerry McCarthy (@kerry4MP) is the twitter evangelist who was responsible for training up Labour politicians in the art of teh interwebs. Oops.

Under the Representation of the People Act it is illegal to reveal details of votes cast before the polling day as it may influence those yet to vote. Avon and Somerset police are now investigating this potentially criminal act.

Other twitter users pretty quickly realised something was amiss and let Ms McCarthy know. Blogger Darren Bridgman was first on the scene.

After briefly trying to defend her position, and presumably consulting with those who know better, @Kerry4MP deleted the tweets. But as we all know, news travels fast and word had got out. Here was her response to the BBC.

On hearing the results of a random and unscientific sample of postal votes, I posted them on Twitter. It was a thoughtless thing to do, and I very quickly realised that it was not appropriate to put such information in the public domain.

“Quickly realised” but not quick enough. At its heart, this is not a social media error. Kerry McCarthy made a simple mistake. She should have known it was illegal to share that information with the public and not done it. This error could have been made when talking to a journalist or writing a press release but in this case she is not only the source of the information but the editor and publisher. What this incident proves, if more proof be needed, is that in this world of instant communication, you have to be really sure of your message and in control of the information you choose to share.

I want contact lenses with this ability so I don’t miss a drop of metadata that might whizz by!

KutcherVSCnn.com is the app that delivered the news. He also raised a lot of money for a very good cause, so good on him.

Ah May 2008. I remember it like it was only last year. How things have changed since then.

The battle for 1,000,000 followers is on.

Currently, the CNN breaking news twitter feed is Top of the Twops (not ‘arf) with 967,979 followers. Hot on the heels of this broadcasting giant is one man who likes to tweet. So which wit, which philosopher, which inspirational human being is deemed so important by the new Twitter masses that he or she has 959,259 followers and is challenging a global news corperation?

Ashton Kutcher.

(Note to self: try, really try not to be snooty)

So now Ashton, aided by Electronic Arts, is campaiging for followers so that he can overtake CNN and win the race to the big one oh oh oh oh oh oh.

Says Ashton:

“When I saw that I was approaching a million and that CNN was too, I thought this was really significant for social media. For one person to have the ability to broadcast to as many as people as a major media network, I think signifies the turning of the tide from traditional news outlets to social news outlets.

“Because with our video cameras on our cell-phones, on our picture cams, with our blogging, with our twittering and our posting and our Facebook accounts we actually become the sources of the news, and the broadcasters of the news and the consumers of the news. We have the potential on this day to turn the tide.”

Ashton Kutcher’s stance as the ‘everyman’ is a bit galling. As one YouTube commenter rather crudely put it:

He’s not the “everyman” you c**t muffin. He’s a fu**ing celebrity. His dumb face is all over every printed media.

Quite. Thanks to interestingperson121 for that quote. I added the asterisks.

I do like the fact that Ashton Kutcher seems to care about social media as well as the promotion he gets out of it. He obviously does all his updates himself and he also gets involved with video blogging on Qik and YouTube and… well I admit it: I dislike him a lot less then I used to. At least I don’t have to watch him acting when he’s on Twitter.

But I don’t really agree with him that his having 1,000,000 followers is a triumph of social media. It’s still a single source broadcasting to many. So it doesn’t matter if that source is CNN or Ashton Kutcher. In fact, if I had to pick one as the only twitter stream I could follow I’d plump for CNN. They really do have a lot of content. That’s why they are a news network.

The point is I don’t have to choose. I can follow as many people as I like and get content from them all. Whether it’s the BBC or a mate from work doesn’t really matter. I pick my crowd from which to source my wisdom.

And you know what? It goes two ways. I can tell people stuff I find interesting. It might be stuff i’ve found on the web or even thoughts that have formed in my own brain.

That’s many to many broadcasting. Throw in a dollop of conversation and that’s social media.

Update 1: You can read a blow by blowaccount of the battle so far in a great series of posts in techcrunch by MG Seigler.

Update 2: If you’d asked me six months ago who would be the first to a million followers, I’d have said it would be between Stephen Fry and Barack Obama.

Since then two things have happened.

1) Barack is now the president of the USA

Twitter was a great tool for him while he was campaigning but now his campaign tools don’t need quite so much attention. Apparently he’s too busy saving the world to let us know what he’s having for breakfast nowadays.

2) Twitter use by superstar celebrities has exploded.

Our Stephen, so revered among geeks and other early adopters, now languishes in the lower regions of the top thirty in the twitter charts thanks to more highly exposed celebs and the general public that follow them. Celebs, some of whom don’t even do their own updates like Britney Spears and Coldplay are above him. If that sounds snooty, it’s meant to.

Those of you who don’t subscribe to the Friday Night Comedy podcast really should.

The Now Show is on at the moment and among others it features regular contributor, Mitch Benn. If you don’t know Mitch, he makes up funny and topical songs all the time, which is great on the radio but must annoy his wife.

Anyway, Mitch is one of many comedians/broadcasters to have recently embraced Twitter (@mitchbenn if you’re interested). A couple of weeks ago I saw him tweeting that he had written a song about Twitter. It’s a funny commentary on how minor celebrities become obsessed with gathering as many followers as they can with no thought as to what conversations they should be having.

At least, I hope he’s joking – he might mean it.

Mitch Benn on Twitter – Download MP3

Here’s Mitch’s take on the ridiculous “schools to teach Twitter instead of history” story. I’ve got a post on this topic baking in the oven but for now I’ll leave it to Mitch. Here is his 1 minute lesson on ‘teh interwebs’.

Mitch Benn on teh Interwebs- Download MP3

He boils it down to these 5 points:

For those of you who, unlike me, have a life instead of monitoring twitter trends, Skittles have revamped their site and the content has almost been completely replaced by relevant pages from third-party social media applications. Visitors to Skittles.com are now directed to the twitter search result for the term “skittles” and invited to navigate their way about Skittles’ social web presence by using the flash navigation menu that overlays the page. [update: the homepage is now set as the facebook page as predicted my moi ]

The ‘Home’ and ‘Chatter’ links both link to the twitter search results for the term Skittles, the products links for each flavour lead to the relevant information on the Skittles Wikipedia entry. There is a ‘Friends’ link that goes to the Skittles facebook page and the video and photo links respectively lead to the Skittles profile on YouTube and Flickr search results for the term… well can you guess?

There are only two actual web pages in use: the product overview page and the contact form.

My first impressions were that this is very brave and very cool. I did have some reservations, however.

Firstly, the idea is not original. Dave Kinsella showed me the Modernista “Unsite” about this time last year.

Remember: a year in social media is roughly equivalent to one dog-year.

I don’t think the skittles implementation is as good. Modernista use javascript menus cleverly to help the user navigate to the content they need, rather than just pulling up a live stream of search results. Even worse, the skittles flash menu cannot be moved by drag and drop which means there is a chunk of the page on the top left that the user will never see. This is especially annoying when trying to navigate around text-heavy wikipedia pages.

I also couldn’t understand why the Homepage was set to the twitter search results. Ok, having a ‘Chatter’ link is pretty cool but why duplicate it on the homepage? All that will do is encourage twitter users to tweet the word skittles over and over again in order to try to get their tweets to appear on the…

*sound of penny dropping*

Aha! That’s it. The cheapest and most effective viral campaign there is. Genius.

I  was mildly concerned (but mainly interested and excited) to see what cunning ways people would try to subvert the idea. There is the most potential for amusing disaster on the Flickr search page. After all, a picture can speak a thousand crude words whereas there’s only room for about 2o crude words in 140 characters.

Unsurprisingly though, it was those cheeky scamps on twitter, led by mischief and Techcrunch UK’s Mike Butcher, who attempted to cause trouble for skittles.  This was closely followed by some wikipedia attacks (which I suspect will stop as soon as Wikipedia lock the entry).

I suspect that Skittles knew this would happen; they make users fill in an age declaration and those underage can’t continue.

I also don’t think that people acting the goat does Skittles any harm. The negative comments, especially the obviously silly ones, reflect only on the user posting them and at the same time as they are revelling in their cleverness at getting rude words to appear on the skittles home page, all their followers are busy investigating what all the Skittles posts are about.

For good or bad, skittles was the number 1 trending term on twitter for most of the day and with twitter’s current high profile, I wouldn’t be surprised to see more mentions of Skittles in the mainstream media in the next couple of days.

I’m also betting that thousands and thousands of people who wouldn’t have thought about skittles ordinarily will now find their hand inexplicably drawn towards that brightly coloured bag while they are queuing at Tesco or picking up a paper. And that’s what it’s about.

There are some naysayers out there, including the normally astute Paul Fabretti, who are of the opinion that people mindlessly twittering the name Skittles, and people talking about the  promotion rather than the product doesn’t actually add any value. I couldn’t disagree more.

Buying a piece of confectionary is an impulse decision. You’re not buying a car so you don’t need loads of information about price and product. When was the last time you saw an informative ad for sweets or chocolate?

“But what about the general public?” I hear people cry. “The ordinary web users who haven’t heard of twitter, flickr, facebook, and wikipedia. They will be scared and confused when visiting the site and throw their laptop in the bath and never buy Masterfoods’ confectionary again and…”

Ok no-one actually suggested that last bit but you get the idea.

I happen to agree that the current homepage , while a great PR stunt, is not ideal in the long term. I think that Skittles will change it to something else in the near future – why else would ‘Chatter’ and ‘Home’ be duplicated?

But are there really any regular web users who have never heard of social networking and the most common web apps? More importantly, are there any regular web users in the target market for skittles that would be repelled by the use of such tools?

I suspect not. All in all, great work Skittles.

I love my Xbox 360. Right now I’m in the firm grip of an addiction to Gears of War 2. My facebook profile pic is me “rocking out” with my imitation Gibson Guitar Hero controller. I really am that sad.

But I get annoyed at how little I am able to integrate my Xbox live account with other parts of my online life. I know it’s possible to fudge together a gamercard widget for ones blog or online profile, and your Windows messenger status can be set to show what game you are playing. But that’s about it and c’mon that’s pretty limited.

I think Microsoft are really missing a trick here.

The newly updated website is still not geared enough towards community interaction. It should resemble last.fm with activity streams, updates, information on users’ game and video libraries. Users should be able to start groups, organize events and competitions and arrange leagues.

The recent update to the Xbox live interface is a wii-inspired move in the right direction but I think Microsoft could do a much better job of getting users involved in the Xbox live community.

For a start there should be an RSS feed or a collection of RSS feeds for my activity so I can share what games i’m playing etc with others.

If I play a new game for the first time shouldn’t I be able to announce to my twitter/facebook/insert-social-network-here friends that “Gez has just started playing XXXX” without, you know actually typing it anywhere? Typing is soooo web 1.0 .

There could, and should be an achievement feed so I can brag about my progress in GTA4. Ok, I not saying I want to subject my network to all this but I’d like to be able to.

The next step would be a functional API so other people could build cool stuff. I’m thinking Facebook apps, flickr viewers and uploaders. Imagine if, when browsing game previews in the Xbox marketplace, you were able to add those games to your amazon wish-list.

It makes commercial sense too. I’m much more likely to buy a game if I know others in my network already have it. And what about those Xbox owners who don’t subscribe to xbox live? Surely they’re going to be more willing to stump up 30 quid a year once they see how much fun they are missing out on?

So come on Microsoft – have a word with yourself and let’s get connected eh?