Popularity Contest: Can Facebook and Twitter Predict Election Results? - ABC News

Popularity helps in politics, especially having "friends," "followers" and people who "like" you.

In November's elections, the candidate who more people "liked" on Facebook won in 71 percent of Senate elections. Twitter was even more accurate, with the candidates with more followers winning in 74 percent of elections.

Facebook says it watched 118 races in the Senate and the House, and found 77 winners had more "likes" than their opponents did. Furthermore, candidates with twice as many fans as their opponent won by at least 3.9 percent.

Social media, such as Facebook and Twitter, were often better predictors of election results than how much money a candidate raised and spent, according to Facebook. In 42 of the races Facebook analyzed, the winner had more "likes" but less money.

The two Senate candidates who spent the most of their own money, Republican Linda McMahon of Connecticut and Democrat Jeff Greene of Florida, did not win. Greene did not win the Democratic primary. McMahon spent almost $42 million and Green spent close to $24 million on the primary, according to the FEC.

But as of November 1, McMahon had only 15 more "likes" on Facebook than the winner, Richard Blumenthal, even though she spent more than seven times as much.

In Florida, Jeff Greene had only 644 "likes" on Facebook compared to the Democratic primary winner, Kendrick Meek, with 24,135 "likes." (Meek lost the general election to Republican Marco Rubio.)

Furthermore, according to the FEC, six out of the ten top-spending Senate candidates did not win election. "The consensus is that money makes a difference but it's hard to quantify," said Andrew Gellman, a professor of statistics and political science at Columbia University. "[Campaign finances] are important, but non-linear. The extra $10 million does not help as much as the first million."

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Twitter links users to Apple music social network - Reuters

A Twitter page is displayed on an Apple iPhone in Los Angeles October 13, 2009.

Credit: Reuters/Mario Anzuoni REUTERS/Mario Anzuoni

SAN FRANCISCO | Thu Nov 11, 2010 12:53pm EST

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Microblogging website Twitter said on Thursday it will link its service with Apple Inc's new music-oriented social network.

Apple announced the Ping social network in September. It works within Apple's iTunes music program and lets users follow artists and recommend songs to their chosen circle of friends.

Twitter said its more than 175 million registered users can now connect their accounts to Ping, allowing them to put song previews and links to buy music from the iTunes store directly in their messages, which are known as "tweets."

Twitter's deal comes after Apple failed to strike a Ping partnership with social networking leader Facebook, which has more than 500 million users.

Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs told the All Things Digital blog in September that Apple had held talks with Facebook about a deal related to Ping, but the discussions did not produce an agreement.

Facebook declined to comment on Thursday.

Cupertino, California-based Apple's shares were down 88 cents at $317.15 in afternoon trading on the Nasdaq.

(Reporting by Gabriel Madway, editing by Gerald E. McCormick)

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Twitter Revamps Search Engine - PC World

Twitter has overhauled the back-end infrastructure of its search engine, boosting its speed and capacity to index posts, process queries and deliver results, while making the system more stable and better suited for the addition of new features.

Twitter transferred its search engine to the new platform in recent weeks, after working on the new back-end system for about six months, according to the company.

Twitter's search engine ran on a system based on MySQL from Summize, a company Twitter acquired in mid-2008, but scaling up the system had become difficult.

The engineering team in charge of the project decided to do an extreme makeover of the search engine using a different technology: the open-source, text search engine Lucene, which is written in Java.

Twitter modified some aspects of Lucene, including its garbage collection, query termination, posting lists, and data structures and algorithms, and was left with an inverted, index-based search engine that scales much more and has better performance.

Twitter fields 12,000 search queries per second -- or more than 1 billion per day -- and "tweets" become part of its search index less than 10 seconds after they are posted.

"We estimate that we're only using about 5 percent of the available backend resources, which means we have a lot of headroom. Our new indexer could also index roughly 50 times more Tweets per second than we currently get," Twitter official Michael Busch wrote in a blog post.

Twitter will contribute back to the Lucene project the modifications and improvements it made to the code.

Although Twitter makes available its index of "tweets" to external search engines like Google and Microsoft's Bing, its internal search engine is a key component of its microblogging service.

In addition to being the preferred vehicle among private citizens, public figures and companies for broadcasting short status updates, Twitter has become an increasingly valued repository of real-time data, tapped for following news, trends and collective musings.

To maximize the value of this "tweet" repository, the company must have a search engine that is fast, comprehensive and scalable, and its massive revamping of its search technology shows the company recognizes the importance of its internal search capabilities.

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