The Twitterverse was decidedly more positive than negative on the Microsoft/Yahoo! search deal, with 14% citing the ongoing battle with Google, and 13% calling it some variant of a great match. Only 8% of tweets were neutral or negative on the announcement.

The largest single share of the Tweet volume (47%) was the ripple of the news itself as it proliferated through the network.

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Tags: brand, brand monitoring, opinosphere by mike
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Microsoft. The Borg, right?

Not anymore, at least according to Vox Twitter on a host of recent issues.

It started with Bing, which a slim majority of Twitter-ers between June 29 and July 13 – but a majority nonetheless – generally liked:

Bing Opinion Monitor Chart

Next came Google’s Chrome OS announcement, which as discussed in a prior post, yielded an almost audible “meh” from vox Twitter. 19% of topical tweets between June 29 and July 13 were generally unimpressed, and the largest single theme of the conversation conveyed the sense that Chrome was no threat to the OS powers that be, foremost among which is Microsoft:

Chrome OS Opinion Monitor

Yesterday’s response to Office 2010 is the clincher. A combined 71% of twitter traffic was positive for Microsoft. The nature of that positive response is interesting… 14% cited the free and online character of the offering, and 16% Microsoft’s innovation in the cloud. 1 in 5 expressed a variant of excitement and/or love for it, and 21% cited it, specifically, as a threat to Google:

If Twitter is, as some feel, a leading indicator of the fickle flows of sentiment among the influential digerati, the last few weeks may have witnessed a sea change with far reaching implications… both in Redmond, and in Mountain View.

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Tags: brand, brand monitoring, opinosphere by mike
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Boatloads of Twitter chatter on Google’s launch of the Chrome OS… Curious how it all breaks down?

We were too:

It’s probably fair to assume some pro-Google bias in the Twittersphere, but those expressing an opinion were more strongly in the ‘Unimpressed’ / ‘No Threat’ camp (at a combined 44% of the postings) than the ‘Excited’ / ‘Threat’ camp (at 35% combined.)

We’re inclined to agree with the 15% expressing some variant of ‘The OS War has begun.’

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Tags: brand monitoring, data, opinosphere, social web by mike
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Comprehensive piece here, our segment begins at 2:30…

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Tags: data, opinosphere, product, social web by mike
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Sweeping condemnation of Proposition 8 among the Twitterverse…

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Tags: company, data, opinosphere, social web by mike
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Amazon’s announcement this morning of the Kindle DX dominated tech news today.  The new version of the web commerce giant’s e-book reader features a larger screen than its predecessor, the Kindle 2, and a host of other improvements including improved support for PDF documents.  It also carries a whopping $489 price tag, which may prove an obstacle to Amazon’s plan to supplant physical textbooks in schools.

Reading TechCrunch’s post “What Does Twitter Think About the Kindle DX today?” I was inspired to do an analysis of a sample of 1500 or so of today’s Tweets using our Voxtrot Opinion technology.  After reading through a few pages of Tweets,  I set the system loose on the remainder with some interesting results:

Although the device itself is gathering huge amounts of attention, more than a third of the non-news Tweets are focused on the implications of the DX for the newspaper and textbook industries.  The DX’s 9.7 inch screen may be approaching a tipping point, where e-readers become a credible alternative for a much broader array of printed media than ever before.  Seeing the amount of buzz around the improved support for PDF,  I am further convinced that technologically at least, the e-reader has arrived.

Practically speaking, although the Kindle DX seems to be on everybody’s wish list, the $500 ask is a major sticking point for Tweeters.  Even with the economy showing signs of recovery (bottoming, crumbling at a slower rate, whatever) I wouldn’t be surprised to see retail DX sales struggle for some time.

That said, today’s announcment represents a huge moment for Amazon and another milestone in what looks to be a very bright future for e-readers.

Tags: events, measurement, news, opinosphere, product by edward
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Wondering how people feel about the Federal government’s intervention in General Motors? We were too.

If you want to know how many times the words “General Motors” have been used online, there are lots of folks who can help you. If you’re interested in the polling results of this site or that one, there are plenty to choose from.

But if you want to understand what the online conversation really means, you might be interested in this…

Tags: brand, company, news, opinosphere, politics by mike
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Sometime this month The New York Times will be launching online Instant Op-Eds. According to Editorial Page Editor Andrew Rosenthal, “the idea is to have a group that provides opinions soon after news occurs, with a solid Web space dedicated to them.” The editorial page and news departments will collaborate on creating the feature.

Is this a good idea or a bad one? On the one hand, it gives the Times the ability to provide breaking-news opinion that it currently lacks: it’s a void I think online news outlets like the Huffington Post are filling today. Others fear that this is merely the cult of the instant, and risks losing thoughtful analysis to a world where “Essays become op-eds. Op-eds become blog posts. Blog posts become Twitter tweets.”

However these first efforts pan out, with the internet now eclipsing every news source except TV, the Times is wise to continue to innovate.

Photo credit: omar_chatriwala

Tags: news, opinosphere by admin
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