Dutch Police also using Twitter.

Last week I read an interesting article in one of the free newspapers you get at the train stations: it was about Dutch policemen using Twitter to talk about their job. Several police departments are using Twitter as a tool to help solve cases quicker. For example, the police in Veendam used Twitter to spread news and gain information when a pyromaniac went on a spree (read more here).

I find it interesting the Police has found Twitter to be a useful tool, but I am a bit worried about the lack of policy with regards to Twitter. There are no set rules about what a policemen can publish on Twitter and what not. How do you determine if they are acting as a policemen or if a tweet is a simple private tweet?

Let me know what you think!

David Letterman's first tweet

Couple of months old, but still pretty funny

A nice video about social media

And a more boring video of social media as a marketing tool.

The six social media trends for 2010

At the beginning of every year people like to predict the trends for the coming year. Even though it's already March I still would like to talk about it. I found an interesting blogpost from David Armano (Senior Vice President at Edelman Digital). He names the following trends:

The six social media trends for 2010
1. Social media begins to look less social
2. Corporations look to scale
3. Social business becomes serious play
4. Your company will have a social media policy (and it might actually be enforced)
5. Mobile becomes a social media lifeline
6. Sharing no longer means e-mail

Especially trend number 4 is an interesting one. It shows that corporations are becoming aware of the power of social media. It recognizes the need for some kind of policy about how employees have to behave on social media platforms without being harmfull for the company they work for.

I do have doubts about trend number 6. I do believe e-mail will phase out in the future, but I doubt it will happen very soon.


Read more: David Armano's blogpost

Twitter lends a helping hand in the fight against scammers

For every organization it is important to protect it's customers from all the nasty people in the world. Twitter recognizes this need. It has now introduced its own shortened url's to protect it's users from scammers. Before today scammers could just send direct messages with url's to malicious websites in it. A user would receive an e-mail notifications about the direct message and could click the link. There was no way for Twitter to prevent this.

Since today Twitter replaces the direct url in the notification e-mails by shortened versions that link back to Twitter. When you click these url's Twitter checks the website it refers to before a user is send there. This stops all the baddies on the internet dead in their track.

But remember kids: common sense is still the best protection against scammers. Many scamming attempts can be prevented by simply thinking for a second and paying attention to the URL's you are clicking on.

More info at Tweakers.net and Twitter

Microsofts "secret" phones coming Verizon

Gizmondo got their hands on some 3rd-party promotional material for some upcoming Microsoft phones. Normally I am not that interested in phones, but it is clear that Microsoft has made this phone especially for social-networking. I'm really curious if it's really a step forward or just a bunch of marketing mumbojumbo.


Read the entire article at Gizmondo

Ballmer talks about Bing & Twitter

At the Santa Clara Convention Center Ballmer talked about Twitter and Bing. He hopes that Bing.com (the new Microsoft search engine) gains some market share, but he primarily wants to make the search experience better.

Ballmer also mentioned he has a secret Twitter account to provide commentary on high-school basketball matches. It's fun to see that even big-shot CEO's use twitter. He also commented on acquiring twitter; read more at Cnet.