You can read a bit more on this newly release report  at Mahable.

Many non-early adopters ask, why do I care that Matt ate toast this morning or thinks that AT&T is an epic failure as a wireless provider?  With occasional browsing the updates seem really boring, perhaps even absurd to even waste time reading.  Keep following those status updates and tweets, soon a digital picture begins to emerge in your head.  You begin to tune into the flow of your friends daily lives and know their day-to-day triumphs and tribulations.  This is known as digital intimacy.

Digital intimacy is increasing on a monthly basis with the evolution of ‘real-time’ platforms.  Thousands of users squawked when Facebook updated to their freshly designed home page with information popping up in their users feeds faster than ever before.  After a few months most adjusted to the new speed of information and the ground swell subsided.

So with this new ambient awareness of your network, you will find yourself feeling strangely close to your friends even though you rarely see them.  When you do stumble across them you pick up your conversation where it left off online.  This is not an unproven theory, I catch myself doing it all the time.  The more I scan my networks the closer I feel digitally to my friends.  But sometimes too much digital digestion can be a bit stressful.

This stress has led to many digital mavens to start adopting convergence tools like FriendFeed or simply skimming on the platforms they currently use when they have ample time.

Users who create more content are much more likely to have more digital visibility and are also more likely to have digital awareness of their network.  Content creates conversation and will foster more time spent digesting and engaging in the conversation.  This closeness drawn from conversation and interaction will foster more digital awareness of their network, especially those who engage with that users content.

That begs the question, are you in the conversation?

• iPhone battery life is kind of bad!

Living in the isolated and desolate state known as Wisconsin, it is not often my iPhone use is ‘heavy’.  I know most places I go so I don’t use battery-sucking GPS Google maps, I know the good places to eat so no need for Yelp. No long commutes to listen to my iPod.  I thought my iPhone battery life was ‘okay’ but certainly could be better.  I would plug it in nightly with 30%-40% of battery life remaining after light to moderate use.  Being in Chicago I had to consciously think, ‘do I really need to look this up or should I save my battery?’  Leaving for downtown in late morning my battery would dead by 6 or 7 p.m.  Between Twitter, Google Maps (w/ GPS), Yelp! (to eat), Photos (snap, snap!) and iPod (1 hr commute in downtown via train), my battery was taking a real pounding.

• The AT&T network really does suck!

You’ve read all the grumblings from other metros, New York, San Fran, L.A. and Miami.  AT&T’s network is terrible.  Do we need to rehash the SXSW incident where all the tech geeks converging caused the AT&T network to crash with the convention in town?  I think not.  I use the SpeedTest.net app on my iPhone to measure bandwidth.  I only got one good result of 2.3 mbps down and 280 kbps up.  That was in the fringe suburbs of the metro though.  When downtown I was getting varying results between 250kbps-700kbps down and 40kbps-170kbps up.  Needless to say I wasn’t very impressed.  Yes the speed varied with the time of day, but overall I was unimpressed with the networks ability to handle the data. That is a teaser for my next point!

• Digital spread is thick in metropolitan areas.

I had a realization moment while riding the Metra train back to Elk Grove Village this afternoon during rush hour.  I was crammed like sardines with business professionals commuting home from work.  Everyone around me had ear phones in and either an iPhone or MP3 player in their hands.  With about 50-60 people in my car, well over 75% were holding a portable media device.  The other 25% were reading the paper, book or using their laptop.  During down time, consumers of digital media simply ‘graze’ news, tweets, music, podcasts etc. as they cruise their way to home or work.  Many companies want to know how to reach a large mass on social media platforms like Twitter.  The truth is because so much information fly’s through our networks, we can’t take it all in.  If you tried, you’d burn out before you knew what hit you.  Many are ‘grazing’.  During proper times they digest what is active in their network at that time and simply turn it off when they need to.  I would argue some of the best times to reach those in your network is commute times and lunch.  However, peak times to reach your network varies with your networks ‘lifestyle’.

Why use Twitter as a passive form of micro-emailing like leaving DM’s for professors when it can be a real-time virtual platform.  I suggested that professors who have appropriate courses should display Twitter on the projector screens in the front of the classroom.  With third-party software like Tweetdeck the professor can follow a custom hashtag for her class and have it auto-refresh at pre-determined intervals.  This allows for a virtual conversation to take place between students as the professor lectures on a topic.

The professor can skim over the ongoing Twitter conversation during his or her lecture and comment on what students have been saying, this will deepen the lecture and make it more personable to the ‘pulse of the students’ who are taking it in.  Giving every student a digital voice will cater to shy students who have things they’d like to say, but don’t out of fear of embarrassment.

Once out of the classroom, the student will be able to go back and re-read comments from any lecture. Re-reading his own tweets and those of his peers will help during weekly assignments and provide a platform for out of class discussion.

Even if a professor is ill or out of town, they can login to Twitter and watch their students comment and discuss that day’s lecture and even jump in the conversation while not present.

Twitter is a valuable communication tool but evolution of ‘real-time’ communication will continue well beyond the walls of Twitter, most notably with Google Wave in the next year or so.  This idea is certainly an experimental one with many variables that can lead towards success or failure of its use.  Some are obvious yet some are unforeseen.  It is my hope that professors at UW-Stout will begin to utilize this means of communicating to aid learning and engagement.

Twitter had to temporarily shut down their search results, saved searches and trending topics to mitigate a full-blown site failure.  This isn’t uncommon for the micro-blogging site.  Twitter has been known to be very unstable during breaking news like the Hudson River plane crash and the Iranian conflict.  “We saw over twice the normal tweets per second the moment the story broke as people shared their grief and memories,” Twitter co-founder Biz Stone told The Associated Press via e-mail.

AT&T said they set a new record for most text messages being sent over their network.  In the minutes following Jackson’s death AT&T subscribers were sending 4,000,000 text messages per minute at its peak, they also said call volume was up 10% during that same time.  AT&T went on to say that the spike in volume from Jackson’s death was even greater than during the September 11th terrorist attacks in New York City.  This is an unfair comparison by AT&T because their customer base significantly increased thanks to the Apple iPhone in the past three years and mergers.  In 2001 AT&T wireless had about 20 million subscribers, in the first quarter of 2009 they had just under 80 million.

Internet giant Google was also crippled by the breaking news.  The security software that protects Google from hackers thought it was under attack with so many queries coming in.   Those on Google News had to enter a ‘CAPTCHA’ code to prove they were real users and not bot.  Google also began displaying ‘malware’ alerts for users trying to search for breaking news on Jackson.  Search queries spiked around 2pm Pacific time, skyrocketed by 3pm, and finally leveled off by 8pm. The majority of Thursday’s hot trends related to Jackson’s death, Google said.  Google provided this chart showing queries about Michael Jackson on Thursday.

Facebook unsurprisingly dominated the social media spread of Michael Jackson’s death with its 300+ million user base.  The saturation of networks is best shown on this chart. (Look at that spike for Facebook!!!!)

Yahoo.com had a record setting day as well.  Yahoo News had 16.4 million unique visitors, breaking the 15.1 million record set on Election Day 2008.

This event will likely continue to be studied for months to come.  I’m waiting to see information released on the stress placed on Google’s server farms and Internet hubs worldwide that funnel traffic in places like Chicago, New York City, Atlanta and Dallas.   Sure trend analysis like the graph’s above are nice, but I would like to see some technical break down of the event.

Analysis showing number of hourly tweets using #IranElection hashtag 

Tweets per hour including the word ‘Iran’

Note the trend dips and peaks between the mention of ‘Iran’ on Twitter and the use of the #IranElection hashtag to consolidate the onversation over the last two days.

The use of the word ‘Iran’ per-day is radpily falling, will it finally be knocked down off the #1 trending position soon?

These numbers are simply mind numbing and showcase the power of social media and the Internet.  (01:02 p.m. CDT  6/18/09: UPDATED)

“Following a massive opposition rally Monday, authorities restricted journalists — including Iranians working for foreign media — from reporting on the streets. They could effectively only work from their offices, conducting telephone interviews and monitoring official sources such as state TV.” – Associated Free Press

Some journalists having been forced to leave because the Iranian government would not renew their Visa which they received to cover the election. 

Iran has also begun censoring communication online as well.  They are throttling bandwidth within their country and blocking popular communication platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and YouTube to name a few.   All of these efforts by Iran to censor information have been rather futile.  Social media and tech savvy geeks in Iran and around the world have shown that trying to completely shut down communication is tough to do.  The only way to really crush communication would be to pull the plug on critical network infrastructure and backbones, however that would leave government entities out of luck as well.  Corporate media who cannot have large six-figure cameras on the street have turned to citizen journalist tools to tell the story from the front lines. 

I watched a reporter on CNN who was walking near a rally in which Iranians were being beaten record his story on a cell phone while walking down the street, he nervously looked around while talking knowing at any time they could become a target of Iranian police.  Truthfully, this could have been anyone using a simple cell phone to record a video describing what they were witnessing.  The only difference being this reporter had the backing of a major news network.  The Iranian election has shown that you don’t need that support to get your message out to thousands.

Pictures (like this) spread on TwitPic(a website for sharing photos on Twitter) of a rally with an estimated 100,000 protesters collected over 60,000 views in less than 24 hours.  This YouTube video shows unarmed Iranian’s being shot at by Basiji forces in the streets of Tehran. These are the kind of images Iran wants to keep under wraps as they try and down play the size of protests.   Iran has now stated as of Wednesday evening that those who engage in ‘incitement’ by using Twitter and other blocked websites to communicate to other countries could face execution.  Yes, I said execution.

Iran will continue to try and keep things up wraps, but tech geeks world wide who are aiding and embedding Iranian protesters in online ‘bunkers’ by offering proxies and encrypted VPN’s will continue to prevail.  The real question is where is all this heading?  #IranElection continues to stay atop Twitter trends though trends showing it may be leveling off with 27,000 tweets using the #IranElection hashtag on June 15th, 2009 and just 19,000 tweets on June 17th.

The #cnnfail hashtag started and really gained some steam as it was trending for hours over the weekend.  However, that momentum has fallen over the last 24 hours as CNN has responded to their viewers anger by devoting day-long coverage to the ‘breaking news’.

Hashtag decline as CNN responds to viewer anger

Viewers have grown to have expectations for CNN when it comes to breaking news.  I feel if this would have happened with Fox News or any other news outlet,  no one really would have cared all that much.  This bodes well for CNN and their campaign to brand themselves as a leader in breaking news and being an early adopter with new technologies.  However, this backfired on them this weekend.  When CNN didn’t deliver on expectations as they drowned the Iran protest story with Letterman vs. Palin, their loyal viewers got their news from different unfiltered sources online like Twitter itself and lashed out at the media giant for their lack of coverage.   Iran has blocked access to social networking sites, text messaging and even jamming satellite signals for T.V. reporters.  Tech savvy students have found ways around the block Internet sites and have managed to leak out information from the front lines.  This website shows graphic photos of students who were under attack at Tehran University.  Exactly the kind of information the Iranian government wants censored from the global community.

Twitter can not only serve as a platform to inform the entire world about the Tehran University attacks, it can also swing corporate media giants to pay attention.