During last broadcast I talked about a chief of a Kenyan village using Twitter to stay in touch with his local residents, send out inspirational messages, fight crime and overall manage his territory. Twitter, in all its simplicity and as some people claim, uselessness, is continuously proving to be the next best thing in the world of social media, it seems. Recently the service’s importance was recognized by big businesses. These guys mostly talk with money – all those doubting the ability of Twitter to commercialize its service and maintain the ever-increasing user base and required disk space could lay their worries to rest after the service introduced commercial Tweets – messages from sponsors that are posted directly in one’s timeline, regardless of who they’re following. While it can be understandably annoying, it’s also understandably necessary – someone’s got to pay for all that disk space, right? However, until recently these capabilities were only accessible by large companies – not sure of the motivation, but it seemed kind of unfair. However, last week Twitter allowed pretty much everyone to participate in the commercial program – not sure what it means for the end user, but for small companies perhaps it means new possibilities of connecting with prospective customers – after all, it all depends on how you use the service. And it appears we have even more news from Twitter, this time regarding specifically the Russian-language segment of the Internet. While Mail.Ru Group, one of the largest internet companies in Russia, is struggling to launch its own microblogging service Futubra, Yandex, their direct competitor, decided to take a path more traveled and struck up a deal with Twitter. From now own a Yandex search will show you Tweets on relevant subjects. Due to the nature of their cooperation, Tweets will be indexed by Yandex seconds after they’re posted. While the results will be shown along other sources from social networks through blog-specific search, Yandex has also launched twitter.yandex.ru exclusively for searching the microblogs. For those of you worried about privacy, there’s nothing to be afraid of if you know how to work with your privacy controls – if you’ve made your tweets unavailable for public viewing, they will not be shown in Yandex search results. April Underwood, Twitter’s business development director, said: “Twitter has over 250 million messages appearing on a daily basis. This is a huge amount of information and one of the fastest way of finding out what’s going on in the world. Our cooperation with Yandex is aimed at making access to relevant information more convenient for the users”. While BBC and SkyNews decided to limit the speed of news and prohibit their journalists from using social networks as a source of immediate news, others embrace the possibilities offered by the service and millions of its bloggers, such as, for example, msnNOW – a new site dedicated solely to news from all over social network. But I’m getting a bit ahead of myself – back to Russia and Russian social networks.

Actually, it appears that Yandex now has fully-fledged social search – not only it searches Twitter but all major social networks and open user profiles. In other words, if you’re looking for someone in particular, chances are Yandex will show you their social network profiles. Looks like a stalker’s dream come true. But that’s not what the creators had in mind, of course. According to Yandex, they’ve approached privacy issues with much consideration, and process only necessary and public information. I’d like to remind you of a scandal involving Yandex, a major cellphone service operator and a number of online stores that happened last year. See, Yandex is an effective tool of search. However, it appears that some people forget it and just, you know, hope for the best when storing sensitive information. Text messages sent through the web interface of the cellphone operator as well as order details of a significant number of said stores were posted online courtesy of Yandex search. For a while people speculated who is to blame here and some tried pointing the finger at Yandex – however, all issues were soon settled due to the fact that Yandex did just what it was allowed to. In other words, information that ‘leaked’ through the search engine was never really private to begin with, at least in terms of computer security.

Imagine a scenario – you sweep something under the rug and have guests over. Chances are they’ll walk around and never notice it. And then you introduce a curious dog – well, now you get the picture. So that whole text message and order detail leak was the fault of mass laziness and irresponsibility of webmasters – people paid to care. And now we have social search, looking for “public” information of millions of regular internet users. See what I’m getting at? I’m afraid the coming days may land some people in hot water simply because of their inexperience with privacy settings. To be fair, the argument whether or not social networks should be responsible for users’ privacy even despite the latter being warned to be vigilant is a long-standing one. I guess it’s akin to thing like warnings on coffee cups in fast food restaurants telling customers to be careful of hot contents. One would think people would realize they’re responsible for what they do with what they’re given but then, as the legend goes, these warnings are usually results of successful lawsuits by victims of the contents of these cups.  But anyway, back to Yandex. Currently it’s a cross-network search with extensive functionality. You can enter the name, last name and extra parameters such as age, city, employment and so on. This could be useful for tracking down relatives or co-workers. And before you start thinking about stalkers and privacy issues, apparently there are people willing to provide extensive personal information to the public. The company plans on putting a lot of thought and effort into this – one of the currently semi-developed features is one’s personal multi-network profile – people can look themselves up and join their profiles across several networks should they choose to do so. On the other hand, if the search mistakenly finds someone else and think that person is you – well, you can inform the search engine this is not the case. This could be also useful when dealing with hijacked accounts and lost passwords. Currently Yandex has partnership deals with VK, Facebook, LiveJournal and the aforementioned Twitter. See anything missing? Well, since social networks is largely believed to be the future of the internet, large companies try to control as much of it as possible, and this social search is yet another aspect of this fight for digital territory. Services provided by Mail.Ru are understandably absent from Yandex social search, and I’ve already mentioned Google’s own efforts on social search in a previous broadcast. While partnering websites offer instantaneous indexing, information from other social networks will be indexed with usual lag and will be limited at best – this may pose future problems. For instance, Yandex plans using elaborate  formulas to evaluate one’s “weight” in social networks through their activity and other factors. This is the next step in the evolution of social search. That’s right, after all, it’s not just a tool for stalking – looking for reliable information, news and expert opinion is what it’s all about. Yandex technology and development director Ilya Segalovich believes the most important thing when returning social search results is the “signal’s importance” and understanding when someone really is an expert in a given field or an immediate participant in ongoing events. On the other end of the spectrum are robots, regular users and spammers whose opinion and “news” should not be relied upon. Methods of evaluating sources is what was already implemented to a degree in Yandex searches through news websites and blogs, but this is a whole new game field with new players and new rules. 

And I guess Yandex has a point. In Russia, social networks are increasingly being used in relation to the past and upcoming elections. YouTube was used to upload video footage of alleged vote rigging, VK and Facebook are now used to organize rallies both to protest the elections and the current rule and to support it. There’s even a whole new social network with over 60,000 users now that was established specifically to connect those supporting Vladimir Putin and to organize flash-mobs through it. But Russia is not the only country swept away with politics – the US presidential  elections are also looming on the horizon. PRMarketing.com decided to evaluate the presidential candidates through social network buzz surrounding them and created an appropriate infographic. Turns out that president Barack Obama’s Facebook and Twitter following leaves Republican presidential candidates way behind – and who knows, maybe these figures will soon be proven to correlate with election results, giving social networks yet another meaning. When it comes to followers and Likes, Republican presidential candidates Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich split second place. Obama has more than 25 million Facebook Likes and more than 12.5 million Twitter followers. Romney comes in second with 1.4 million Facebook Likes, while Newt Gingrich has 1.4 million Twitter followers, ranking him the second most followed 2012 election candidate, although many of his followers’ accounts are inactive. You know these things are important as a former Gingrich staffer told Gawker.com that Gingrich purchased Twitter followers on eBay.