Influence is a controversial topic and its measurement and definition are increasingly scrutinized as social media democratizes one’s ability to earn stature and prominence in new online societies. There’s a clear delineation between influence and popularity and it’s important to understand that in social networks, influence is not derived by the quantity of followers, friends, clicks, or “likes.” Nor is it discernible by the frequency of which one participates in their respective communities. While these serve as indicators of influence, they are not necessarily constant factors in its quantification.

Hey Everyone!
We're happy to announce that we have agreed to license the Twitter Firehose.

We are very proud of the strategic relationship that we have with Twitter; we have been working with the Twitter API since 2007.

The power behind PeopleBrowsr is our deep historical data warehouse that has stored and indexed every single tweet in the PeopleBrowsr servers. This data is ready to be searched and organized into "buckets" of conversations held about brands, events, hot and trending topics, top news, demographics, psychographic groups and more.

Tracking voting intentions in real time has now been made possible for politicians and the general public with PeopleBrowsr’s new web app Election.ly.

It’s about time we had another way of watching ‘worms’ and polls when we want to know the sentiment of a country in the lead up to and during a Federal election.

Let's peer into the near future. It's the Year 2040, 35 years after the social networking revolution began. How has human behavior changed? Just how blurred are the boundaries between public and private persona? How much do we share? And, how will this impact on the way we build relationships and find information?
These were just some of the questions analyzed at Tim O’Reilly’s Foo Camp 2010 (held on June 26). Foo Camp is an annual hacker event hosted by publisher O’Reilly Media. It’s described as a birds-of-a-feather session, where smart people get together to discuss technology issues.
Attendee Jodee Rich suggests that the Foo Camp group be called Sotropians, modelled after Xtropians -- people who speculate about the evolution of human beings augmented by social networks.
The panel explored the premise that openness will be ubiquitous by 2040 – when the debate will no longer be private vs. public, but instead public vs. broadcast. Borrowing on the idea of Extropianism, the group introduced Sotropianism, reflecting a concept where social networking and social behavior improve the human condition in many ways.
This includes: greater connectedness leading individuals to become less judgmental; the availability of public profiles and data which will accelerate relationship building; degrees of separation will be narrowed from 6 to 3; markerters will have less control of their brand;  geographic boundaries becoming transparent, and virtual villages will rapidly evolve and decline around issues. We can all tap into the collective stream of consciousness to enhance how we learn, shop, do business and make decisions.
Some of the panel speakers included Brian Solis, Deanna Zandt, Mark Pesce, along with Jodee.
Foo Camp people are those who work in fields such as mobile, big data, cloud computing, open government, gaming, open source programming, computer security, hardware hacking and merging technology fields.

If you need proof on how pervasive social networking is becoming to society than look no further than Twitter users' attitudes towards the BP oil disaster and the effect it is having on the Obama administration.

Aware of this, PeopleBrowsr chief data analyst Brian Solis put together a report on the evolving state of public sentiment towards BP and Obama. The goal of his report was to put the spotlight on views and opinions as they evolved over a three-month period on Twitter, starting in March and ending in June 2010. At the same time, Brian set out to show perception vs. actuality by separating the developing attitudes on the state of Obama and BP over these same months. And this is where it gets interesting. When comparing the data, starting with positive sentiment, the nosedive for both is big.

Business development manager Lachlan Maxwell has joined PeopleBrowsr with the aim to further expand the company’s product reach and profit revenues in the Asia-Pacific region.

Maxwell will work closely with the Sydney-based PeopleBrowsr team; product manager Priscilla Scala and chief web strategist Brian Solis, along with business development managers Becky Wang in Los Angeles and Chris Flatley in New York.

With over 13-years-combined industry experience in new digital media and telecommunications, Maxwell’s previous two roles included managing large teams as a business development manager for LG Corp, outsourcing services to the Philippines, and as national sales manager of business directory TrueLocal.

PeopleBrowsr CEO and founder Jodee Rich said Maxwell’s appointment was “a very exciting addition to the PeopleBrowsr team”.

At a breakfast held at the Marriott Hotel in Sydney, Jodee Rich shares his insights on leveraging social media networking as a part of brand marketing.

Jodee speaks about the evolution of communication; from the jungle, to spoken language, to written language and to today’s social media cloud of rich data.

Explaining how technology has helped us share information and how we can now make this data persistent, Jodee says that we are now able to store a lot of data -- creating a real-time historical record.

PeopleBrowsr will present at Gravity Summit in Los Angeles today.

Ad.ly launches today Ad.ly Analytics, an awesome dashboard to better understand your followers and content on Twitter.
We've really enjoyed working with the Ad.ly team and we're very proud of the result.

On Ad.ly Analytics, you can see:

As Twitter adoption travels from the left to the right of Rogers’Diffusion of InnovationsBell Curve, mainstream consumer behavior gathers momentum, manifesting into influential and telling market indicators. This invaluable behavior and sentiment eventually becomes deafening and without actively monitoring and analyzing this movement, we miss opportunities to learn, grow, and help.

We need a prescribed lens into the real-time thoughts, observations, and experiences of real people, unfiltered, to make informed decisions and both lead and evolve along with our markets.