Category: News

Google has launched a new Labs experiment dealing with image search. The feature is called Image Swirl, and attempts to deliver the user image search results in a different and more visual interface. Google describes Image Swirl:

Google Image Swirl organizes image search results into groups and sub-groups, based on their visual and semantic similarity and presents them in an intuitive exploratory interface. Think about Image Swirl as kind of a visual image version of the wonder wheel. The wonder wheel performs a very similar task with text. This works with actual images (not just image queries). Here’s what it looks like:

Google says to try Image Swirl to resolve an ambiguous query visually, such as "apple," "jaguar," or "beetle." They also suggest using it to explore different visual perspectives on queries like "Eiffel Tower," "beach," or "impressionism." You can only use the feature for select queries at this point. It’s not just like performing a regular image search. They give you a list of possibilities in addition those mentioned above, but it is not limited to those. I tried searching for several band names, for example, and they all seemed to work.

After that quick test run, I could actually see this being useful in a shopping scenario. For example, when I search for the band "Converge," I get one result that shows a t-shirt, and when I click on that, it brings up other t-shirt results from various sites. If I was looking to buy a new Converge t-shirt, that could come in quite handy.

Google Labs experiments are of course just that – experiments. Some of them blossom into full-fledged Google products. Others sit there and collect dust. I can already see a great deal of potential in this one, however, and based on Google’s use of the Wonder Wheel in its search options, I could easily see this one making a jump to the image search options.

What do you think of the Image Swirl? Would you use this if it was a feature of Google Image Search? Share your thoughts.

Related Articles:

> Google "Similar Images" Feature Goes From Labs to Actual Feature

> Rank in Image Searches and Get Valuable, Untapped Traffic

> Google Presents New Image Search Options

Following up on earlier rumors of Pandemic Studios’ closure, Kotaku reports that an internal Electronic Arts memo has confirmed the studio’s fate.The …

What is it with airlines?

If they’re not breaking guitars, their pilots are missing airports, or they’re berating people that are trying to help them.

Well, we have one more reputation disaster to add to the list, courtesy of American Airlines.

You may recall the open letter web designer Dusting Curtis wrote to the airline. In it, Curtis suggested that AA was losing millions because of its poorly designed web site. He even went as far as suggesting a new design for the site.

Shortly after, one of AA’s designers took it upon himself to reply and explain the complexities of AA web site design decisions. His reply was open, honest…radically transparent.

American Airlines has allegedly fired him for it!

This may have happened back in May, but it’s only just come to light that the AA designer was apparently fired an hour after he wrote his reply.

AA searched their exchange database for the text I posted, found the guy, and fired Mr. X on the spot. From what I have learned, they also threatened him with legal action if he spoke to me again. Apparently he broke his non-disclosure agreement by discussing the design process at AA.

OK, so maybe he shouldn’t have broken his NDA with the airline. But, maybe AA shouldn’t have been so near-sighted and pedantic about its employee policies. Surely the airline is aware that it’s industry hardly has the best reputation for caring about its customers. Heck, even Jet Blue–the poster child of airline awesomeness–has screwed-up royally in the past.

In some ways, you can’t blame American Airlines. It is completely ignorant of how customers want to interact with the airline. We don’t want to hand flight attendants slips of paper that say “well done”–something AA encourages me to do as a frequent flier–we want to engage with the airline. We want it to do better, and we have ideas. Ideas about clean blankets, baggage fees, and yes, web site design. How does AA marry its apparent openness on Twitter, with this crackdown on a real employee that wants to help?

Yes, you should have guidelines in place, but those guidelines should be designed to encourage thoughtful customer interaction, not prevent it! If we hear that you’re firing employees because of their transparency, how are we supposed to take your official social networking efforts seriously? What, do we now assume that everything that is shared on Twitter or Facebook is nothing more than sterile, PR sanctioned, sound bites?

The airline industry may well be the very last to “get” the concept of Radically Transparent. When they do finally have that “aha!” moment, we’ll know that we’ve finally entered the age of open, honest, dialogs.

Andy Beal – AA Platinum Card Holder; Million Mile Flier.

(via)

Comments

I’m a different person at work than I am at home. I tell different jokes. I have different stories. I share different experiences with different people in different ways depending on a host of different factors (e.g., how well we know each other; where we went to school; what our shared interests may be, etc.).

The context in which I know people is different from one person, one situation to the next. By and large, this is a good thing. I wouldn’t want my co-workers to know all that my wife knows and my wife wouldn’t be interested in all that my co-workers know.

Not surprisingly, online these relationships play out differently through different social networks. As a fairly engaged social networker (and dork), I recently tested my own social networks for what I’m calling, "social overlap" – the percent of overlapping "friends and followers" I have between the three social networks I am engaged in most: Facebook, Linkedin and Twitter. (I highly recommend doing this exercise yourself, it shows a number of revealing insights about yourself. Here are some of mine. I’d love to hear your findings in the comments.

This analysis shows how few of my contacts overlap between different social networking platforms. This online fact echoes my offline reality of having different kinds of relationships with different people depending on the context of how we know one another.

My own lack of "social overlap" is complemented by a recent report from Forrester. Analyst Jeremiah Owyang (who recently left the company) suggests, "Today’s social experience is disjointed because consumers have separate identities in each social network they visit." Owyang goes on to say, "This creates friction for consumers who must now manage multiplying personal information and username/password combinations."

As a solution to this "friction" Owyang predicts that people will bring a single online identity from one social network to the next. Early examples of this prediction coming to light are "Facebook Connect," which allows users to "connect" their Facebook identity to any site, and "Open ID," a potential social network standard for a shared identity system.

However, a single online ID seems out of synch with how we (or at least I) naturally relate to others in our offline/real world lives. Maybe I like having different platforms on which to interact with co-workers vs. family members. Maybe I’m not comfortable showing the same side of me to everyone I know, regardless of how I know them. Maybe my lack of "social overlap" online is a good thing…much as it is offline.

The point here is not to knock a single online ID, it’s to ask bigger questions about who we are on the social web. How are we different consumers in different contexts? What permission do we give different brands on different sites? How does your brand fit in with your customers on Facebook differently than it does on Twitter? Because it’s not just a different tool, it may be a "different person" with whom you’re connecting.

These questions point to the critical need to listen first before coming to market with a social media strategy. To understand how your customers think of your brand, product or service as relevant and meaningful in different social media contexts. Because maybe your customers are not the same people in one context that they are in another.

Sometimes, what looks like it will be as tasty as chocolate and peanut butter, ends up tasting more like pickles and ice cream. Nothing matches that last culinary disaster better than the merger of AOL and Time Warner.

Well, on December 9th, that union will be no more.

You can read the wordy Time Warner press release, but you’ll probably either fall asleep or your head will explode, before you reach the end. Instead, we’ll turn to trusty Reuters to translate the announcement into plain English:

Time Warner shareholders of record on Nov. 27 will receive an AOL stock dividend for every 11 shares of Time Warner common stock they hold…Based on the closing price of Time Warner’s stock at $32.35 and its 1.17 billion outstanding shares, the ratio would effectively value AOL’s market capitalization at around $3.44 billion…AOL common stock will begin trading on a ‘when-issued’ basis on the New York stock Exchange on Nov. 24 and will start trading under the ‘AOL’ symbol on Dec. 10.

Of course, it’s been almost 6 month months since Time Warner announced the AOL spin off, but now we finally get a date to watch. On December 9th, former Google exec and AOL CEO Tim Armstrong, will get to show us what he–and AOL–are made of!

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Now that iLike owned by rival MySpace, Facebook is restricting some features of the iLike app on it pages. The move is bound to be unpopular with the 12 million users that have made iLike the #1 music app on Facebook. Over the last few days Facebook users who had installed the iLike app received this message:

"Due to upcoming Facebook changes, your Music data on Facebook won’t show on your profile and you’ll stop getting concert alerts. Take this step to save your music data."

The restrictions stop users from adding music to the Facebook profile and receiving personalized concert alerts. iLike has responded by asking users for their email address to send concert alers directly. 

Facebook’s move against iLike is also a bi-product of what they called a wider

campaign of "New Ways to Find and Engage with Your Favorite Applications".  Obviously, new does not always mean better.

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It seems like every month another news organization toys with the idea of charging for their content. But, we always rejoin, you’ll ultimately sacrifice your audience if you charge for news content. However, the Boston Consulting Group says that may not always be the case—in fact, even Americans are willing to pay for online news.

Well, sort of. The average amount an American was willing to pay for news was $3—and not $3 a day, but $3 a month. Not exactly the profits Rupert Murdoch dreams of, is it?

The survey also found that people were more willing to pay for news that was:

• Unique, such as local news (67 percent overall are interested; 72 percent of U.S. respondents) or specialized coverage (63 percent overall are interested; 73 percent of U.S. respondents)
• Timely, such as a continual news alert service (54 percent overall are interested; 61 percent of U.S. respondents)
• Conveniently accessible on a device of choice

And good news for newspapers: “consumers are more likely to pay for online news provided by newspapers than by other media, such as television stations, Web sites, or online portals,” especially since these other media have so much free competition. Interestingly, while Americans were more likely to pay for sites that offered access to multiple papers, only national and local—not major metropolitan-based papers—have that level of appeal. (I’m not sure which category The New York Times and Washington Post fall into here.)

Marc Vos, a Milan-based partner and leader of BCG’s media sector in Europe, tells newspapers that they “should be experimenting with paid online content. It will take trial and error to find what works.”

The prospects aren’t so bleak everywhere. In addition to 1000 US respondents, the survey also looked at results in Germany, Australia, France, the UK, Spain, Italy, Norway, Finland. While Australians also wanted to pay only $3 (USD?) for their news, other countries saw higher rates. The New York Times said that this may be because Western Europe has more consolidated news offerings, where news in the US is a very fragmented industry.

However, before Western European news sites get all excited, note that the highest amount on the survey, in Italy, was $7 a month.

What do you think? What would you be willing to pay for news?

Comments

Social media is about community, right? Social media is about relationships, correct? What is required in a genuine relationship? People exchanging ideas and thoughts with each other and getting to know each other is how I look at it in an incredibly basic sense. At least that’s what I think. While social media is considered to be advancing our ability to connect with others it is still important to caution just how much we trust who is saying what. In other words, your relationship with many is more likely to be with a handler than the real person.

I realize this is nothing new and I am not setting the world on fire with this but I came across this post at TechCrunch and it certainly made me think a little. Barack Obama, the President of the United States admitted on his current trip to China that he has never used Twitter. Huh? Wasn’t his campaign the one that utilized social media like never before so his supporters could have a feeling that they were truly a part of history in a real sense?

This is not a political discussion so if you are getting all “blue” or “red” state on me just go read something else. This is about someone who utilized a technology for some advantage in a very important situation then admitted that he never used the technology personally. I find that a little disturbing and we, as social media professionals and watchdogs, should have some opinion on this practice (not the person or anything else, just the practice). Oh and let’s put out ‘preemptive strike’ on all of the “If you were stupid enough to think it was actually him tweeting comments ………..” People wanting to believe they are part of something genuine is not stupid. In fact, in this world it’s hard to find.

MG Siegler reports

President Barack Obama has one of the most popular Twitter accounts with over 2.6 million followers. It should be no real surprise that most of the time it’s not him tweeting from it, instead its various people within the White House communication team that use the account to send out information. And now that he is the President, certainly there are some security concerns with him using something like Twitter. But, did you know that he’s actually never used Twitter at all?

That revelation was made tonight during a Q&A session at a town hall event with Chinese youth that was held in Shanghai this evening (which was streamed live on the web). The President fielded a question about the restricted use of Twitter in China and he had this to say, “I have never used Twitter but I’m an advocate of technology and not restricting internet access.”

Once again, I know it is silly to think that someone as busy as President Obama would have the time to knock out a tweet from time to time but if that’s the case (that he has NEVER used it) I really think it would have been more transparent to know this a little earlier. In fact, if I was one of the followers that felt like I was part of something bigger I would feel a little duped. To be transparent, I have not followed a politician (to my knowledge) on Twitter because I feel I get enough spin and rhetoric just being alive so I don’t to seek more from either side of the aisle.

TechCrunch’s visual take says it all in an ‘update’ to the President’s response to his Nobel Prize.

So who was / is actually updating this account with 2.7 million followers? I don’t know and probably never will. At this point, who really cares since we know that the President has never touched the account (although it is a Verified Account for Twitter which now means what?)

What we need to be looking at as social media “insiders” is talking a great game about transparency and then allowing the medium to be questioned and eventually devalued because there is nothing that is real. Will social media just become a place for online actors and actresses to portray others? Will we a need SMAG (Social Media Actor’s Guild) card to tweet at some point? We are treading on some thin ice in these areas when we talk about accessibility but then only fake it. Maybe being genuine is just old fashioned and overrated?

Maybe this is an emerging area of the online reputation monitoring and management industry which will require policies and actions on what to do when your social media persona is ‘found out’.

Comments

The majority (74%) of Americans, or nearly 171 million people, read a newspaper in print or online during the past week, according to a new report by Scarborough Research.

"While our data does show that print newspaper readership is slowly declining, it also illustrates that reports about the pending death of the newspaper industry are not supported by audience data," said Gary Meo, Scarborough Research’s Senior Vice President of Print and Digital Media Services.

"Given the fragmentation of media choices, printed newspapers are holding onto their audiences relatively well and this is refreshing news."

Highlights of the report include:

•   79% of adults employed in white collar positions read a newspaper in print or online
•   82% of adults with household incomes of $100,000 or more read a printed newspaper in print or   online
•   84% of adults who are college graduates or who have advanced degrees read a printed newspaper in print or online

"Printed newspapers have been a trusted source of news and information for decades, and many newspapers have continued that tradition by successfully extending their brands into the digital space," said Meo.

"In doing so, they are attracting an audience that has even stronger socioeconomic status-equally upscale with their print brethren, but younger."

Circulation, which is audited and reported by the Audit Bureau of Circulations, refers to the number of printed newspaper copies sold. Audience, which is measured by Scarborough and accredited by the Media Rating Council, refers to the percentage of Americans who actually read the newspaper.

"For media buyers, analysts and others who evaluate the health of newspapers and the value of our medium’s advertising, audience is a far more meaningful way to measure newspapers’ ability to attract a growing audience across multiple platforms," said John F. Sturm, president and CEO of the Newspaper Association of America.

"This important data from Scarborough Research also provides further evidence that newspapers reach a highly educated, affluent audience."

Related Articles:

>Newspapers Not Effectively Using Social Media

>Google News SEO Tips-Ranking In News Search

>Newsday To Charge For Online Access

Albert Wesker is so cool that he can wear sunglasses at night, and if you dare call him on it he can rip your spine out. Heck, he’s so cool that he ev…

I was talking with one of our Web CMS Report subscribers today, someone who is leading a state government’s effort to modernize its WCM system. The question arose as to how to keep vendors from giving softball answers to hardball questions when submitting a Request for Information. I proposed a simple expedient: Require screenshots.

If a product supports a certain type of functionality via a graphical user interface, the vendor should have no qualms about showing the UI in question, doing the operation in question. It’s one thing to be told "Yes, our admin interface supports restricting a user’s right to Copy or Move a file" (for example), but a picture, as they say, is worth a thousand workarounds.

What about when the vendor comes back with "This functionality is easily implemented via changes to a configuration file" (or via an API call)? Very well: In that case, let’s see the relevant XML fragment (or code snippet) with the changes highlighted. Demand to see the relevant lines of code. Is that so much to ask?

Hey, the worst that could happen is that the vendor will skip past a few of your harder questions — or complain that your RFI process is just too burdensome. In which case, you’ve already learned a great deal indeed.

As you may recall from last month, UPS recently asked us to create a series of videos, where we explain some of the stuff we talk about here on Techdirt on a regular basis in under two minutes, using a whiteboard. The first video was about the economics of abundance and got a great response. The second video is now up, and it’s an attempt to explain the Innovator’s Dilemma, based on Clayton Christensen’s must-read research. If you’re unfamiliar with it, it explains how difficult it is for many companies to adapt to changing markets, and is a good framework for understanding both why some companies are so slow to adapt. More importantly, it provides a good system for thinking about your own company and understanding how to adapt and implement new ideas rapidly:

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As you know, Google’s ultimate goal is to organize the world’s information. With this in mind, it should be no surprise that Google is organizing full-text legal opinions from United States federal and state district, appellate and supreme courts. The company is using its Google Scholar service to do so.

"As many of us recall from our civics lessons in school, the United States is a common law country," says Google Distinguished Engineer Anurag Acharya. "That means when judges issue opinions in legal cases, they often establish precedents that will guide the rulings of other judges in similar cases and jurisdictions. Over time, these legal opinions build, refine and clarify the laws that govern our land. For average citizens, however, it can be difficult to find or even read these landmark opinions. We think that’s a problem: Laws that you don’t know about, you can’t follow — or make effective arguments to change."

You can now search Google Scholar to find opinions by searching specific cases (like Plessy v. Ferguson) or topics (like desegregation). You can type a phrase like "separate but equal" and get results for cases in which such a phrase is in included.

Users can look at cases that are related to others by using the links that say "Cited by" and "Related articles" on the results pages. This is useful for following citations within the opinions themselves.

Google thinks being able to search these opinions will "empower the average citizen" by helping them learn more about the laws that govern them. It does appear to be a great way to educate yourself on legal issues without having to go to law school. Furthermore, it could be of tremendous benefit to students who are actually in law school.

"As we worked to build this feature, we were struck by how readable and accessible these opinions are," says Acharya. "Court opinions don’t just describe a decision but also present the reasons that support the decision. In doing so, they explain the intricacies of law in the context of real-life situations. And they often do it in language that is surprisingly straightforward, even for those of us outside the legal profession. In many cases, judges have gone quite a bit out of their way to make complex legal issues easy to follow."

Google really is working non-stop on "organizing the world’s information". This particular instance may only apply to the U.S. (and such a feature could get awfully tricky on a global scale), but it would not be surprising to see more countries’ data get included in the future.

Related Articles:

> Google News Organizes a Lot More of the World’s Information

> 20,000 Sources Added to Google News in a Year’s Time

> Google Puts News on a Timeline

Last time Dreamcasts were spotted for sale, the price was north of $100, but Amazon now has the system for only $79. It’s NIB too. Ladies, this could make a great Christmas gift for your nerd boyfriend.

Everyone loves the Dreamcast. It has a great selection of games (that are very easy to pirate), good enough graphics, and 10x the cool factor of a Nintendo Wii. If you’re going to get this system, make sure you get at least a Visual Memory Unit and you probably want an extra controller too. Chances are that local second-hand gaming outlets have those cheap.

[Amazon via DealNews]

Immediate thoughts after Ray Ozzie’s keynote at PDC09
[Full post continued here…]

After a warm welcome in Beijing’s historic Great Hall of the People, President Obama and President Hu sat down to discuss the many overlapping issues facing both nations, including China’s growing economy and its effect on the US and the rest of the world and the exciting education reforms happening in each country:

President Barack Obama and Chinese President Hu Jintao speak during a joint press conference held at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, China, Nov 17, 2009. (Official White House Photo by Lawrence Jackson)

One topic of particular interest to both leaders is a joint initiative towards clean energy, and President Obama and President Hu introduced a far-reaching package of measures to strengthen cooperation between the United States and China on clean energy. An abridged version of the measures is below, and the full version is available here:  

The U.S.-China Clean Energy Research Center will facilitate joint research and development of clean energy technologies by teams of scientists and engineers from the United States and China, as well as serve as a clearinghouse to help researchers in each country.

The U.S.-China Electric Vehicles Initiative will include joint standards development, demonstration projects in more than a dozen cities, technical roadmapping and public education projects, all aimed at eventual deployment of electric vehicles to reduce oil dependence.

The U.S. China Energy Efficiency Action Plan will allow the two countries to work together to improve the energy efficiency of buildings, industrial facilities, and consumer appliances, culminating with an annual U.S.-China Energy Efficiency Forum, rotating between the two countries.

The U.S. China Renewable Energy Partnership will facilitate development of roadmaps for wide-spread renewable energy deployment.  A new Advanced Grid Working Group made up of American and Chinese developers and strategists will help plan for grid modernization in both countries, and a new U.S.-China Renewable Energy Forum will be held annually, rotating between the two countries.

A 21st Century Coal Initiative, for which the two Presidents pledged to promote cooperation on cleaner uses of coal, will include large-scale carbon capture and storage (CCS) demonstration projects. 

A Shale Gas Initiative, will allow the U.S. and China to use experience gained in the United States to assess China’s shale gas potential, promote environmentally-sustainable development of shale gas resources, conduct joint technical studies to accelerate development of shale gas resources in China, and promote shale gas investment in China through the U.S.-China Oil and Gas Industry Forum, study tours, and workshops.

The U.S. China Energy Cooperation Program will leverage private sector resources for project development work in China across a broad array of clean energy projects, to the benefit of both nations.  

Read more about the President’s historic 10-day trip to Asia here.

President Barack Obama and President Hu Jintao together at a reception before the formal state dinner at Great Hall of the People in Beijing, China on Nov. 17, 2009. (Official White House photo by Pete Souza)

Cloud Computing is becoming more and more the buzzword of every conference, meeting and article. Yet it is still in it’s inception, and there are multitude of issues and problems. Cloud services are springing up like mushrooms after rain, and all the big players want a piece of the pie.

Dark Reading discusses Quelling 7 Cloud Computing Fears in which it touches the issue of trust and security. The author recommends that the cloud computing providers be proactive in gaining the trust of their users and potential users.

How do we decide when we trust the cloud?
Here are the mechanisms by which we can approach the level of trust that we have in our infrastructure for the cloud. But bear in mind, that each approach can have it’s own pitfall!

1. Encryption – Most readers will immediately start to think about encryption. Yes, it is a good idea, but is it enough? In encryption, regardless of the algorithm used, you are always dependent on the actual implementation of the algorithm. If the implementation is flawed, there can be back doors into your data. And you can’t control or check the implementation – it’s in the cloud
2. Certification to Security Standards – A logical industry choice – if you are certified to a security standard, you are all good and well. But tread very lightly and be very careful about this: most security standards are quite flexible – you can choose to certify only a subset of your operations. So a security certificate of the data transfer subsystem won’t do you much good when you are using the cloud for storing your customer database – the data storage and processing subsystem may not even be up to the security level of your home PC!
3. Compensating Penalties (Contractual and via Litigation) – You can try to define penalties for breach of security within the service contract. But the cloud provider will limit such penalties to a limit which may be far below what you estimate to be your financial impact, and simply refuse to offer the service if you insist on full penalties. And unless you have an army of international lawyers on your payroll, don’t even try to go into litigation – you’ll end up loosing even more money in the trial.
4. Insurance – Transferring the financial impact of the failure can be an elegant solution. But the insurance company will start asking the same questions about trusting the cloud provider and can quite easily deliver a significant premium charge on your insurance.

Conclusion
There is no magic wand that will make the users suddenly increase their trust in the cloud computing services. But agreeing on a common standard for what is required to be met in terms of Confidentiality and Integrity is a step in the right direction.

We recommend that the minimal requirement should be:

• Always insist on the cloud provider having a valid Security Standard Certificate which covers the entire scope of services that you plan on using.
• Contractual penalties should be in place for everything that can be quantified. This means that you’ll even need to quantify loss of every byte of data.
• If possible based on the cloud computing service that you use, encryption should be implemented for the data stored/processed in the cloud.

Talkback and comments are most welcome

Related posts
Cloud Computing – Premature murder of the datacenter
Datacenter Physical Security Blueprint

Fortune 100 companies don’t quite know what to do with Twitter, according to a new report.  Public relations firm Weber Shandwick instead painted a picture of big corporations just staking out their territory and then occasionally issuing the 140-character equivalents of press releases.

The Weber Shandwick report stated, "73 percent of Fortune 100 companies registered a total of 540 Twitter accounts.  However, about three-quarters (76 percent) of those accounts did not post tweets very often, and more than half (52 percent) were not actively engaged."

Furthermore, "50 percent of the Fortune 100 accounts had fewer than 500 followers, a small number in relation to the size and reach of a major corporation.  Another 15 percent were inactive . . ."

So there you have it, although "it" is something from which it’s hard to draw conclusions.  After all, Fortune 100 companies are by definition doing more than all right, regardless of their awkwardness on Twitter.  And many Twitter users have claimed that they don’t want to be bombarded with marketers’ messages, anyway.

What’ll be interesting to see is how this situation develops over time.  Twitter’s said before that it might unveil analytics packages to attract big corporations.

Related Articles:

> Twitter Gives Apps Access To People Search

> Tweeting Habits Parsed By Time, Day

> Compete Builds "Twitter Down" Case