If you hang around or come into contact with a lot of sick people, you’re very likely to fall ill yourself. Common sense, perhaps, but what if we could use social media to predict the likelihood of that happening in advance?

Researchers at the University Of Rochester in New York have used Twitter to track the outbreak of flu through New York, and, using learning model, have been able to determine when healthy people are about to fall ill with an accuracy level of some 90 percent.

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Are you wondering which events, athletes or brands are getting the most Twitter buzz during the Olympics?

Well, the folks at Socialbakers launched their Olympic “Cheermeter” this past Thursday and they just may have the info you’re looking for!
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If you’re attempting to watch the Olympics from the U.S., no one needs to tell you how miserable the coverage is. And if you’re on Twitter, you’ve likely tweeted the #NBCFail hashtag in frustration more than once.

But what if doing so resulted in your account getting suspended? If you retweeted one specific tweet from journalist @guyadams that may just happen!

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There’s so much more to social media than just writing catchy tweets and sending them out. You’ve got to time your updates, balance your interactions with content, and – perhaps most importantly – track your results.

This tracking just became a whole lot easier with a new update from one of our favorite Twitter scheduling tools. Buffer has launched a robust suite of analytics products for their Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn scheduling, so you can now track who clicked, who retweeted and who interacted with your content.
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Twitter is unofficially officially half as big as Facebook now.

According to analyst group Semiocast, Twitter has passed the 500 million registered users mark, making it the second-largest social network in the world.
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Social media is dominated by women, and Twitter is no exception, but it appears that when it comes to sharing information on our favourite micro-blogging network, men are far more likely to be retweeted than women.

Yep, that’s right. Twitter has a gender bias. And there’s every chance that you have one, too.

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Four years is a long time in the regular old world of technology, but it’s an eternity in social media.

Since 2008, Twitter’s userbase has expanded almost one hundred times. Facebook has grown almost ten-fold (the latest user numbers are up to 955 million) and, perhaps most impressively, YouTube daily views have risen from 133 million to an incredible four billion per day.

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We don’t want to distract you from the Olympics, but this really deserves a mention in case you missed it.

There are few things more hilarious (or relentless) than journalists cracking jokes at or exposing others’ faux pas – and today we bring you a doozy.

This Newsweek piece by Joan Juliet Buck is the talk of Twitter today, offering tweets that are just too hilarious to miss.
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Are you fond of connecting with Twitter followers on Instagram? Well, unless you already synced up your accounts and followed everyone you wanted to, you’re out of luck.

Twitter no longer allows Instagram to access its API and pull in “friends from Twitter.”

The move does not bode well for apps seeking frictionless sharing with the platform in the future.
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Social Curation Summit kicks off tomorrow, July 31, in New York City! Connect with industry experts and explore how the social graph is transforming at our all-day event.  Full access passes go up $100 at the door, so make sure you register before midnight.
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