It appears that how popular you are on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter actually had a real world effect on the November elections in the United States.
Candidates with more “likes” on Facebook won 71 percent of the time in the Senate elections while candidates with more Twitter followers won 74 percent of the time.
Facebook said that in 77 of the 118 races it followed in the Senate and the House, the winner had more “likes” than the opponent did.
If you had double the amount of “likes,” the average margin of victory was 3.9 percent.
There also seemed to be a correlation to money raised and spent, as one big spender, Jeff Greene of Florida, spent $24 million and did not even win his primary. The primary winner, Kendrick Meek, had 24,000 “likes” on Facebook to Greene’s lowly 644.
Of course, social networking popularity did not help a few high profile candidates like “I am not a witch” Christine O’Donnell, who was very popular on Twitter and Facebook but got crushed in the election by 17 percent. Meg Whitman, the billionaire, spent the most money and had the third highest amount of Facebook likes but still lost the California governor race.
Says ABC News: “[Social media] provides information about comparisons…trends and changes could be informative on the subset of people on it. You get more information out of it if you respect limitations. If you try to get too much, you get nothing.”
Result for: high profile
Thanks to a new internal Google document leaked by Advertising Age, there were multiple companies that spent over $1 million in June to buy ads in Google’s search results.
The largest jump came from BP, who spent $3.59 million for the month, jumping from $57,000 a month before their tragic oil spill.
At $3.6 million, BP moved into sixth place among companies spending large amounts of cash on ads through Google.
AT&T, thanks to the launch of the high profile iPhone 4, topped the list, spending $8.08 million for the month of June. Apollo Group, the company behind the University of Phoenix, came in second, spending $6.67 million for the period.
Those companies were followed by Expedia, Amazon, eBay, BP, Hotels.com, JC Penney, Living Social and ADT Security to round out the top 10.
Google did not confirm the document, but AdAge says multiple sources with “direct knowledge of spending levels” verify the data as accurate.
Overall, 47 companies spent over $1 million in June, another 71 spent between $500,000 and $1 million and another 357 spent between $100,000 and $500,000.
Result for: high profile
A look at the minimum system requirements for the upcoming blockbuster Just Cause 2 shows that the title won’t work on installations of Windows XP. This would represent one of the first high profile releases not to be supported by the still-popular Microsoft operating system. The requirements specifies that an operating system newer than XP is required, and provides a hint why.
The game requires at least DirectX 10. Windows XP can only officially go as far as DirectX 9, meaning that gamers would need to be using Windows Vista or Windows 7 to play the game. A recent hardware/software survey from Steam showed that 42.15 percent of its users were in fact still running the Windows XP operating system, although Windows 7 was becoming popular very fast.
Of course, there have been several methods used to install DirectX 10 on Windows XP since it was launched, none of which are supported by Microsoft and several of which have no support from their original authors either. So maybe it is “technically” possible to run it on Windows XP, but it is a shame that users should have to install a hacked DirectX 10 package and probably patch the game files themselves to play it on Windows XP.
Amazon.com incorrectly lists XP as supported in search results.
Minimum System Requirements
Operating System: Microsoft Windows Vista or Windows 7 (Windows XP is unsupported)
Processor: Dual-core CPU with SSE3 (Athlon 64 X2 4200 / Pentium D 3GHz)
Graphics Card: Nvidia Geforce 8800 Series / ATI Radeon HD 2600 Pro with 256MB memory or equivalent DX10 card with 256MB memory
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