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: subset
Yesterday, the MeeGo Project officially started its “Day 1″ launch, making the baseline source code available to developers.
October should see the release of MeeGo 1.1, on Nokia smartphones.
Furthermore, the MeeGo UI team has said they are actively creating the “handset reference user experience.”
Day 1 marks the final merger of Moblin and Maemo, a joint effort by Intel and Nokia.
The MeeGo Project Handset Day 1 includes:
MeeGo APIs, incorporating Qt and MeeGo Touch UI Framework (MTF)
Subset of the handset reference UI and applications
Status Bar: clock, network, Bluetooth, 3G connection, notifications, and battery charge
Home Screen
Lock Screen
Application Launcher
Virtual Keyboard
[More]>>
Result for: subset
In a surprising announcement today, Bsquare has said they will be porting Flash Lite 3 to Android phones by the “late Q3,” eliminating the need for users to wait for the official Flash 10 port which still does not have a release date.
Bsquare vice president of global sales Larry Stapleton added that the browser plug-in should be available for current Android phone owners as well.
“Our intent is to try to get these guys to market faster by using this base port,” Stapleton added.
Flash Lite 3 can render Flash Player 8 files meaning files that require 9 or 10 will not work on the handsets. However, Stapleton says “a large subset of what’s on the Web today will render in a pleasing way for the end consumer.”
