I think FOX News and/or Twitter might want to clean this up a bit. http://bit.ly/msyMFL

The link points to the FOX News Twitter feed that shows the half-dozen or so tweets saying that President Obama had been killed.

Now, what do I do with sensational tweets? Verify! I checked Google News and found this - The Associated Press: Hacking on Fox News Twitter reports Obamas death. Tada! Mystery solved. Sensational tweets placed in the Recycle Bin.

So the lesson here kids: verify trending tweets that seem incredible – chances are they are uncredible. Oh, and, fireworks should only be played with by sober adults. #HappyJuly4th #Happy4thofJuly

Here is a list of major passenger airline Twitter names:

Alaska Airlines: @AlaskaAir
American Airlines: @AmericanAir
Continental: @Continental
Delta: @DeltaAssist
Frontier: @flyfrontier
JetBlue: @JetBlue
Southwest: @SouthwestAir
United: @United
US Airways: @USAirways
Virgin America: @VirginAmerica

Empire Avenue let’s you “invest” in people by buy fictitious stock in them on a website; specifically their social media identity. The most social media presence one has the higher their stock price. The more investors one has the higher their stock price. Users can buy and sell stock in other users or non-users via their social media identities like Twitter or Facebook.

Blogs are also consider social media currency and they can contribute to a user’s value. Hence I’m writing this blog to have my blog accepted as part of my social currency.

This is it! Foursquare has once again created a special badge and logo for 4sqday! We’re super proud to unveil the new 4sqday 2011 logo and confirm that users will be able to unlock a 4sqday badge by checking in on April 16th, 2011! Details on exactly how to unlock the badge has yet to be revealed, but stay tuned! via Announcing the official foursquare badge, logo and T-shirt! « Foursquare Day.

There are several sites aligning themselves with this day/event, but nothing from foursquare officially. That makes me think this it is a grass-root movement. It’s cool though.

According to their tweet today it appears McDonalds is planning something for 4/16/11.

One place to find information is http://4sqday.com/ or @4sqday.

@jack sent the first tweet

#numbers Monday, March 14, 2011
Five years ago this week, a small team of people started working on a prototype of the service that we now know as Twitter. On March 21, 2006, Jack Dorsey (@jack) sent the first Tweet. via Twitter Blog: #numbers.

• 3 years, 2 months and 1 day. The time it took from the first Tweet to the billionth Tweet.
• 1 week. The time it now takes for users to send a billion Tweets.
• 50 million. The average number of Tweets people sent per day, one year ago.
• 140 million. The average number of Tweets people sent per day, in the last month.
• 177 million. Tweets sent on March 11, 2011.
• 456. Tweets per second (TPS) when Michael Jackson died on June 25, 2009 (a record at that time).
• 6,939. Current TPS record, set 4 seconds after midnight in Japan on New Year’s Day.
• 572,000. Number of new accounts created on March 12, 2011.
• 460,000. Average number of new accounts per day over the last month.
• 182%. Increase in number of mobile users over the past year.
• 8. 29. 130. 350. 400. Number of Twitter employees in Jan 2008, Jan 2009, Jan 2010, Jan 2011 and today.

UPDATE: References

Let’s show the power of the higher ed community!

Friday Five: Go #MBTeamS Go!

Under the radar – #sachat needs to follow @tsand

The Power of Social Media – The MB Tweet Race

content + connectivity: analyzing the brand of @tsand.

The #MBTeamS Poster Project

Mercedes Tweet Race Case Study

What #highered can learn from the #MBteamS and @tsand social media win

The best social media is always the most fun

Thoughts About MBTeamS and the (First) Great Tweet Race – mStoner – Blog

Twitter baptism by #MBTeamS

Final score on MBTweetRace.com

Two epic battles occurred in the past week: one on Twitter and the other at the Super Bowl. On Twitter, “Team S” (hash tag #MBteamS) was racing against 3 other teams in the first-ever Twitter-fueled race sponsored by Mercedes-Benz. Team S drove a 2011 Mercedes-Benz S400 coupe from Los Angeles to Dallas, while the other teams drove from Chicago, New York, and Tampa. During the 3 day race, the teams and their Twitter followers accumulated points by completing challenges. The team with the most points won.

Super Bowl XLV was played on Sunday, February 6, in the new Dallas Stadium between the Green Bay Packers and the Pittsburgh Steelers. The billion dollar stadium was completed in June 2009 and is home to the Dallas Cowboys. Attendance for the game was 103,219 people. (FYI: that’s more than the population of Green Bay which was 101,025 in 2008)

Even as I write this, a day after the Super Bowl, both topics are still smoldering on the Internet; still trends on Twitter.

Well, the short story is that both MB Team S and the Packers won. MB Team S amassed 131,643 points! That was more than the combined points of the 2nd (74,092) and 3rd (44,944) place teams. The Green Bay Packers won the Super Bowl 31 to 25; they never trailed.

So how did they win? Promotion.

Todd Sanders (twitter user name @tsand) and John Pederson (@ijohnpederson) were the drivers for Team S. They won the chance to drive in the first ever Twitter-fueled race from a promotion Mercedes held back in late 2010. They, along with their coach Pete Wentz (@petewentz), promoted the race from day one. They were the underdogs according to Twitter follower statistics. Todd works for University of Wisconsin, Green Bay, John works for WiscNet, Madison, and Pete is a famous musician (bassist for Fall Out Boy).

First, the race was a promotion for Mercedes-Benz. They are developing a new line of cars in the coming years and they want young people to drive them. Somewhere in the recent past they must have lost that demographic. This was the first time the luxury automaker has advertised at the Super Bowl.

[Sidebar: I find it a little ironic that Audi and BMW also had ads this year - the 3rd year of economic recession. I guess they're hurting too and want a wider customer base.]

Second, the race was a promotion for donations to the charities of the coaches. Pete’s charity was St. Jude Children’s Hospital. Mercedes donated $45,000 to the winning team’s charity. Todd and John, additionally, raised over $5,000 from their friends, followers, and the social network community.

Third, the race was a promotion of social media, or, more accurately, the power of social media. Through crowd-sourcing, Todd (it was mainly Todd) was able to reach out to the people that follow him on Twitter and Facebook, and they in-turn reached out to their followers, and so on. With that number of people, most of whom are proficient users of social media, Team S was able to keep their car “full” of tweets – from start to finish – each day.

UPDATE: As the number of references grows, one can really begin to see the power there is in social media, and the influence one man can have on an entire community. Todd even had the cojones to visit us at HighEdWeb 2010 from his home via videos, tweets and pictures; he’s that good.