Welcome to the Friday#

This week in The Sizzle: Glamour magazine launches first Facebook issue. In The Fri-Up, The Three Kings: Charlie Sheen, Colonel Gaddafi and the iPad 2. The Sauce: Hungry boffins print food.

The Sizzle

• JP Morgan plan to acquire 10% Twitter of prompts speculation on the service’s finances and investors
• Glamour magazine launches first Facebook issue
• Google threatens new algorithm in a war against content farms
• Twitter – it’s just not cricket
• Record Breakers: Charlie Sheen – well we had to put it in here
• Does anyone care what Walsall Government’s day is like? Pooper scoopers and libraries apparently. Now you can go back to sleep.
• Research: Facebook makes your head bigger

The Fri-Up

The three kings

This week at Brandwatch we’ve been focusing on three things social media wise: Gaddafi, Charlie Sheen and the iPad 2.

We’ve seen various blogs pitching Gaddaffi against Charlie Sheen including the Guardian ‘who’s line is it anyway?’ quiz which challenges you to identify who said what (surprisingly difficult).

At Brandwatch, we’ve decided to add the third element, squaring the equation. So we’ve lined up the three kings of social media this week and pitched them against each other to see who has the most value in social media and whether they are man or machine.

To make it a fair fight, we’re just looking at the information from the point of the launch of the iPad 2.

Fig 1. Charlie Sheen vs Gaddafi vs iPad 2 history graph

Despite an astounding number of headlines surrounding Sheen and Gaddafi, the iPad 2 is far and away the winner in volume of mentions. So it becomes clear – everyone’s up for a revolution or a bit of celeb bashing.. UNTIL a great new piece of tech comes out.

Now for the real test, to truly rank the popularity and strength of the three: sentiment. For the purposes of this experiment, we’ve filtered out the neutral sentiment to show just positive vs negative.

Fig 2. Charlie Sheen vs Gaddafi vs iPad 2: Sentiment

From the graph we see that although there are clearly various elements of the iPad 2 and Colonel Gaddafi which are a little annoying, sometimes more than annoying – the truly evil and despicable dictator threatening  the world’s happiness this week is  Charlie Sheen. Well, as far as social media is concerned anyway.

Surprised? No, me neither.

The Sauce