Big tweets from the White House as President Obama has announced his intention to hold the first Twitter Town Hall on July 6th at 2pm EST. He plans to address economy and job related questions via the #askobama hashtag. This will allow users to voice their questions not just to the Pres himself, but to the community at large. It’s expected that in the build-up to the 2012 election, Twitter will continue to take a more prominent role and we’re excited to see that.
In other news, Virgin America is embracing social tech to the max with its latest in-air perk. The airline will lend its passengers Chromebooks, made by Samsung, on their flights to test its new wifi services and boy is this a good idea. The Chromebooks, which are neither Macs nor Windows operating systems, are unknown to the public so this really is great promo for them to get their name out there.
Google Analytics announced its most recent social initiatives and stat additions to their platform. In Mashable’s words: Google Webmaster Tools now has a “+1 Metrics” section, which provides reports on the impact of the +1 Button on search. The new analytics show how +1s affect your website’s clickthrough rate (CTR). It tracks the amount of +1s on a given page, the CTR with +1 annotations and the CTR without +1 annotations. The new tool also graphs out the amount of annotated impressions and annotated clicks your website receives over time.
Interesting stuff.
Finally here are some shorts to entertain and enthrall you:
Paypal predicts the extinction of wallets by 2015. Sorry cash lovers.
Google+ launched and in addition, Google calendar got a makeover.
and finally, finally, I discovered a fan page where a watermelon engaged in a like war with the Biebs. The Biebs won.
That’s all for now. Hope you enjoyed this weekly wind down.