Thin Film's Solar Share to Double by 2013

from Semiconductor International

With the price of polysilicon cut by more than half last year, thin-film photovoltaics has lost its edge against crystalline silicon technologies. Nonetheless, its share of the solar panel market is expected to grow from 14% last year to 31% in 2013, according to iSuppli. more » » »  

8 Reasons You Need to Stop Ignoring Twitter

There have been many articles written about why to use Twitter, and we've certainly published our fair share of them. However, the landscape is constantly changing. New trends, ideas, applications, and features come out, and they further emphasize Twitter's place in said landscape. Following are some reasons why it is becoming increasingly important to marketers.


1. Twitter Lists

Twitter Lists are changing the game. We recently looked at several reasons why, but also consider that with the Lists gadget, your tweets may appear all over the web if you can get onto lists. They will appear on sites and blogs, which are more than likely going to be related to the niche you are in anyway if you have the right audience on Twitter.

2. The Openness of Twitter

The openness of Twitter, social media and the web in general, pretty much means that your messages on Twitter won't be limited to your Twitter audience. Facebook and other social networks will bring tweets in. People will share them, screenshot them, link to them on blogs, etc. Twitter is a means of getting your message out to more people, but it's not necessarily only the people on Twitter that will see those messages.



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Twitter Expands Into More Than Just 2 Languages

from WebPro News

Update: Twitter is now supporting the Spanish language.

Original Article: Twitter announced that it intends to roll out the service in the French, Italian, German, and Spanish languages. Currently it's only available in English and Japanese. 

Expanding into more languages should have a profound impact on Twitter's growth in new users. The company doesn't plan to stop there either though. Co-founder Biz Stone says that's just a starting point. 

Twitter is taking a cue from Facebook and calling upon users to help with translations. The company has launched a tool for people with experience in different languages to suggest translations for the Twitter site itself. "Then, we'll follow up technically," says Stone.

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By Tweeting, You Could Appear All Over the Web

from WebPro News

Twitter has introduced a new widget for the Lists feature. If you are unfamiliar withTwitter's widgets, there is one that lets you display your most recent Twitter updates on a web page, one that lets you display search results in real time, and one that lets you show off your favorite tweets. 

The Lists Widget is fully customizable. You start off by selecting the username of the account you want to pull lists from, then choose the list name, title it, and give it a caption.

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Thinking Beyond Facebook and Twitter for Social Relevance

from Web Pro News

When you think about social media marketing or building your social media presence, you probably think about Facebook or Twitter, or perhaps YouTube or MySpace. That's good. These are some of the top places on the Internet where people are spending their time online.

That said, there are probably plenty of places that you are either overlooking or just plain ignoring. They might not have the broad user-bases of the aforementioned services, but there are people there, and the more people you can reach and engage with, the better off you may be in some cases (depending on your goals for social network use). 

According to Hitwise data, the top ten social networking websites and forums by US market share of visits looked like this:

To be clear, the Hitwise data from which MarketingCharts compiled the above graph is based on US market share of visits as defined by the IAB, which is the percentage of online traffic to the domain or category, from Hitwise's sample of 10 million US internet users. It's unclear exactly what all kinds of sites fall into the social networks category.

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