Platform Five – This week’s hottest social media tools and platforms

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A new addition to the Paratus blog in 2011 is something we’re calling ‘Platform Five’ – a quick recap of recent news and developments relating to the web’s most popular self-publishing platforms.

With upgrades and changes made (almost) every day we thought it was worth tracking this activity and sharing it with you.

Here’s this week’s recap…

1. The Quora ‘quake – Quora, the question and answer community developed by two former Facebook employees, has exploded into significance this week with new users being added at an astonishing rate. Can the hype be sustained? Definitely one worth keeping an eye on…
2. Timely arrival – A new tool from the team at Flowtown sparked some buzz this week with it’s ability to schedule tweets at times when they’ll achieve the best reach. Timely also provides ‘success’ rate information based on each tweet you schedule.
3. YouTube gets trendy – YouTube recently revealed a tool called YouTube Trends which is great for getting a picture of which videos are popular by location and demographic. A handy and easy to use tool.
4. Twitter sets new record – Twitter’s all time usage record was eclipsed just after midnight on 1 January in Japan with nearly 7,000 tweets being sent per second. Read the full story here (includes great video visualising the data).
5. Who’s your OneTrueFan? This has been around for a little while but seems to be popping up on more and more blogs / sites every day. OneTrueFan is a social toolbar that sits on the bottom of your blog (see ours installed below) which tells you who has been visiting your site and what they have been sharing from it. It is a really neat way of seeing who likes and recommends your content.

We’ll see you next week!

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