Social media round up

It’s been a week of drama in the head office of the world’s largest social media network. We can only imagine the panic on the faces of Zuckerberg and pals as Facebook’s outage caused issues with status updates.

And where did people go to express their annoyance/anger? Twitter of course. According to Facebook, network maintenance was the cause of the problem. Not updating a status for a few hours may not seem a huge problem, but as some commentators pointed out, many websites are connected to Facebook through the integration of services, causing glitches for thousands of sites. The problems experienced once again highlight the sheer size of this social network and themammoth task of keeping it running smoothly every minute of every day.

As we mentioned last week, as part of Ryanair’s first official Twitter activity, controversial CEO Michael O’Leary took to the social media channel to hold a live Q&A session and the results didn’t fail to live up to his usual standards. The #GrillMOL Q&A has been described as a ‘shambles from the start’, epitomised by his response to one of the first questions which was to comment (to a female Tweeter) "Nice pic. Phwoaaarr! MOL".

TravelMole has picked out some of its favourite questions aimed at the budget airline’s blundering boss; have a read, there are some amusing comments in there!

Seeking to minimize traveller pain and its own hurt, TripAdvisor announced that it would begin to take direct bookings for hotels for the first time using its smartphone app. If TripAdvisor carries out direct bookings the way competitors such as Kayak, Room77 and Hipmunk have done, the company will partner with an online travel agency such as Expedia, which will process the bookings and handle customer service in the background.

Scientists at Stanford University have tapped into 1.4 million geo-tagged images on Flickr in order to study how people use natural areas for tourism and recreation. Whilst a great deal is known about how man-made destinations contribute to local economies, surveys and head counts have previously been the only reliable indicator for natural areas such as beaches and national parks. With tourism contributing over $6 billion a year to the world economy your holiday snaps could hold the key to a new wave of holiday trends and destination marketing.