From the angry to the sarcastic, Singapore’s frustrated train commuters have taken to Facebook pages – real and fake – to vent their unhappiness at the massive train disruption yesterday. Thousands of commuters were left stranded when train services on segments of the North-South line were disrupted during yesterday’s evening peak travelling  hours.

Folks on one particular train, trapped in a tunnel between stations, resorted to smashing a fire extinguisher at a window to get fresh air, after power came off and the air conditioning went offline. They then hiked to the nearest station in a dimly-lit tunnel, during the latest but one of the most serious disruptions to the city’s train services.

Today, Internet users were fast to vent their anger at SMRT on the social media space, whether this was through a fake SMRT Facebook page set up by online pranksters or on SMRT’s own page.

On the fake SMRT page, called SMRT Ltd (Feedback), people are seen pouring scorn at the transport operator.

Facebook user, Harul Fariz, asked: “If SMRT cannot handle these few existing lines without any major disruptions, can we expect more of the same to happen when more new lines appear as the complexity of the systems increases?”

Clearly angry, another user, Aaron Ang, suggested that SMRT work with the Singapore tourism authorities to build a fun ride. ”Oh wait. Here’s a suggestion. Why don’t you work with STPB to come out with a ‘Uniquely Singapore’ attraction: Come experience the thrills and excitement of suffocating in a train, breaking a window, walking through tunnels in a WORLD-CLASS SMRT train!”

Over at a real SMRT Facebook page, the Ride SMRT page, commuters too were unhappy.

Said Facebook user Kenny Giam: “SMRT must be held accounted for what has happened on 15th Dec. You guys pride themselves as First World Transportation but in truth, SMRT is worst than than even third world countries.

“In your eyes, profit and money are the only things you people care about. First Increase Cab Fare and then when the mrt break down, start to send out information to all your cabs to rush down to grab “income opportunity”. This is like trying to make profit from people or country’s plight. Totally unethical!! Its like the shame of the country!”

It didn’t help, of course, that SMRT had sent out some rather insensitive-sounding advice yesterday to its taxi fleet, which it also operates along with the trains.

It is understandable that SMRT wanted to direct taxis towards MRT stations to alleviate the human jam, but coming days after highly unpopular taxi price hikes, the announcement of an “income opportunity” read like SMRT was coordinating its resources to fleece helpless commuters in a time of crisis.

To its credit, SMRT has since apologised for this particular mess-up, explaining that the message was sent from a template. While the anger is going to take a long time to assuage, perhaps what stands out amid the unhappiness on Facebook is that some commuters are grateful for the efforts of the rank and file staff who had to work overnight to restore and ready train services for today – even if this was posted on the fake page.

Said Facebook user, Ryan Joseph: “Kudos to the engineers and all the other men and women on the ground. As for the senior management .. enjoy your jolly good salaries in unique little Singapore with no competition.”

Twitter may already possess a large portion of the pie serving up bite-sized pieces of information, but a bunch of developers based in Singapore is taking square aim at the micro-blogging service with a location-based twist.

Like Twitter, the app lets users feature – or feecha – an event or an object that’s close to him/her, which friends of that user can discover. Unlike Twitter, however, these feechas are all visualised on a map, and are colour-coded based on popularity.

It is currently possible to add your location to a tweet, but Twitter treats that as a secondary and optional feature. Feecha seeks to highlight that very feature and make it central to the app’s experience.

To create a feecha, users take a photo or video of the activity – such as a plate of mouth-watering char kway teow at an less-known hawker centre – and upload it to the map. A one-eyed monster will then pop up over the location for others to see.

For the feecha to grow, it must receive attention from other users, such as views and comments. A feecha which just isn’t interesting will slowly discolour and disappear from the map. This ensures that only the most updated and interesting happenings stay on the map.

The potential uses of Feecha are undeniable. Ever wondered what’s happening within those quaint shop houses as you amble down Ann Siang Hill? Ideally, you should be able to fire up the app and explore what other people are feecha-ing in your vicinity. You can then decide spontaneously to hop into a coffee shop for a book signing, for instance.

Of course, the app depends on complete spontaneity, and there’s the possibility that you’ll find zero feechas around you, especially now in the app’s early days.

Feecha also requires the user to enjoy and actively seek out serendipitous encounters. However, most Singaporeans will probably have a destination in mind, and won’t take the time to scan their surroundings for feechas. Businesses will also be unlikely to depend too much on such an inconsistent audience for their custom.

The biggest challenge, then, is to establish a large base of users as quickly as possible. To help push the numbers along, Feecha has announced that the user with the biggest feecha by 18 December will win S$8,888 in cash.

Feecha is available on the iPhone only, and an Android version will come by June 2012 (No S$8,888 for Android users, we suppose). The developers are also exploring the viability of a Windows Phone 7 version, and have no plans for a BlackBerry version.

This story first appeared on Techtalk, our technology content partners at Yahoo! News Singapore

Money, cost and price were the most talked about issues on social media during the Singapore general elections 2011.

So says Singapore social media insights start-up JamiQ and data visualization company Swarm.

They drew this conclusion based off the data collected via their real-time visualization of the GE 2011 twitter streams, which can be found at ge.swarm.is.

A total of 188,768 tweets were collected for the project between the dissolution of the parliament on 19th April 2011 to voting day 7th May 2011 based on the keywords “Singapore elections” and hashtag #sgelections.

Of these, there were 77,913 unique tweets and 110,855 retweets. These were spread across 11,069 unique users.

Charts of top GE 2011 keywords

When JamiQ mines the tweets for the visualization, it chops up all the tweets into noun phrases, like “Cost” and “Tin Pei Ling” and throws away all the tenses and verbs. JamiQ then aggregates them over the entire period so that a trend can be seen.

For example, below is the chart for the top 10 most talked about personalities in GE 2011:

Of course, the list is very, very long — in excess of tens of thousands of terms –and we’re only charting the fat head of the long tail.

One other interesting thing to note is that TPL — short form for “Tin Pei Ling” — was also very popular among Singaporean twitter users and this abbreviation was ranked highly at number seven for personalities during the election.

Unsurprisingly, the top mentioned places were Aljunied GRC and Hougang.

The lion’s share of the comments that referenced political parties mentioned the PAP, followed by WP and then the rest of the political parties.

Do note that the system only references exact terms, so abbreviations and misspellings do not appear anywhere near this fat head — they will be found in the long tail.

A human eyeball scan of the top 300 terms in the keyword list allowed us to draw some anecdotal insights into what people are talking about. After some data cleansing and removing common terms like “day”, “night” and election”, we came up with a rough list of issues.

One top concern seems to be money (55th place, 2929 mentions), cost (75th place, 2234 mentions) and prices (112th place, 1650 mentions).

One other interesting issue was on foreigners (107th place, 1711 mentions). Ranked slightly behind that was HDB flats (238th place, 963 mentions) and housing (239th, 960 mentions).

Top five retweeted articles

According to JamiQ’s data, here are the top five retweeted articles during the GE 2011:

• Yawningbread: It all begins with political apathy, 202 RTs.
  This is an excellent article by guest writer Loh Peiying, 20. She talks about how her apathetic stance on politics evolved into passion.
• Singapore People’s Party: Volunteers needed for counting/polling agent, 191 RTs.
  SPP’s call to action for volunteers during voting day must have made a difference, as supporters spread the word on twitter.
• Mr Wang Says So: PAP’s Cynthia Phua And Her Most Famous Moment as an Aljunied MP, 189 RTs.
  This is a story on MP Cynthia Phua and her altercation with a low income and mentally disabled boy.
• Twitpic by MrBrown: WP rally at Bedok Stadium, then PAP rally at the same place, 185 RTs.
  Well-known blogger Mr Brown posted this side-by-side picture on twitpic of a PAP and WP rally at Bedok Stadium
• Straits Times: Man arrested for saying he wants to burn his voting slip, 180 RTs.
  A man threatens to burn his voting slip, and was promptly arrested.

Top five retweeted tweets

Here are the top five retweeted tweets during the elections period:

• If TPL is disqualified from #SGelections due to her comments on Facebook, she will have a new ans to “What is your biggest regret in life?”
  - CalvinTim, 202 RTs
• “Polytechnic students are not working, so why should they pay adult fares.” Sadasivam Veriyah #sdprally #sgelections TOTALLY AGREE.
  - qinatthedisco, 175 RTs
• With extra $16000 per month in her pocket now, Tin Pei Ling can upgrade from Kate Spade to Hermes. #GeorgeYeoInTinPeiLingOut #SGElections
  - fakeMOE, 161 RTs
• Dear Singaporeans, Let’s trend #GeorgeYeoInTinPeiLingOut in support our our beloved foreign minister. #SGElections #sgedu
  - fakeMOE, 150 RTs
• Friend 1: I heard PAP rally got free bus, food & drinks leh.Friend 2: Eat already tabao go Opposition rally lor. #sgelections
  - mrbrown, 149 RTs

Hope you did enjoy these stats. Let us know what you think in the comments!

Disclaimer: I do business development for JamiQ.

Social media has the power to change the world. It allows people with the same shared beliefs to come together and marshal grassroot support for causes.

It could be used to organize protests, campaign for beliefs, or even used to promote giving back to community.

One such great example of the latter is Twestival, a global phenomenon that started two years earlier in 2009. Twestival is an event in which people organize organic grassroot fundraisers using twitter to give to charities all over the world in a single day.

For 2011, that day was last week on March 24th. In Singapore, volunteers here picked CARE, a charitable agency which aims to help youths at risk, as the beneficiary.

The volunteers took just four weeks to organize and setup the entire event, and mobilized mainly through just twitter. They met for weekly face-to-face meetings on weekends, but much of the coordination was done online.

Said Supriya Addanki, one of the core volunteers behind the event: “We simply told people that we’re organizing Twestival this year on twitter, and asked people to contribute whatever skills or resources they could bring.”

And people did in droves for the second year that Twestival was run here in Singapore.

From local food and music dive TAB hosting the place, to events agency Waddup! supplying a magician and doing events management, to PR agency Text100 doing media relations, people contributed.

All for free. There were many, many other folks and unsung heroes — for example, the musicians and bands, the photographers, the emcee — all who contributed their time without a dime.

On top of this was a ton of free gifts from companies — an eclectic mix from cameras to shopping vouchers to hotel stays — to attract folks to donate in a lucky draw drive. 100 percent of the donations that evening went to CARE.

Folks enjoying themselves at Twestival Singapore 2011

Twestival: Tweet, meet, give

What’s most important that set Twestival apart from other fundraisers, though, was Twestival’s soul.

According to Supriya, people didn’t volunteer to get recognized or lauded — they simply wanted to help.

“No one said ‘I did this so what’s in it for me?’,” quipped Supriya. “It’s not about people saying ‘Yay! Now I can put grassroots organizing in my resume’.”

In fact CARE was so surprised at being picked as a beneficiary that CARE co-founder and director Adelyn Poh purportedly asked: “Why are you doing this? I don’t understand!”

And the response from the Twestival volunteers was simply: “Because we want to.”

Supriya said that although social media has sometimes been perceived in a negative way in the media — think fake, shallow banal conversations that amount to nothing — it can be very much a driving force for good, like Twestival.

“It’s a bit of a cliche, but social media is not about creating a ‘persona’,” said Supriya. As a seasoned PR veteran, she’s very mindful of this fact. “It’s about being transparent and candid, and sometimes it really works that way.”

For CARE itself, it was an eye opening and enriching experience that was more than just about fundraising monies.

Said Dr John Tan, the executive director at CARE who was at the event itself helping out: “It’s a fantastic platform to raise awareness.”

Typically, a fundraiser will be a formal sit down dinner with corporate clients, said John.

Twestival felt different. The whole tone was full of enthusiasm, especially with the youthful crowd — a segment that is typically more difficult to reach via traditional channels.

“CARE is not really tech or media savvy,” he said. “We’re really glad for this outreach opportunity.”

“Social media is like teen sex.
Everybody wants to do it.
Nobody knows how.
When it’s finally done there is surprise it’s not better”
– Avinash Kaushik, analytics evangelist, Google

An amusing anecdote that social media consultant Yongfook brought up during last week’s Blogout ’09, but nonetheless very true.

Run on 6th and 7th March (Friday and Saturday) last week, Blogout ’09 was an event organized by Singapore’s TDM (The Digital Movement) to help attendees “make sense of the social media space in Singapore”.

They brought together a bunch of digital media consultants like Yongfook, Joel Postman and Tania from Ogilvy to present to the largely government audience (at least on the 6th when I was there) on social media. Topics touched on include how to measure ROI, how to do outreach in this space and where social media is going in the future.

It was well-run and well-coordinated, so kudos to the TDM folks (e.g. Claudia) for organizing a great event from a bottom-up grassroots effort.

Just adding my two cents to various topics that caught my interest throughout Friday 6th when I was there:

• On measuring social media ROI: Yongfook mentioned looking at various business “needles” (e.g. authority, marketing/sales leads, etc.) to measure impact rather than using web metrics like page hits and number of visitors. Whilst I agree that these are effective measures, how these metrics are formulated and pegged to business impact is difficult to do (which is why it’s valuable!). I doubt you can get away from things like page hits and the like short term — even though they can be gamed — because it’s an objective metric that’s easy for the fledgling social media industry to measure and sell.
• On making money through blogs or paying blogs to blog: Whilst there are individuals who probably are exceptional in this area, I’m not convinced that blogs are a vehicle for making money, especially not through ads. And in the Singapore context, this is even more difficult due to reasons like the limited advertising market. Here’s anarticle I wrote for Digital Life two months back, in which SMU’s Michael Netzley explains why he believes it doesn’t work.
• On blogger outreach: Yes, reaching out to bloggers is about conversations. To do it well, you need to understand why bloggers blog. Is it about passion? Is it about fame and/or ego? Do they only want friends to read or are they aiming for a wider audience? Do they intend to make a living from building their own personal brand online? The thing is this: people blog for all kinds of different reasons, and there are millions of them out there. Pragmatically speaking, you can’t talk to ALL of them; you have to prioritize. How influential are these bloggers that you reach out to? Will they champion what you’re presenting to them? I really don’t think this is as an easy question to answer as many social media folks make it sound like. “Just have conversations loh” isn’t going to cut it, unless you explain in depth what this entails.
• Is social media outreach useful for B2B? I’m not convinced of this myself. I think it’s far more useful for B2C than B2B. B2B is probably better served through other channels like industry relations or analysts relations, because it’s easier to see more direct business impact from these types of comms work. Maybe if you’re flush with cash and want to do a branding campaign social media could be included as a component for B2B, but to me there are better alternatives.

Agree? Disagree? Leave a comment!

But the process of gathering information – arguably the core of journalism – is distinctly separate from the technology (enablers like twitter and plurk), or from the final product (like these blog pages that you read here).

Take a look at Spot.US. This recent media experiment, officially launched 10 Nov 2008, uses crowdfunding to pay professional journalists, and crowsourcing to get ideas. The video below by David Cohn, the founder of Spot.US, lays out what the project is about.

David was also founder of the now defunct Assignment Zero project, an experiment with Wired, on “open sourcing” journalism – a really interesting read. Guess we’ll have to wait and see how the Spot.US experiment unfolds.