The week in social media: Obama's Thanksgiving turkeys earn a pardon and Twitter predicts the future

The White House website was promoting a new feature yesterday where people were introduced to two turkeys. Visitors are encouraged to get to know the turkeys and read about their backgrounds and their distinctive gobbles.

It turns out that the two turkeys are in competition with each other for the coveted title of ‘National Thanksgiving Turkey’, with the site stating that the winning bird will be pardoned by President Obama. However, the wording on the website led people to believe that the losing turkey would be slaughtered in some sort of Hunger Games-esque battle.

The winner will be determined by which turkey’s story is shared the most on social media, but the website copy was quickly changed to appease turkey lovers everywhere, and now reads that both turkeys will be pardoned.

PHEW. Confused? Me too.

Google Maps launches airports and railway stations

Google Street View has been updated to include a range of international airports and train stations. This is excellent news for forward planners like myself who like to know which platform the train goes from.

As of Tuesday, Google Maps now includes 16 airports, over 50 train and subway stations, a cable car station in Hong Kong and the inside of an Emirate Airbus A380 at Dubai Airport.

Perfect for worriers who want to know exactly where they’re departing from.

Twitter appears to be experimenting with predicting viral Tweets

According to an article on The Next Web, it looks like Twitter is beginning to experiment to see if it can predict the next viral tweets.

@MagicStats, a mysterious new account, has appeared, with a bio that reads: “I favorite the best tweets I see in real time".

The account is protected, but despite this TNW says that: “In both instances where @magicstats favorited our tweets, they received well over 100 retweets within a few hours.”

The article states concedes that it is not 100 per cent certain whether this is the real deal or not, but it seems awfully similar to experiments that it has done in the past.

I think I say this in every article, but this time I really mean it. It will be interesting to keep an eye on this one.

Pinterest introduces place pins

Just after I filed my article last week, Pinterest decided to announce that it was introducing Pinterest Places. CHEERS GUYS.

After noticing that an increasing number of people were pinning pictures surrounding ‘vacations’ (that’s holidays to you an I, old bean), Pinterest decided to introduce its newest feature, the place pin.

Now you can add a map when you’re creating a new board (or you can edit an old board to add one on there) and from then on you can map the living daylights out of all your pins. Hurrah!

Just make sure that you’re mapping everything in the right place, as no-one wants any geographical confusion.