Social Media's Hottest Dress of the Season!

Since it is the end of awards season, you would think it is the end of dresses being the top hit on Twitter. 

But last night, Twitter was overtaken with a new dress that caused a huge controversy.

Dubbed #TheDress, this color optical illusion basically divided the internet into two camps, #TeamBlackAndBlue and #TeamWhiteAndGold.

To explain a bit, depending on your brain's perception of color, viewers can see an image of the same dress as either black and blue striped, or gold and white striped.  The concept is fascinating, but since this isn't a brain function blog, I'll let you read about the science elsewhere.  If interested, I think WIRED's recap of it is the best.

Another fascinating aspect, though, is just how quickly this sensation swamped our newsfeeds!  #TheDress was first posted to Tumblr on Wednesday.  Apparently, as Washington Post reported, the dress was intended to be worn in a wedding.  And when the mother of the bride snapped a picture of it to send to members of the wedding party, they all saw the dress as different colors!  To settle the debate, they posed the question to social media and BAM.  

Tens of millions of tweets siding on either end of the debate led to trending hashtags #TheDress, #whiteandgold, #blackandblue.  Even celebrities from Taylor Swift to Mindy Kaling to Julianne Moore chimed in about #TheDress.

When I first saw it, I thought people were pranking me!  It was clearly white and gold.  But now, a few images that I've seen actually do look blue and black!  We are clearly going mad!

What colors do you see?  

Happy Social Media Day!

You know you've hit it big when you have a day of the year dedicated to you.  I'm still waiting for Social Media Diva Day.  It has a nice ring to it, don't you think!

In the meantime, Social Media Day is here!  This Saturday, June 30th is Mashable's 3rd annual Social Media Day!  Started in 2010 by Mashable, the worldwide event is a celebration of "the digital revolution happening right before our eyes"!

Here's my challenge for you for Social Media Day 2012. Learn something new.

Yup, that's it.  Seems simple, huh?  And guess what!?  It IS simple! 

There are so many amazing sites that can simplify, deepen or enhance your life and your learning.  I've listed several of them below.  I want you to sign up for one of these, create a username and spend an hour digging around on the site.  Get involved in the conversation and the community.  And let me know what you learn.  I can't wait to hear about it.

http://www.facebook.com/ (really?  If you aren't on Facebook yet, we need to talk!)                  
http://www.tumblr.com/
 http://www.pinterest.com/
http://www.instagram.com/ http://www.meetup.com/                                                                                                                   http://www.twitter.com/
 http://www.digg.com/                                                                                                                       http://www.flickr.com/
 http://www.youtube.com/                                                                                                                 http://www.blogger.com/
 http://www.klout.com/                                                                                                                      http://www.reddit.com/
 https://plus.google.com/                                                                                                           http://www.stumbleupon.com/

 Bonus points:  Logon to to http://mashable.com/smday/ to see if there is a Meetup scheduled in your hometown.  You are sure to meet a ton of people and learn.   Strange enough, here in LA, our Meetup currently has no details!  But social media lovers are biting at the opportunity.   If deets aren't up soon, this is going to be a crowd sourced event!!!

Proof Your Work, People!

Proof your work, people!

Mitt Romney’s campaign released a new iPhone app yesterday called “With Mitt”.   All in all, a great idea for a simple app that lets you use different Mitt-promoting, stenciled overlays on the pictures you take.  Whoever you might be voting for, the designs are quite nice looking.  But that’s not what brought this app into the news today.  Let’s just say one of the overlays would have failed a standard spell check.

In the first version of the app, one stenciled overlay reads:

 “A Better Amercia”

I’m not joking.  That’s what it said.  A better A-M-E-R-C-I-A.

COMMON!

How does this happen?  That doesn’t even LOOK right!  I am not making a political statement here.  Heck, Obama’s campaign has had several blunders (57 states, anyone?).  We are all human.  Plus, I’m sure Romney didn’t write the app himself.  But, people have GOT to double check things.  Seems like a pretty big accident, don’t you think?  If I was a conspiracy theorist, I’d be all up in arms about this one.

Alas, I am not. I am Social Media Diva!  So, I am up in arms about this blowing up the social media world. The biggest irony of this explosion is that the app itself encourages sharing the pictures on Facebook and Twitter.  And that’s exactly what happened.

Tumblr now has a whole page entitled “Amercia is with Mitt!” which is dedicated to the erred stencil.

Even Mitt’s promoted hash tag “WithMitt” – used initially by the Romney campaign to announce the app – has pretty much been hijacked with images of the mistake.  And to top it off, #Amercia was trending on Twitter last night and into this morning. 

And while the app might be talked about more than anticipated, I’d guess team Romney will be triple checking everything in the future.