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BBC Radio 1’s The Official Chart is now visualising the top 10 best-selling singles in the Chart via the Radio 1 website for the first time, says Maria Stadtmueller. Listeners will be able to watch the final hour of The Official Chart every Sunday as Reggie Yates counts down the top 10 tracks.

Social media usage within the Inc 500 ranking – the 500 fastest-growing privately held companies in the US – has changed in the past 12 months. While these outfits are now incorporating the likes of Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, texting, mobile apps and Foursquare, they are cutting their use of blogging, message boards, video blogging, podcasting and MySpace, according to a report by the Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts.

Africa’s biggest Twitter nation? That would be South Africa, according to How Africa Tweets research from Portland Communications and Tweetminster. In the last quarter of 2011, the country boasted over twice as many tweets (5 million) as next-most-active-market Kenya (2.5 million), ahead of Nigeria (1.6 million), Egypt (1.2 million) and Morocco (745,000).

A little over half of tweets from Africa are sent from mobile devices, while 60% of the continent’s most active Tweeters are aged between 20 and 29. Twitter in Africa is widely used for social conversation, with 81% mainly using it for communicating with friends.

Bangkok street life is buzzing and appears somewhat chaotic with myriad food and market stalls open pretty much 24/7, while counterfeit – and well-made – branded goods abound, and smartphones and iPads are almost de rigueur among youth. Plus. everyone is on Whatsapp. And social gaming was a big trend here in back in early- 2010.

Thai youth is clearly as heavily into the latest tech as its counterparts in Asian and Western societies, says Sabine Stork*.

While Manchester City’s were beating Spurs on the pitch last weekend, the Premier League club was busy snapping a 360-degree, ultra-high resolution picture of the interior of the Etihad Stadium together with Gigapixel FanCam, says Steve Mullins.

McDonald’s has pulled a US promoted tweets campaign on Twitter after consumers used the brand’s #McDStories and #MeetTheFarmers hashatgs to slate the company over food quality, employee working conditions and animal rights – a subject McDonald’s managed to get into a debate with on Twitter with pressure group PETA.

If Twitter were the news, the most high-profile person of last year would be Justin Bieber, whose tweets were retweeted an average of 5 million times, compared to President Obama’s mere 250,000. By the way, locks of Bieber hair sold for $40k on eBay back in March 2011.

From Sony Ericsson comes the SmartWatch. This Android timepiece enables wearers to keep on eye on Facebook posts, as well as catch up on tweets, texts and e-mail. All users need to do is download the apps they like to wear and access them via a scratch- and splash-proof multitouch display.