Headline seem like it’s over the top? Maybe a little but a report has been released making the claim that Twitter costs the British economy 1.38 billion pounds on an annual basis. That’s a boat load of pounds! (We miss you Carol. Please say something outrageous soon, please!).

Regular readers will know how I tend to be a skeptic first on any surveys / research / reports that claim anything because let’s face it, most things are hard to quantify and even harder to draw definitive conclusions from. This one, which was reported in the Telegraph, set off the ‘Research Report Red Light’ quickly but it sounded just silly enough to look into further. The report says

With Halloween looming in the very near future one wonders if the ‘reconnect’ feature’s algorithm doesn’t have a little bit of ‘All Hallow’s Eve’ mischief in it or is programmed for the macabre. Either way it is managing to upset more than a few Facebook users with suggestions that border on the, well, bizarre.

Mashable shares with us some of the experiences that have been reported as a result of the Facebook ‘improvement’.

Unfortunately Facebook’s algorithms can’t account for some less desirable scenarios: according to Twitter reports, the site is recommending that users reconnect with ex-girlfriends and ex-boyfriends. It’s recommending they reconnect with their (current) husband or wife. It’s even advising people to reconnect with friends who have died, causing obvious distress. These aren’t isolated cases: there are scores of Twitter reports of these issues.

While this UPS sponsored video at Mashable is slick, I’m scratching my head over it.

Aside from the fact that it’s extremely basic–which is probably UPS’s intent–I’m just not making the connection between a courier service and social media.

Can anyone help me out? Why is UPS sponsoring this?

No, seriously, they added magic.

As you’ve probably noticed today, Google Reader has added a few new features. The first is the Explore section, just below the People you follow section. Here, Google shows off two sources of new feeds: Popular Items and Recommended Sources. As you might guess, the Recommended Sources feature analyzes your feeds (via Reader Trends) and Web History to find feeds you might like. (This is the old Recommendations feature.) Popular Items highlights “top-rising images, videos and pages from anywhere (not just your subscriptions).” It identifies these items algorithmically (how else?) and sorts them in the order they think you’ll like them.

The magic isn’t just in the mind reading, however. It’s also in the feed settings: now we can order items by newest, oldest or . . . magic.