Blackberry Tweet via iPhone Catches Attention

Folks at Canada-based mobile manufacturing company, BlackBerry, are definitely having an awkward day after the company’s official Twitter feed just received a tweet via iPhone, i.e. its top competitor, on January 13, 2015, at 11:08 am. Even though the tweet was deleted immediately after it was posted, the damage had been done.

The message posted on Tuesday afternoon promoted the new BlackBerry Classic phone and urged consumers to “keep up with the conversation” on Twitter, accompanying a lovely looking photo of the BlackBerry Classic.

Sina Weibo Announces to Launch Its English Version Worldwide, Directly Competing With Twitter Inc.

It is hard to believe that there are still other microblogging services in this world other than Twitter. But one of these unheard of microblogging companies, Sina Weibo from China, is planning to soon make its English version and be as popular in the English-speaking world as it is in the Chinese-speaking world. It was quoted in the The Next Web blog, which had sourced a Chinese-language site TechWeb, that Sina Weibo (pronounced ‘way-bore’) is “actively preparing” to soon release its platform with the support of English language. This English-version of the service will put it in direct and fierce competition with the Twitter, the world-leading microblogging service of United States. It was stated in the article that this English version will be available online as soon as two to three months.

Image via WikipediaMany analysts are measuring as to how much potential damage the English version of Sina Weibo can do to Twitter. It is a tough call and the prediction is not so easy to make, though according to the statistics Twitter may need to start worrying about the rising problem. Sina Weibo, seen by the analysts to be an amalgam of both Twitter and Facebook, currently houses almost 140 million users, whereas as the company hopes to reach around 200 million by the end of this year. Comparing that number to Twitter’s global audience of more than 300 million users, only around 20 million of which are actually from the United States, marks the uncertainty.

Instagram Gives Birth to Trendy Fashion Photographers

It is somewhat a little difficult to admit that Instagram, one of the leading iPhone applications for Twitter photo sharing, is popularly used for stylizing among street style photographers. Even more peculiar reality is that most of these fashion photographers were not so active before Instagram; most of the ‘well-followed’ photographers on Twitter are the ones who did not even have any experience of street style photography before they started using Intagram.

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“I started using Instagram about two weeks after it launched in the App Store and just fiddled around with pictures of my family and friends,” stated one of the photographer from NY, Anthony Danielle, who has acquired almost 18,000 followers with her username takinyerphoto. He said that “I’d see other people doing street work and thought, ‘I could do that,’ and I just started taking pictures of people on the street.” In addition to the amazing styling feature of the app, the experience is even more enhanced with the iPhone’s portability and camera reliability. Instagram has helped strengthen, rather develop, the hobby of Danielle which he never thought he’d end up doing. He claims that even the most darkest and useless photos he takes, are often ‘stylized’ into art with Instagram’s and Camera+‘s filters.

Twitter CEO Declares That 80 Percent of Advertisers Will Be Renewing Their Approach

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More than 80 percent of all the companies which advertise on Twitter Inc.’s microblogging website are going to renew their marketing approach, declared the company's CEO on Wednesday. Twitter is specifically working lately, on restructuring its advertising-based business. CEO Dick Costolo also mentioned that company's future is not only dependent on getting more prices for its shares in the initial public stock offering. Costolo was present at the D9 conference of All Things Digital when he claimed that Twitter's long-term success is not "correlated" with an IPO. Investors are always keeping a sharp eye on such fast-growing social networking companies like Twitter and Facebook, only hoping to become the next blockbuster IPOs. Just last month, the professional social networking site LinkedIn Corp made the decision of listing itself as a publicly-listed company and its shares literally doubled from the original offered price on the first day. Twitter has topped above 200 million registered user accounts, allowing them to constantly update with 140-character long short messages.

Just this Wednesday, CEO Costolo unraveled the latest feature of the company which makes it easier for the users to post photos directly from their Twitter homage along with an additional enhanced search. Costolo asserted that Twitter Inc. hosts an estimated 600 advertisers, which is a steep rise from previous 150 advertisers in 2010. Even though Twitter is boosting up and restructuring its advertising business, Costolo made it clear that Twitter is not doing this under pressure for better revenues at all. He stated that "we don't need to optimize for short-term revenue."

Twitter Adds up an Online Ad Team to Help with Monetization, as It Acquires AdGork

Image via CrunchBaseTwitter has recently acquired an internet company which will reward it with an advanced expert team in the technique of advertising campaigns on Google Inc. AdGrok has now stepped up to Twitter, from Google, to help gain the company better revenue generation. It was announced on the official website of AdGrok, that the company has been acquired by Twitter as of this Tuesday. Further the notice on the website revealed that this acquisition has been made to work on a "monetization platform" for Twitter. It was also notified that now the company was not working to serve the customers of Google's AdWords platform anymore and it will discontinue all of its previous endeavors by the end of June.

The statement at AdGork’s website stated: "We're happy to announce that Twitter has acquired the AdGrok team. Starting today, we will be working full-time on Twitter's revenue engineering team." According to the spokesperson of Twitter Inc., Matt Graves, two executive of AdGrok team will now be collaborating with Twitter and reporting at its San Francisco headquarters. While it was revealed by an email of Graves that the third executive and co-founder of the company has found an employment and will join Facebook, the fiercest rival of Twitter.

If Twitter Releases a Built-In Photosharing Service, How Worse Can It Affect Services like Twitpic, Yfrog

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Rumor on the street is that Twitter is soon going to announce its own managed photosharing app, obviously being immensely sync able with Twitter, maybe even also integrated with the original microblogging service. Third-party photosharing services, like Twitpic and Yfrog, which were currently working closely to serve the needs of the large Twitter user base, are now seeing complete bad luck ahead, if the rumor is discovered to be true. Alexia Tsotsis, a technology reporter, informed TechCrunch this Sunday that “according to multiple sources, Twitter is on the verge on announcing its own built-in Twitpic competitor.” She also anticipated that “photosharing is the next logical step of Twitter expanding its in-app experience. It’s basically grabbing at low-hanging fruit.”

Image via CrunchBase

The rumors were furthermore confused with reality when Liz Gannes, a writer of a technology blog, All Things D, also supported the rumors and stated that Twitter is expectedly going to reveal its plans for the photosharing service by this week at the D9 conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif. This Wednesday at the conference, the C.E.O. of Twitter, Dick Costolo, has personally planned to speak publically. Gannes stated in her article that “Currently, Twitter users who wish to post photos in their tweets must host them elsewhere, with popular options including Twitpic, Yfrog, Instagram and Flickr. Users then include links to the photos within their tweets.  Many Twitter clients, including those developed by the company, use the links to go fetch the images and display them inline. But the process could certainly be smoother.”

Companies like Twitpic and ImageShack, owner of Yfrog, have their entire business and identity on risk, as they have been running an extremely profitable business by selling more and more ads with the image they display through tweets. Moreover Tsotsis also mentioned that “It’s only natural that [Twitter] would spend more resources on photosharing, especially considering how much money is being poured into the white hot space and that images were the crux of the success of competitor Facebook.” Gizmodo published an article by Kelly Hodgkin, their chief writer, which affirmed that there is “no word on what will happen to TwitPic and Yfrog support if Twitter develops it own solution. We would like to think Twitter would be open to any service, but the company has become increasingly anti-competitive.”

Hackers Publish a Fake Story on PBS Website of Tupac Being Alive

                Image via WikipediaThe officials of PBS have confirmed that a group of hackers took down their network's website, and injected a fake unoriginal post regarding the dead rapper ‘Tupac Shakur’ being alive, residing in New Zealand. The group of hackers involved, also took responsibility for the complaints regarding the hacking of a recent "Frontline" investigative news program on WikiLeaks. PBS made the announcement on Monday morning through its official Twitter account declaring that the website was compromised. The fake published story was deleted by the administration at the same time on Monday morning. The news story was published on the website of the "PBS NewsHour" program, produced by WETA-TV in Arlington, Va.

The executive producer of "Frontline" program, David Fannin, stated that he just got to know about the hack attack as of Monday morning, i.e. a week after the "WikiSecrets" documentary was aired in the program. This documentary was produced by WGBH-TV in Boston and faced heavy criticism and skeptical debate programs favoring the WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange. Though according to Fanning, Asange personally thought that the program was fair. He said that getting a hack attack on the PBS after a news program was unusual but "probably not unexpected.” Fanning claimed that "from our point of view, we just see it as a disappointing and irresponsible act, especially since we have been very open to publishing criticism of the film ... and the film included other points of view.” He added that "this kind of action is irresponsible and chilling."

A British Council Successfully Forces Twitter to Hand over User Data after A Court Battle in California

A local authority in Britain had demanded Twitter to provide them with some users' details as it made the request to the the US microblogging site in the court of California. This step was taken for the first time ever, in a case from Britain. South Tyneside Council of northeast England has taken all necessary steps required to lodge an official application in the legal boundaries to investigate and acquire the identity of an anonymous blogger, entitled with the cyber name "My Monkey", who has apparently passed slanderous statements against the councilors.

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The spokesperson, Paul Robinson, declared on behalf of the council that "Twitter has released information to our lawyers and this is currently being analyzed by technical experts." The information required was delivered to the council after it had dragged Twitter in to a court in California, the hometown of the service.

Analysts are suspecting that this ruling could be the result of footballer Ryan Giggs’s case, whose lawyers had previously insisted in front of the British courts that Twitter should disclose the identity of the user which has allegedly defied the court orders.

Twitter Reinstalls A Feature to Its Service, Which It Suspended Two Years Back

This Thursday, Twitter has once again rolled out a feature it had suspended

 earlier. Basically, the feature lets the users see the timeline of other users, like the home twitter feed. It was previously suspended by Twitter two years back. The suspension of this small feature was followed by an official blog post which justified the removal, dated on 4^th June of 2009. The Twitter Status blog stated: “Recently we made a change to remove the With Friends tab from user profiles. We did this after finding out that this tab was both a relatively rarely accessed as well as computationally expensive page for us to serve.”

Image via CrunchBaseNot only was the feature “relatively rarely accessed” but it was also accumulating many costly cycles on their taxed servers at that time. Now the question in mind of many users is that why is Twitter returning this feature now. It’s clearly visible that Twitter is past its limitation of main scaling issues, since its downtime is way too less than before. Even though there is considerable time when the service is unavailable even today, but it has still increased tremendously compared to the situation two years ago. The features like “With Friends,” tweet-to-IM, auto timeline updates were among the main reason behind the downtime of mainstream functions of Twitter.

So to eradicate the problems, these features were discontinued back then since keeping a healthy social graph was not as important concern of that time. But now that it has improved it’s functionally and has no problem in having more users, its primary concerns is to make Twitter more useful and keep the users addicted to the service. Hence these features like “Who To Follow” and “See What I See” are very helpful in that regard. Especially the “See What I See” features can be used as a self-tutorial to show new users about how to use Twitter in full capacity.

Facebook Users Constantly Fall For Fake News Articles Spreading Virally

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Many Facebook users were utterly stunned to read the news telling them that the last four minutes of the famed Harry Potter’s movie series is going to be divided and played in seven different movies.  It was obviously a fake prank by the notorious website, The Onion, which is popular for its fallacious headlines. The blog has been getting some very intense comments as the readers fall for the prank and believe the unbelievable news. Hudson Hongo, 24, is the humor writer who actually penned down this publication. Previously he wrote a humor article, titled ‘Planned Parenthood’ and was pretty surprised to see that many Facebook users were not able to recognize it as a joke. Hence he began poking around last week, and realized that there were a lot of public Facebook pages which were full of "Onion"-related confusions. He wrote on his personal blog that "When I found out that people were reacting the same way to many other Onion articles, I felt the phenomenon was worth documenting and put it up my blog."

One of the reader of his article commented: "Wow ... really? I guess it's one way to milk a franchise,” while another complained that "Eh, I've enjoyed the last few, but paying around $70 to basically see the end of one movie is a little sad." While responding to another such fake blog post titled "Abortionplex,” one user wrote "This is unbelievable," and another claimed that "THIS IS SICK ... really unbelievable that our taxes are paying for this!”

Yahoo Finally Launches Its Email Service Overhaul

Yahoo Inc. has finally announced the makeover of its well-accepted email service, it had promised quite a while ago. This makeover is Yahoo’s shot at making its e-mail service more attractive as it keeps on trying to challenge the users’ mounting interest in new services like Facebook, Twitter, and Google along with other online communicative methods. This overhaul of the feeble service was announced on Tuesday, declaring to completely redesign the email format which Yahoo has kept in its testing phase for almost sevenths months now. The entire consumer base of Yahoo email service, almost 277 million users, is going to be shifted to the updated version in a phased manner over the next few weeks.

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This new makeover includes plenty new features, including an integration of Facebook and Twitter accounts automatically updated from within Yahoo's email boxes and many more. Whereas, many old features are improved as well, including the overall speed which is promised to be twice as faster and the capability of sending attachments as big as 100MB. Other miscellaneous developments include better junk-mail controls and the feature of chatting to your online Facebook friends. Yahoo is literally relying on this upgrade to not only appease the current email users, but also attract new users, since it is definitely in a time of need for the e-mail service. Majority of its users are adopting the rival Gmail service, run by Internet search leader Google Inc., which grows its consumer base steeply.

Blipsnips Updates Its App Adding Twitter Integration & Geolocation

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Socializing through sharing video is becoming extremely popular, just this Tuesday BlipSnips 2.0 made a special announcement launching an updated TechStars-bred mobile app which will be focusing on the tools like video sharing and tagging. The first BlipSnips for iPhone and Facebook apps were launched back in January 2011, thanks to the brave investors like Chris Kelly, who is the former chief privacy officer at Facebook. The first BlipSnips app released for iPhone totally gathered a total of 125,000 downloads. This release was highlighted and sold for its features like the ability of tagging friends through their Facebook accounts on a specific time in the video, along with adding comments to an exact time stamps within the video, like in SoundCloud’s mobile app. Users were easily able to share and post their videos on Facebook.

Now in this latest BlipSnip 2.0 app, the company promises to provide even more vigorous experience. The new additions and amendments from the last version includes a new “BlipSnip video theater” playable in HTML5 allowing the users to not only view but also tag and comment. Other developments include a public feeds list, ability to tag friends from both Facebook and Twitter, tag your geolocation in the video, sharing on Twitter, and an additional new following/follower feature. The company has further added a new mobile website, keeping its original website intact, where the videos can be tagged and shared on YouTube. The C.E.O. and co-founder of BlipSnips, John Bliss, stated that “In effect, what we’re trying to do is put the social into video, rather than creating a video app that has social as its by-product.” Further implying: “We’re more a social app first, video second.”

Twitter Confirmed To have acquired TweetDeck in exchange for $40 Million

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Supplementing all the previous stories being published for weeks, Twitter has finally announced that it is going to acquire the popular third-party app, TweetDeck. It was first revealed in early May by Mike Arrington, who claimed that the deal is quite confirmed, referring to it “as good as done.” However, the news was still being considered as a rumor, since it was not announced by either of the two companies were as they decided to delay the publicly release of the numbers. Finally it was revealed today, announced by both CNN and CNET, that TweetDeck has now been acquired by Twitter Inc. in exchange price of $40 million. Even though the news is still not confirmed or announced by Twitter Inc. but according to the brevity of the news and the sources close to the deal, it’s done.

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The acquisition of TweetDeck by Twitter was not just a simple result of investment plan; it has its own story starting from February. Many inside sources confirmed that that TweetDeck is in the last stages of negotiating a deal with Gross’ UberMedia, the suspected price of this deal was expected to be somewhere in between $25 and $30 million. It was these rumors which put Twitter Inc. into immediate action and it apparently hammered itself with a non-deniable counteroffer. This offer was considerably much better than UberMedia could have offered and proved be the one that TweetDeck couldn’t have refused.

CDC’s New Campaign Titled "Zombie Apocalypse" Gathers Record Breaking Page Views and Crashes the Website

                               Image via Wikipedia

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published a blog post on its website regarding how to keep prepared for any "zombie apocalypse" in near future; it was a cheery attempt by the department to make more and more Americans to actually read about how to prepare for hurricanes. The blog post was so interesting that, owing to widely used social networks, it attracted record breaking internet traffic that the website even crashed, informed the department on Thursday. Originally the Zombie Apocalypse campaign was aimed to get support from social media, and a commendable effort of CDC's Public Health and Preparedness center to make more people aware of the upcoming start of hurricane season i.e. 1^st of June, 2011. CDC is a federal government health agency headquartered in Atlanta.

The popular blog post initiates writing: "There are all kinds of emergencies out there that we can prepare for." It goes on asserting "Take a zombie apocalypse for example. ... You may laugh now, but when it happens you'll be happy you read this, and hey, maybe you'll even learn a thing or two about how to prepare for a real emergency." The blog was published only few days ahead of May 21, which is a predicted to be the “Judgment Day” by an evangelical broadcaster in California.

The spokesperson of CDC, Dave Daigle, stated on Thursday that "If you prepare for the zombie apocalypse, you'll be prepared for all hazards." The blog post goes very deep and identifies that the word ‘zombie’ is derived from voodoo practice of spirit possession, where the victims are stripped of consciousness. The post mentions that the ‘Zombies culture’ became popular, after immense success of the block buster horror movies like the one of George Romero “Night of the Living Dead." This movie was released in 1968 and showed the flesh-eating zombies wander about in the eastern seaboard after a disastrous radioactive contamination.

Non-Profit Group Launches Website Tracking Power Outages in India through Twitter Users

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The load shedding and power cuts in India are becoming a hectic daily routine, as it now encompasses entire country from the small villages to the capital. However, since most of the power outages are unannounced, the statistical information on the degree of the problem is largely unreliable. Recently a volunteer group in India has begun a project along with the cooperation of the Indian community of Twitter users, to create an infographic statistics based on the information received from Twitter users. These tweets are than compiled and analyzed, sourced from the various parts of the country, consequently the reports of power failures all over the country are used to support this idea.

According to the founder of the project, Shefaly Yogendra, who’s an Indian working as an investment consultant in U.K, this public-generated infographic statists can also prove as a very useful weapon against the politicians and government to get them to discover cheaper solution of such deep-seated problem. Moreover, she added that as the project becomes more authentic gradually, it can also be used by the officials for reference when working for a solution or deploying new investments in electricity generation and transmission. Yogendra stated that "Every time it is summer, I usually have a lot of friends from India complaining on Twitter about power cuts."

The President of Republic of Rwanda, Kagame, Publically Stands Up To the Criticism of A Brish Journalist on Twitter

                                            Image via Wikipedia

Recently a British journalist, Ian Birrell, was using Twitter to criticize some of the acts in the regime of Rwanda's president, claiming that he has kept his "despotic and deluded" government for too long. Surprisingly enough, the president himself, responded from his official twitter account leading to an extraordinary conversation and somewhat a clash between the critical reporter and the president of a country. The President of Rawanda, Paul Kagame, responded with almost 14 fierce tweets, to the courageous journalist, Ian Birrell, one of which simply implying that: "Wrong u r."

In the middle of the conversation, the foreign minister, Even, also intervened and referred to Birrel, saying: "wld u care 2 know what 11.000.000 Rwandans think of Paul Kagame b4 u spread ur formed opinion? 2 big a challenge 4 u?"

Japanese Doctors Speak Highly of Twitter Services, Being Acquired to Save Lives after The disaster

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BBC International reported on this Friday that the Japanese doctors are 

appreciating the reliable services of Twitter in their time of need; they called it “an excellent system” which let them communicate with their needy patients and spread awareness, both quickly and easily, about where to can obtain their vital medication from. This appreciation note by the doctors was published in The Lancet, considered to be world’s largest medical journals. In the aftermath of the earthquake which hit Japan on 11^th March, 2011, almost all the phone services were affected drastically and their services were unreliable, although at that time of need internet access throughout the country remained intact. Hence, gave the doctors the chance to make use of the services provided by Twitter.

Among the published notes in The Lancet, two doctors from the Keio University School of Medicine in Tokyo, Dr Yuichi Tamura and Dr Keiichi Kukuda, specially mentioned the challenges their community faced during the catastrophe. They reported that their first priority after the disaster was to reach their regular patients and inform them to acquire their vital pulmonary hypertension drugs, which was crucially needed at the time. They said that “Forming a supply chain for such drugs in the earliest stages of the disaster was difficult; however we found that social networking services could have a useful role.” It was also precisely stated that the ‘Re-tweet’ function of the network allowed the important information to flow easily and vastly among the twitter community.

Surveys Show That Celebrities More Addicted To Twitter, Generally Have Shorter Careers

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In today’s era of social media revolution, studies have shown that regardless of celebrities having several millions of followers, those who overflow their fans with casual and random tweets are more likely to get their fans bored of them; consequently they have a shorter career in comparison to those who cleverly maintain the sense of mystery and charm in their tweets.

It was published by Bauer Media, a music consumer research firms’ publisher, that in today’s age, when the celebrities have become more reachable than ever; these social networking websites have made these celebrities lose their charm and become less appealing. He reported that celebrities have a very certain likelihood of boring their followers with their everyday activity rather than doing their promotion. He said "In this social media age, it's all too easy to follow your musical icons on a minute-by-minute basis. There's a consensus within the industry that this ease of access is leading to artists losing appeal more quickly.”

Malaysian Authorities Begin Crackdown on Local Gangs Recruiting Teenagers on Facebook

This Wednesday, Malaysian authorities have declared that they will soon begin a large-scale major crackdown to bring down the local criminal gangs using the highly popular social networking websites, like Facebook and Twitter, which are being used to actually recruit teenager as their "street fighters." Star Daily, a local source reported that Hishammuddin Hussein, the Malaysian home minister, has said that the government will be launching these crackdowns after observing extra ordinary growth of the online recruitment pages in recent months.
                    Image via Wikipedia

Hishammuddin also stated that "The ministries, including the Information, Communications, and Culture Ministry, the (multimedia) commission and the police will be brought in to tackle the issue." "They all have their own expertise and it is just a matter of coordinating them to achieve the goal," he added. He announced that since this will be a very large crackdown; the authorities will not at all be lenient, he declared that in this crackdown even crime like money laundering to drug trafficking will be considered as the same level of crime as terrorism, and the authorities will aim to bring down all types of organized crime. He ended his words stating that "They are all related and are a serious threat not only at the national level but also the international level." Obviously no further descriptive details about the crackdown were shared.

Blu Cigs Takes A Very Unique Step to Bring Together Social Networking and Smoking, Called E-Smoking

It was actually a long time ago when smokers or smoking in general was considered a social advantage; those were the times before the health movement spread immense awareness. In those times the smoker were considered elite and being a smoker has its elite benefits, like getting access to an exclusive club, smokers had their own social community which they considered superior. But now things have changed upside down, not only the smokers are smoking very less, there are very fewer places which even lets them smoke, it will not be surprise if someone stated that smoking is a crime in some places. Now the smoke breaks in offices is not but a wasted few minutes standing alone in the open.

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

The overall reaction of the society as a whole to ban smokers, is largely due to the awareness in the common people regarding the health risks it brings, hence more people are quitting smokes today, than ever before. If we bring together this former addiction of people, with another growing evil addiction of the society, dependence on the technology, we give birth to e-cigarettes. This might also be considered as a desperate attempt to restore the image of smoking. These devices are designed to deliver vaporized nicotine to the user along with the incentive of interacting with other people who have the similar addiction, smoking.