A new blog post from the Twitter media team suggests that the company will launch an embeddable tweets feature sometime tomorrow. Most of the time, when a blog or website wants to add specific tweets to its blog posts, it has to either quote the text or screenshot the tweets and put them in the post. Suffice it to say, the former doesn’t have have the same impact as the latter, but the latter is a time-intensive affair. ...
Spam emails such as the one below have been doing the rounds on the Internet hoping to lure recipients into downloading a Facebook toolbar. If you download the file by clicking on “Download Here”, you’ll see a file with the icon shown below: If you take a closer look at the icon, “darkSector” is shown inside of it. How strange. Is this actually a Facebook toolbar? Let’s take a look at the property of the file since the file looks a bit fishy. In the file properties, you’ll see the following in the Details tab. ...
A group of Second Life users is suing Second Life’s creator over a virtual land dispute. They say their contractual property ownership rights have been changed and that this alteration of the terms of service constitutes fraud and violates California consumer protection laws. Before you scoff too much at this seemingly ludicrous lawsuit, remember that virtual worlds aren’t just “funny money” and avatars. They’re serious business, both for the owners and investors who profit from them and for the users who pump hundreds and even thousands of dollars each into creating characters and interacting online. ...
Self-proclaimed social media scientist Dan Zarrella has already applied linguistic methodologies to psychologically profile Twitter users. Now he’s using the same technology and approach to break down Facebook sharing behaviors. Zarrella uses the Regressive Imagery Dictionary (RID) and Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) methods to arrive at the conclusion that, “Articles … that include sexual references in their titles are shared on Facebook far more than the average story.” ...
If you’re one of those people who scribbles your plans for a given week on the back of the junk mail in your purse (totally not me…), then you could probably benefit from MySpace’s new platform. Today, MySpace continues on its quest to distinguish itself as a place for entertainment and socializing with the addition of what is essentially a calendar that combines your events, your friends’ events, concerts and shindigs put on by your favorite artists and even events from your Facebook account. You can also buy concert tix from band pages and pages of other entertainers. ...
Google’s adding an intriguing new feature to its Twitter search options –- the ability to “replay” a moment in time to see what people were tweeting about a given topic at any point between the present and the advent of the microblogging tool. In a blog post, Google explains that this could be used to “explore any topic that people have discussed on Twitter. Want to know how the news broke about health care legislation in Congress, what people were saying about Justice Paul Stevens’ retirement or what people were tweeting during your own marathon run?” ...
Twitter has just announced a new feature and API for desktop applications: users streams. The revelation was made by Twitter’s Director of Platform Ryan Sarver at the Chirp conference. The new API is focused around pushing out data to desktop applications in real time. There will no longer be rate-limits for data on desktops — tweets, retweets and all other updates will be streamed directly to the desktop. ...
Earlier this year we predicted that Twitter would use geotagging to identify physical places via Twitter, and today Evan Williams announced at the Chirp conference that the company is doing just that with its new Points of Interest feature. The feature doesn’t appear to be live yet, but soon users will have the ability to click on a place name — included in geotagged tweets — to view the particular place on a map. Next to the map, Twitter users will see a stream of nearby tweets, giving them a real-time view of what’s happening in a particular place at a particular time. ...
In kicking off Twitter’s Chirp developer conference, the company finally revealed its long mysterious registered user number, and it’s surprisingly large (based on some prior outside estimates): 105 million, or to be exact, 105,779,710, according to a slide showing behind Co-founder Biz Stone during his opening remarks. The growth’s not over either — Twitter says its still adding 300,000 users per day. Moreover, as many have speculated, most of Twitter’s traffic — 75% of it in fact — comes from third-party clients and applications. ...
Aiming for one billion Twitterers by 2013? Twitter’s International Team Lead Engineer Matt Sanford has blogged on the company’s site that Twitter is seeing growth of over 60 percent in registrations outside the U.S. After setting up a Spanish language capability in November, the microblogging service saw a huge surge in registrations in Latin America, Sanford said. Sign-ups in India also spiked early in the year after several politicians and Bollywood movie stars began Tweeting. ...