Twitter

I had a look at my twitter page early this morning and read “Twitter is a rich source of insanity”, and thought “Wow, the twitter marketroids are really bold, but it’s a good line.” Upon re-reading, however, I realized that what it really said was “Twitter is a rich source of instantly updated information.” It might, however, have been a Freudian slip, because twitter got hacked yesterday, and bunches of celebs found they had been forced to follow the hacker. Even worse, as it struggled to right the ship, twitter temporarily removed their followers, and celebs found themselves in the traumatic position of being unpopular, at least for a while. ...

If you’re a fan of cloud storage service Dropbox and own an iPad, it’s your lucky day. The iPhone version was already quite good, but Dropbox have now updated the app for better iPad support. The new version of the app, available for free here [warning: iTunes link], makes great use of the extra screen real estate afforded by the iPad and takes advantage of both portrait and landscape modes. A few other visual niceties separate the iPad from the iPhone version, making an overall slicker appearance and implementation on the larger device. ...

Ah, cellphones and dodgeball, they go together like… well… they don’t really go together at all, but that’s not stopping Samsung Mobile from organizing what will purportedly be the world’s largest dodgeball game on May 12. The practice of launching a stunt to herald the advent of a new product is nothing new — remember when the Droid took over Times Square? And Samsung is no stranger to the record realm; it attempted to make the World Record for collecting the largest donation of mobile phones in one location in April at the Samsung Mobile 500 at Texas Motor Speedway in Fort Worth, TX (the company failed). And managed to set the World Record for the fastest text message sent using Swype technology on the Samsung Omnia II. ...

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. ...

On Jimmy Kimmel Live 2 nights ago, Jimmy asked guest Alyssa Milano to explain Twitter and hashtags to him. In the video below, Alyssa explains that she tweets 12 to 22 times per day, that she likes to imagine Jimmy Kimmel naked when she’s nervous and that she uses a lot of hashtags — a big plus in my book. A closer look at the actress’s Twitter stream reveals that she uses TweetDeck, an app she likes so much that she asks Twitter “not to kill TweetDeck.” The acquisition of Tweetie has made the future of other third party Twitter clients a little uncertain, but with support like this, the folks at TweetDeck have nothing to worry about. ...

Loic Le Meur, Seesmic founder and tech scene leader, was clearly bullish on the Twitter platform in this interview conducted yesterday at Chirp, the Twitter developer conference. Le Meur, whose company is launching its own platform, is a big believer in the opportunities for those who develop Twitter apps. Innovative apps that add value and diversity will always find a place in the market, and Le Meur is confident about Seesmic’s current position. ...

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?” ...

Today the Library of Congress is announcing that it’s doing its part to digitally preserve each and every public tweet since the beginning of time … err Twitter. It fittingly broke the news on Twitter earlier today. As a federal cultural institution, the Library of Congress exists for research purposes, preserving every form of written word imaginable — and now that includes our tweets. The institution deems tweets important and hopes to use the archives “to learn about ourselves and the world around us.” ...

Metadata has long been part of Twitter applications. Viewing conversation threads or learning about a user’s location has changed how users interact with content and have provided third party app developers with great opportunities to innovate on Twitter’s platform. Ryan Sarver, Twitter’s director of platform, announced today at Chirp, the Twitter developer conference, that annotations can now be added to tweets. In other words, any kind of metadata can be added to any tweet; it’s up to developers to decide what kinds of apps they build to showcase what kinds of metadata. ...

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. ...