140 characters can get Indonesians 12 years in jail

Indonesia’s Communications and Information Minister has declared that anyone tweeting illegal content, such as blasphemy, pornography, and threats, could spend up to 12 years in prison.

Indonesia has a strained history with free speech issues and open media, so a law that would punish Twitter users harshly for their words isn’t entirely surprising. The case of Prita Mulyasari is one big example of how uncomfortable the country is with online communication. Mulyasari was jailed and … Continue Reading

Obama shows further mastery of social by tweeting Spotify campaign playlist

Many analysts think President Obama won the 2008 election partly due to his campaign’s ability to use social networks and the web to rally and influence voters. And now with the 2012 election season upon us, Obama is showing he still gets it with the release of a subscribe-able 28-track Spotify playlist.

Obama’s official Twitter account today posted a new Spotify playlist titled “2012 Campaign Playlist” with the message: “A little Wilco, a bit of … Continue Reading

Nivio pulls in $21M to make cloud computing cheaper and more student-friendly

Cloud computing and desktop virtualization are rapidly growing trends in the tech world, and one company has spent a considerable amount of time developing this technology. Nivio, which started as an idea in 2004, announced today it has received $21 million in its first round of venture capital funding.

Nivio lets you store up to 10GB of your documents, music, and movies in the cloud for free with nDrive. Your files sync across all of … Continue Reading

Biggest Super Bowl loser is Netflix: Traffic down 40 percent during the game

The next time a nefarious organization wants to keep people off the Internet, it would do well to engineer its own championship professional football game.

Web traffic dropped significantly during this past Sunday’s Super Bowl football match between the New York Giants and the New England Patriots, according to a Sandvine report published today. But with this year’s game bringing in a record 111.3 million viewers, the Sandvine’s findings aren’t entirely surprising.

Overall internet traffic … Continue Reading

How Twitter captures the heartbeat of current affairs (infographic)

In 2008, the tweets per second record during the Super Bowl was 27. Four years and 12,206 more tweets per second later, the volume of Super Bowl-related Twitter activity is evidence of something more significant than a societal preoccupation with football’s greatest game or brands’ advertising gambles.

A look at the escalation of tweets per second over the years tells us that Twitter has blossomed into the social network of record for current affairs.

The … Continue Reading

Brazil attempting to block tweets with speed trap locations

A country progressive in its stance on off-the-clock email is pushing for a far more antiquated policy when it comes to information-sharing by way of Twitter.

The Attorney General of Brazil, according to Brazilian publication O Globo (The Globe), has filed a preliminary injunction to suspend and block the Twitter profiles of users who tweet the whereabouts of speed traps, DUI checkpoints, and radar locations.

The lawsuit seeks to fine those in violation of the … Continue Reading

Twitter hits a peak of 12K tweets per second during Super Bowl

Twitter users sent 12,233 tweets per second at the end of last night’s big game.

The Super Bowl halftime show featuring Madonna inspired 10,245 tweets per second.

Just one month ago, the service had 9,420 tweets per second during a Sunday football game featuring Tim Tebow. For contrast, Twitter saw a peak of 8,868 tweets per second during Beyoncé’s MTV music video awards show pregnancy announcement and just 5,106 tweets per second as the news … Continue Reading

A roundup of the Super Bowl and tech, by the numbers

Super Bowl 46 is history now and here’s a roundup of all of the internet-related reports. Roughly 100 million watch the Super Bowl every year, making it one of the most viewed events in the world.

Twitter reported that there were an average of 10,000 tweets per second in the final three minutes of the game. That beats the Royal Wedding at 3,966 tweets per second and Osama Bin Laden’s death at 5,106 tweets per … Continue Reading

A web geek’s round-up for watching the Super Bowl

The NFL’s Super Bowl championship football game is routinely one of the most watched televised events of the year with over 100 million viewers. But increasingly, people don’t just want to watch the game, they want to interact with it. For me, that means keeping my iPhone and iPad open while the television is on. And this year’s game will actually allow me to use both devices for more than just a distraction during the … Continue Reading

Twitter a truly global tool with 72% of accounts outside of the U.S.

Twitter is growing in popularity across the world, with U.S. accounts now representing just slightly more than one quarter (28.1 percent) of the total Twitter population, according to new data.

With 33.3 million accounts, Brazil now outranks Japan (29.9 million accounts) as the second most Twittering country, but Japanese remains the second most used language on Twitter after English, according to Paris-based social media research company Semiocast.

Semiocast said it analyzed the explicit and implicit … Continue Reading

Twitter’s revenue expected to nearly double in 2012

Twitter is expected to see $259.9 million in revenue in 2012, up from $139.5 in 2011.

Over the next couple of years, the company’s revenue is forecast to reach $399.5 million in 2013 and $540 million by 2014.

Year-over-year revenue growth for 2011 to 2012 is estimated to be at 83 percent; that growth rate is expected to slow to 36 percent by 2014.

For a company that (rather famously) didn’t have a business model … Continue Reading

SocialFolders backs up your Facebook photos & Google Docs on your hard drive

With cloud computing all the rage these days, we often have files and bits of data that live exclusively on a server far away from our hard drives. And while that’s often really awesome, sometimes you want and need a backup of that information on your computer. Enter SocialFolders, a service that backs up your social and cloud data to your hard drive.

“SocialFolders was basically created to help people manage their content on social … Continue Reading

Don’t mess with Dick: Twitter CEO speaks out against Google, censorship, and SOPA

If Twitter is to become a dominant web company and live up to the accidental potential its original founders never intended, it will do so under the leadership of its well-spoken, quick-witted and confident CEO Dick Costolo.

Costolo, CEO of a company that has historically been as flighty as it name suggests, appeared every bit the able-minded and focused leader Twitter needs to succeed in a social landscape dominated by Facebook and under siege by … Continue Reading

Twitter CEO Dick Costolo: 2012 is going to be the Twitter election

2012 is going to be the Twitter election, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo said at the D: Dive Into Media event in Dana Point, California Monday night.

In an interview with AllThingsD media editor Peter Kafka, Costolo said that a majority of the Republican candidates are buying ads, otherwise known as Promoted Tweets, Trends or Accounts, on the information network.

“Yes,” he said, “they’re buying ads … and they’re going to continue to do it.”

Political … Continue Reading

Social media’s role in politics

You’ve read how Facebook and Twitter fueled the Arab Spring uprising. You are watching the videos coming out of Syria on Facebook. But most likely you have not witnessed the power of social media impacting politics in near real time right here at home in America. Sure, activism groups and politicians have tapped social media to raise money. But to date, no flash mob has ever stopped a bill in its tracks or beaten down … Continue Reading

British tourists detained, barred from U.S. after tweet about “destroying America”

Two British tourists were detained and barred from entering the U.S. after the Department of Homeland Security flagged one of them for joking to “destroy America” and to dig up Marilyn Monroe’s grave on Twitter.

British citizens Leigh Van Bryan (pictured, middle) and his friend Emily Bunting recently flew to Los Angeles for a holiday trip and instead were interrogated for five hours and locked up over night, according to The Sun newspaper.

Bryan told … Continue Reading

Twitter database reveals the 4,411 takedown notices it received last year

Twitter has been tap-dancing around foreign governments’ demands to remove tweets, as VentureBeat’s Jennifer Van Grove reported this week. Now the company has made public the 4,411 takedown notices Twitter has received in the U.S. under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

You can read the text of these notices, dating back to November, 2010, on Chilling Effects, a website dedicated to collecting and analyzing legal notices that affect online users and publishers. The sheer volume … Continue Reading

Jack Dorsey, Ron Conway to attend The Crunchies Awards

It’s time to get excited for The Crunchies Awards. The final line-up of notable guests has been released, making us all the more excited to co-host this star-studded event.

Harris Wittels, “Parks and Recreation” writer and all-around funny guy, will take the stage as the host of the 2011 Crunchies Awards next Tuesday night, January 31. VentureBeat, GigaOm, and TechCrunch are hosting the event, awarding the best tech innovation of 2011.

The event is chock-full … Continue Reading

The FBI wants to spider social media to prepare for the worst

The Federal Bureau of Investigation is creating a tool that will crawl Facebook, Twitter and more to catch emergencies before they happen.

According to a posting on the Federal Business Opportunities website, the FBI’s Strategic Information and Operations Center (SOIC) is feeling out the IT industry to see if anyone can create a “social media application.” The application should be able to spider through public content posted on social media sites such as Facebook and … Continue Reading