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

Not total bunk, case of “stolen” Twitter followers moves forward

The case of the “stolen” Twitter followers may or may not have merit, but its claims passed a second litmus test this week.

In the matter of PhoneDog versus Noah Kravitz, a U.S. district court judge ruled to allow the plaintiff, mobile review site PhoneDog, to move forward its suit against former employee Noah Kravitz with amended claims.

Kravitz, currently the editor-at-large at TechnoBuffalo, is being sued for allegedly misappropriating trade secrets by changing 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

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

Twitter tap dances around tweet takedown requests

Twitter is becoming quite the tightrope artist with new technology that will help it better walk the thin line between supporting free speech and honoring takedown requests.

The information network has developed a system for withholding tweets from the streams of users in select countries, as opposed to deleting them altogether.

Twitter will now partially remove some tweets at the behest of governmental authorities in countries where individuals are not permitted to speak freely on … Continue Reading

Jack Dorsey: Twitter seeing 3 to 5 percent engagement on Promoted Tweets and Trends

The market has tested Twitter’s Promoted Products business model and found it good, chairman Jack Dorsey confidently asserted today at the Digital Life Design conference in Munich.

Twitter’s Promoted Products — including Promoted Tweets, Accounts and Trends — are seeing 3 to 5 percent engagement, Dorsey said. “Advertisers are coming back … [the market] is proving that this is something people want to see more of.”

The company’s Promoted Products offer advertisers a way to … Continue Reading

Mojang reveals 20M registered users for Minecraft

In a tweet sent out on Saturday, Markus Persson, aka Notch, the developer behind gaming sensation Minecraft, made note of the 20 million registered user milestone. He joked,

“Minecraft now has 20 million registered users. At 70 kg each, that’s 25% of the weight of the Great Pyramid of Giza.”

At the current price of a registration (about $27 US), that’s a lot of money as well as weight. Even at the old pre-release cost … Continue Reading

Tweets are free speech, even threatening ones, judge rules

Does posting thousands of threatening messages to Twitter targeted at single person constitute online stalking? Legally, the answer is now officially no.

Judge Roger W. Titus ruled, in the case of the U.S. versus William Lawrence Cassidy, that harassing messages posted to Twitter or blog sites are the digital equivalent of soapbox rants, and are thus protected forms of free speech.

In the now-dismissed case, the government had accused the defendant Cassidy of causing “substantial … Continue Reading

Embed this tweet: This New New Twitter feature finally works

Twitter is good in (em)bed

— Jenn Van Grove (@jbruin) December9, 2011

Throw out the blackbird pie, Twitter has finally served up a new dish of embeddable tweets that is actually digestible.

Twitter released a brand spanking New New Twitter option called “embeddable tweets” Thursday. The feature makes it simple for folks to pull tweets from Twitter and paste them, with all their Twittery-goodness in tact (reply, retweet, favorite and follow options), elsewhere on the … Continue Reading

Peter Molyneux parody account ‘Molydeux’ suspended by Twitter

The Twitter account parodying Peter Molyneux, the legendary English game designer and Microsoft Europe creative director, has recently been suspended.

The account — which gained over 19,000 followers and cited by many as the funniest  account on Twitter — clearly stated that it was not the real deal. It also doesn’t have Twitter’s “verified” seal of authentication. But that hasn’t stopped some people from taking it all too seriously.

Molyneux, perhaps best known for creating … Continue Reading

Another Skyrim patch coming, Bethesda PR tells frustrated player to “calm down”

If you’re one of the millions of players who purchased Skyrim in the past week, upon loading up the game for the first time you probably noticed an update was already available. Now Bethesda has announced that another patch is in the works, though the company has yet to detail exactly what issues it will be addressing.

With a game as ambitious as Skyrim and from a company as notorious for releasing unfinished, buggy games … Continue Reading

The case of the “stolen” Twitter account

The ownership of a moderately popular Twitter account and the value of the account’s 17,000 followers are at the center of an ongoing legal dispute.

In the case of the stolen Twitter followers, or PhoneDog v. Noah Kravitz, PhoneDog, a mobile review site, alleges that former staffer Noah Kravitz misappropriated trade secrets by changing the password and name of a Twitter account he used while employed by PhoneDog. PhoneDog argues that Kravitz caused the company … Continue Reading

Why CNN’s ‘Black in America’ misses the point on race in tech

Almost no one has seen episode 4 of CNN’s  documentary series “Black in America,” about race in the technology world, but a lot of folks are already jumping in on the race controversy the show’s promo has kickstarted.

A lot of folks need to shut up and wait till it airs.

Black in America: The New Promised Land – Silicon Valley, is about the journey of eight participants in the NewMe Accelerator program for black … Continue Reading

Developer of Twitter for iPhone departs company

Loren Brichter, the founder of Atebits, the creator of the iPhone app Tweetie and the mastermind behind Twitter for iPhone, has completed his last day at Twitter.

“Today was my last day at Twitter. Taking some time to figure out what’s next. Really proud of the way the team has grown,” Brichter wrote in a tweet posted to Twitter Friday afternoon.

Brichter has been developing Mac applications since 2007. As the founder of Atebits, Brichter … Continue Reading

The life and death of tweets, according to a week’s worth of Klout data

Why did that all-important, life-changing tweet you feverishly posted lose steam after just a few minutes? Odds are, it’s because you’re just not influential enough.

Klout, the startup that measures a social media users digital influence, analyzed a week’s worth of retweet data and researched the correlation between the life of tweets — as determined by the spread of retweets — and Klout scores. The startup specifically looked at the half-life of tweets (pictured below). … Continue Reading

iOS 5 available for all iPhone users October 12 with over 200 new features

Update: iOS 5 is now available for download.
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Apple announced today its latest mobile operating system update, iOS 5, will be available for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch owners to download on October 12.

Today’s Apple event had little by way of new features available in iOS 5, but did recap what we can expect next Wednesday when we all plug into iTunes.

According to Scott Forstall, Apple’s senior vice president of iOS … Continue Reading