Posts Tagged: ‘Twitter’

Last June, Senator Joseph Lieberman introduced an act in Congress that would give the executive branch of government — essentially, the President — to command key pieces of infrastructure to sever ties to the Internet. Some critics of the proposed legislation fear it could lead to a situation similar to what happened in Egypt earlier this month. What if the President were to command Internet Service Providers to shut down in order to silence protesters? Despite multiple statements from Lieberman and others saying that the language of the act specifically prohibits the President from such actions, distrust and suspicion continue to fester. Perhaps Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s words about Internet restrictions and censorship will help.

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Was your luggage lost? Did someone steal prescription medication out of your checked bag? Was your flight cancelled due to snowstorm and now you’re sleeping on a cot in an airport?

Then tweet it. As The New York Times put it:

“Because of the viral nature of Twitter, with Twitterers habitually “re-tweeting” one another’s posts, customers who reach out to the airline via Twitter may get a quicker response than they would by phone or another communications channel as airlines attempt to quell any negative publicity.”

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I met several incredible people at CES 2011. One such person is Brian Brushwood, stage magician and technology enthusiast. I had encountered Brian once before at Dragon*Con in 2010 but we didn’t have much of a chance to chat. At CES, we both guest hosted Tech News Today along with Ian Morris of CNET UK. I just learned about a project of Brian’s that promises to carry on his life, in a virtual sense, after he has shuffled off the mortal coil (in other words, after he dies).

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There have been a host of stories in the news about the business of technology lately. A good number of them are about Steve Jobs’s taking a leave of absence from Apple and leaving the company (mostly) in the hands of Chief Operating Officer Tim Cook. But a good bit of the news is about that good old standby, funding.

For example, last week I read Paul Thomasch’s article in Reuters that Facebook’s revenue for last year…

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I’m having trouble figuring out if the rapper 50 Cent is guilty of insider trading for his big stock tip over the weekend.

Mr. Cent (or Mr. Jackson, your pick) used his rather large Twitter following (about 3.8 million) to boost the share price of penny stock in a company he holds shares called H&H Imports.

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Yesterday was a bad day for Skype. The peer-to-peer voice over Internet protocol and messaging service experienced a massive failure across multiple regions, leaving millions without service. I follow a lot of tech podcasts and shows — many of these rely almost exclusively on Skype to connect hosts with guests and record content. Without Skype, they were left scrambling to do things the old-fashioned way, either by connecting by phone or relying on creating content in a physical studio.

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Studies have shown that twitter posts (tweets) more often than not fall on deaf ears, or no ears at all. For example: Survey: 71 percent of tweets are ignored They discovered that more than seven in every 10 tweets sink without any kind of reaction from the world. Of the remainder, just 6 percent get [...]

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The Jakarta Globe reports that the Twitter account of Andi Arief, the government adviser for disaster management and social affairs, was hacked on Thursday. Someone managed to hijack the adviser’s account, @AndiAriefNew, and send a message to his 8,500 followers: “Besok jakarta tsunami” (“Jakarta tsunami tomorrow). Aside from the loss of face, there doesn’t appear to have been any fallout or panic created by the tweet. The hacker also sent other messages, mocking other national officials and prompting an indignant response from a staffer.

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I read an interesting post on Graham Cluley’s blog over at Sophos this morning. Cluley is a professional security expert. Today, he wrote about a security flaw on the Twitter Web site that could cause big problems. The flaw allows users to post messages using onMouseOver JavaScript code. The code prompts a pop-up window to appear if you scroll your mouse over the tweet. It’ll also automatically direct you to a Web page if there’s a link included in the message. Can you see where this could be a huge problem?

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Yesterday afternoon, Twitter held a press conference unveiling updates to the site’s design. Soon you’ll be able to view content like pictures and videos within your Twitter home page. It’s aligning Twitter with other social networking sites, most notably Facebook. The less time you spend clicking on links and checking out photos, the more time you spend on Twitter.

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