Thursday: July 28, 2011
Sponsored tweets from companies you follow will be appearing more often in your Twitter timeline.If you use a Twitter and you happen to follow of lot of name brand companies you'll be seeing what that particular company has to say front and center. Sponsored tweets from said companies will appear at the top of your timeline and can be easily dismissed with a click. This seems like a good idea in theory, if I'm following a given company on Twitter one would think that what they have to say would be relevant to my interests (in theory of course). In theory you could also follow me on Twitter (@subwarm), and no - there will not be sponsored messages from me or GLM (not intentionally anyway).
Monday: July 18, 2011
An awkward meeting between Twitter founder Biz Stone and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook.The Next Web posts an interesting article regarding a meeting between the two heads of the socially charged companies that happened some time around November 2008. It is rumored that this is about the time that Facebook was thinking of acquiring Twitter for sum of about $500 million. I smell a Social Network sequel or at the very least an Odd Couple-esque sitcom.
Thursday: July 7, 2011
- App of the Week: Instantbird
Lately I've noticed that I've somehow found myself on a great deal of sites that have their own form of instant messaging clients. Facebook has one, Google has one, and then there's that ancient AIM account that I can never seem to let go of. The problem is that it can be more than a little annoying having to be logged into each respective utility to do something as simple as instant messaging. Enter Instantbird. I gave this a whirl last week and I've liked it thus far. Instantbird takes all of these IM clients and puts them into one easy to use app. You can finally see a list of your Facebook friends along with your AIM friends, it works almost a little too well. After adding my Facebook list I was overwhelmed by the number of items on my typically small AIM list.According to the Instantbird website they currently support the following clients by default: AIM, Facebook Chat, Gadu-Gadu, Google Talk, Groupwise, ICQ, IRC, MSN, MySpaceIM, Netsoul, QQ, Simple, Twitter, XMPP, Yahoo and Yahoo JAPAN. That's a pretty big list of clients.
Under the hood is a lot of code from the Mozilla project. As such there are add-ons and familiar settings panes for those who are well-versed in the art of Firefox (you'll notice some similarities mainly in the control panel section). So far I've only tried the app on Windows but there is a Mac version as well. I like that the software is minimal and for the most part stays out of your way. For those of you can't live without tabs you can have tabbed chats. For those who are maniacal single window fans (for purposes of IM, I fall into this category) you can turn it off. Lastly, you can also theme your IM conversations with a couple different variations. Overall I reccomend giving this app a try if you like me, you grew tired of having to log in here and log into that. Consolidation of your instant messaging is a good thing.
You can download Instantbird from their website: http://instantbird.com/.
Tuesday: May 11, 2010
Twitter glitch that allowed anyone to follow anybody quickly resolved. Phew.For a brief couple of moments yesterday it was possible to have anyone follow you on the micro-blogging service. That wondrous feeling was countered by Twitter setting all accounts to zero followers - to which a collective gasp across the Interwebs could be heard miles around.
Tuesday: April 20, 2010
Facebook now accounts for 41% of all social media traffic according to comScore stats.As of March 2010, Facebook traffic made up 41% of all traffic on a list of popular social destinations. MySpace was in second place, capturing around 24% of traffic. Gmail had 15%, and Twitter had 8%.
Thursday: April 15, 2010
Entire Twitter archive to be included in Library of Congress digital assets collection.The addition of Twitter into the organization's offerings could foster an enormous amount of academic research. From a new kind of historical record to an unprecedented opportunity for discovering patterns of social interaction, this is big.
Choose two celebrity Twitterers and see whose fans are dumber with one handy site.Stupid Fight can't go out and administer an intelligence test to each person that's sending messages to a celebrity. So instead, it estimates based on several stupid indicators. Are they using twenty exclamation marks in a row? Do they endlessly use the abbreviation 'OMG'?
Monday: April 12, 2010
Conan O'Brien headed over to TBS for brand new late-night talk show.Said O'Brien: 'In three months I've gone from network television to Twitter to performing live in theaters, and now I'm headed to basic cable. My plan is working perfectly.' O'Brien will host his hour-long, yet-to-be-titled show Mondays through Thursdays at 11 p.m. (ET/PT).
Thursday: April 1, 2010
Twitter revamps their homepage to in effort to make Twitter easier to understand.To me, this revamp is actually a much welcomed step in the right direction as you can plainly see the 'realtime-ness' that didn't appear to be there with their previous version. Trending topics scroll across in realtime along with top tweets from select users. Not bad.
Friday: March 26, 2010
Twenty geeky gadgets for growing plants indoors.Yes, it's quite possible (with a little soldering) to see how your plants are doing by way of their personal Twitter updates. Through those updates you'll know if your beloved plants require water and/or more sunlight all through Twitter. In other news, your plants are on Twitter.
Monday: March 15, 2010
The age-old art of blogging may have peaked thanks to introduction of Twitter.Blogs are meant for people for whom being a writer, being a creator, is a passion, or perhaps a requirement of life. They're meant for people for whom Facebook's 'What's on your mind?' question can't always be answered in 500 characters or less.
Thursday: February 18, 2010
New website exposes the dangers of improper social network usage.In a nutshell, a third party service posts your location status via Twitter. Someone managed to aggregate that content into one easy website for the entire world to see. A happy day for burglars round the world.
Wednesday: February 10, 2010
Google takes a big step into the social networking arena with new service.Google Buzz is a new way to start conversations about the things you find interesting. It's built right into Gmail, so you don't have to peck out an entirely new set of friends from scratch — it just works. If you think about it, there's always been a big social network underlying Gmail.
Thursday: February 4, 2010
Do you think that your favorite television characters need Twitter accounts?My initial response fell into the negative on this subject but then I realized that some of my favorite characters would actually be pretty funny to read in some type of Twitter capacity. For your enjoyment here is a site dedicated solely to Creed quotes.
Thursday: January 7, 2010
You'll soon be able to tweet from your automobile thanks to the Ford Sync system.Yet another way that technology is going to make the roads safer. As if cell phones, smart phones, app phones, GPS, XM weren't enough to distract from you from you know, actually driving.