Twitter

Twitter: Don't you dare tweet your mom for Mother's Day

You know how you love tweeting? You know how Twitter is the epicenter of your universe, the medium of your message?

Well, Sunday is Mother's Day and Twitter has a message for you: Don't tweet.

At least, don't even think of tweeting your mom to wish her Happy Mother's Day.

How do I know this? Well, Twitter released a PSA (yes, crises such as this need a PSA) to explain to you (boys) that momma deserves more than a tweeted hug and kiss.

To use Twitter's own words, if you are thinking of tweeting your … Read more

Jimmy Kimmel gets celebrities to humiliate Twitter trolls

Few are immune from feeling envy.

Some, though, just can't help expressing it.

In our socially networked world, there are several choices of medium on which to vent one's inadequacies, but none seems so immediate as Twitter.

You can go there and post all sorts of deeply offensive things and actually direct them at the famous people who have turned you green in more places than merely your gills.

For example: "I just saw @JessicaAlba. If this was 2007, I'd be really excited."… Read more

Twitter buys tech that speeds up data analysis

Twitter has purchased the technology behind Ubalo, a 2-year-old startup that specializes in making technical computing more accessible for engineers and scientists.

"In early 2011, we started Ubalo to make large-scale computing easier and more accessible to a technical audience," co-founders Jacob Mattingley and Ian Downes said in a note published on the company's Web site Thursday. "A few days ago, Twitter agreed to acquire our technology and we agreed to join their staff."

A Twitter spokesperson declined to provide comment or share the terms of the deal, but a tweet from Twitter's engineering … Read more

TweetPee: Huggies sends a tweet when baby's wet

Hashtag #pee! If you're looking to keep up with Junior's bladder goings-on when you're not in immediate range of his diaper, Huggies is making it easy to do that via social media.

TweetPee consists of a sensor and a Twitter alert. The cute little bird-shaped sensor attaches to the front of the diaper. When it senses a change in moisture, it sends you a tweet letting you know it's time to get off of Twitter and attend to business. You decide whether to retweet that message to your followers. … Read more

Sole female, minor coder wins hackathon with anti-spoiler app

As the father of a 5-year-old girl who adores all things princess but also digs stars and comets and mastered the user interface for both Android and iOS in about half a day, I'm always on the look out for Geek Grrl role models. So the new hero in my household is Jennie Lamere.

This 17-year-old grrl loves both reality television and hackathons and tapped into those two passions to win the grand prize at the TVnext hack event in Boston last month. Her brilliantly simple hack, first detailed on evolver.fm, is designed to prevent spoilers on Twitter while watching live TV.

Surely we've all shaken our fists in the air when a fellow "Walking Dead" or "Game of Thrones" fan in a different time zone tweets about the latest character to get eliminated while you're still popping popcorn and getting the couch ready for the evening's gore-fest.

Lamere's Google Chrome app, Twivo, allows users to block any tweets related to a certain keyword or words for a specified period of time, allowing you to keep up with the rest of the Twitterverse during commercial breaks without ruining the show you're watching.

Read more

Teen suspended for tweet critical of high school sports

I am writing this with a cold compress on my head and a milk chocolate digestive biscuit in my mouth.

Both are to soothe my furrowed thoughts.

For this is another tale of peculiarity from the antiseptic-smelling hallways of America's high schools.

It has been well-established that strange things happen in the nation's places of youth education.

You can get expelled and arrested for putting toilet cleaner and foil in a water bottle on school premises.

You can also get suspended for tweeting that you don't think your high school has very good sports teams.

Wesley Teague, … Read more

Facebook support removed from TweetDeck

If you've been relying on TweetDeck as a front-end for your Facebook account, it's time to look elsewhere.

Starting today, Twitter-owned TweetDeck no longer supports Facebook. That move, which Twitter announced in March, was part of the social-networking giant's effort to "focus our development efforts on our modern, Web-based versions of TweetDeck."

As expected, as part of the move Twitter also has removed support for TweetDeck for Air and versions of the client for iPhone and Android.

For now, TweetDeck for Mac is still available, but one has to wonder how long that will be … Read more

Social media self-promotion: The urge, the ick, the outcome

"My agent just sent my book to publishers! Fingers crossed!" That's the status message I just stopped myself from writing on Facebook.

It took all the willpower I've ever had.

In fact, I'm now eating a block of cheese because focusing so hard on not updating Facebook with that status has depleted my willpower reserves. My diet is left defenseless.

I'm 29, and I'm working hard to make a living, to produce something I am proud of, to pay the rent, to scrape some savings together, to make time for love, to eat … Read more

Evan Williams: A mogul in Internet publishing

NEW YORK -- Twitter and Medium co-founder Evan Williams loved reading magazines growing up in rural Nebraska in the pre-Internet days. It was a way to experience the world outside of Clarks, Nebraska, population 369.

"I wanted to get out of there and see the bigger world. [Clarks] is not a bad place to be, but I yearned to see the rest of the world," Williams said in conversation with Wired senior writer Steven Levy at the Wired Business Conference here.

Since leaving Nebraska for the West Coast, the 41-year-old serial entrepreneur has become one the Internet's … Read more

Onion's Twitter account hacked by Syrian Electronic Army

When it comes to parody news site the Onion, it's hard to tell if anything it publishes is real. So, after the site's Twitter feed had several tweets on Monday saying "The Syrian Electronic Army Was Here" and other similar messages, few people batted an eyelash.

However, both the Syrian Electronic Army and the Onion have confirmed that indeed the site's Twitter account was hacked, according to The New York Times.

Besides announcing that "The Syrian Electronic Army Was Here," the hacking group, which supports Syrian President Bashar Assad, also tweeted a message … Read more