Social networking

The city of Yokohama in Japan has had to offer up some quick apologies to its nearly 42,000 followers for erroneously tweeting that North Korea had launched a missile at its homeland.

Earlier today, the Crisis Management Office Affairs Bureau for Yokohama tweeted that North Korea had launched a missile at Japan. The tweet stayed up for 20 minutes before being taken down and replaced with an apology from the city, saying that its tweet was sent out in error.

Yokohama acknowledged the error on its Web site (Google Translate), saying it created the tweet in advance to inform … Read more

Blogging platform Tumblr has pulled the plug on Storyboard, its year-old "ambitious experiment" with journalists covering Tumblr as a "living, breathing community."

Saying that he "couldn't be happier" with the editorial team's effort, Tumblr CEO David Karp announced that the unit would be shuttered and its employees laid off.

"What we've accomplished with Storyboard has run its course for now, and our editorial team will be closing up shop and moving on," Karp wrote. "I want to personally thank them for their great work."

Despite accomplishments involving &… Read more

I like to think I'm very simple.

Lovers have told me I'm not -- often while they toss my Golden State Warriors T-shirts out their apartment windows and curse quite loudly.

So simplicity is an entirely subjective concept.

In my own subjectivity (and that of many others), Apple's phones have always seemed so very simple to grasp. Both physically and emotionally.

But now, very vast brains have come along to declare that this might not be so.

Branding agency Siegel+Gale -- motto: "Simple is smart" (sigh) -- claims it used a proven (and presumably … Read more

This might seem like Fred Astaire and Carrot Top.

It might resemble that little-known double-act Putin and Tutu.

For some, it might even conjure Jerry Falwell and Jenna Jameson.

Here, you see, is news that the squeakiest of squeaky clean musical acts, the Jonas Brothers, are getting together with slightly more controversial gadget maker Huawei.

A breathless announcement is currently dancing before my eyes. It reveals that Huawei is to sponsor the Jonas Brothers' new tour, which, as you know, begins July 10 in Chicago. … Read more

Presidents want to be loved just like anyone else.

Actually, presidents want to be loved a lot more than anyone else, which is why they became politicians in the first place. Well, that and the money.

It was touching, therefore, to see President Bill Clinton appear with Stephen Colbert on "The Colbert Report" and admit he was afraid of not being loved. On Twitter, that is. How could the man who turned the last election with one speech fear that he would be left all alone, with just a little blue bird for company? The president admitted that … Read more

Do you believe in life after death?

I believe that several fans of singing icon Cher have had such beliefs bolstered by events that occurred today on Twitter.

Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher passed away today.

She was admired and derided in almost equal measure. Some adored how she assaulted entrenched British institutions with her handbag. Others thought she was a petty and divisive shopkeeper's daughter.

One Web site that espoused the latter view is called Is Thatcher Dead Yet? It rather looked forward to her passing to the Safeway in the sky.

So when her death was announced, it immediately created the hashtag #nowthatchersdead.… Read more

Facebook users in the U.K. are being treated to the same premium charges their counterparts in the U.S. have been hit with when sending messages to certain high-profile members on the social network, as well as people outside their circle of friends.

According to U.K. news site The Sunday Times, Facebook users in the U.K. late last week started being charged as much as 10 British pounds (about $15) to send messages to celebrity-status Facebook members. Olympic diver Tom Daley and former Children's laureate Michael Rosen are the most expensive celebrities to contact.

Facebook last year announced what it called a "small experiment" … Read more

Perhaps your laptop, like mine, fights strange intrusions every day.

Some ads attempt to outwit pop-up blockers, as if it's a bizarre episode of "Survivor."

Yet it seems that some companies might be attempting even more irritating ways of not only attracting your attention, but detracting from the tone of Web site you're looking at.

Would you, for example, want to see a banner ad from H&R Block besmirching the pristine pages of Apple.com?

This is allegedly what happened to computer science Ph.D. student Zack Henkel. As Ars Technica reports, Zenkel was … Read more

Facebook Home, the social network's latest, major push into the mobile devices arena, has been leaked before its official debut in the marketplace.

Mobile news site MoDaCo obtained a copy of a prerelease build of Facebook Home from an HTC First ROM. The site reports that the installation is "rather buggy and incomplete" and it couldn't get the platform's Chat Heads to work.

However, many of Facebook Home's other features were accessible, and MoDaCo published photos of the application in action. For those who want to take the risk of running prerelease software, MoDaCo … Read more