Social networking

The great Twitter 'text-your-parents-you're-a-drug-dealer' experiment

Twitter might well be a repository for half-truths, halfwits, and even the half cut, but sometimes it has its uses.

One consists of trying to get your followers to provide some entertainment.

How can one not commend Nathan Fielder, star of Comedy Central's "Nathan For You," for creating art in action with the help merely of his followers, their phones, and their parents?

He took to Twitter and made a very simple request. He asked his followers to text their parents accidentally that they had drugs for sale and to screenshoot their reactions.

The text they were to send read: "Got 2 grams for $40." A price not to be sniffed at. They were then to offer an oopsie that the text had gone to the wrong recipient.… Read more

Twitter may soon tell you what's going on nearby, right now

If you've ever wondered what people near you are tweeting about in real-time and thought that might help you find cool things going on nearby, Twitter may soon offer exactly that feature.

According to AllThingsD, Twitter may well be working on new features that would show tweets from people near you.

"Twitter is in the process of testing a new feature that lets you discover tweets from people within a certain distance of your location," AllThingsD said it had been told by multiple sources. "The idea is to surface relevant activity based on where you are … Read more

Suicide is funny, says Hyundai ad

Can you laugh about suicide?

Can you laugh about suicide while you're trying to sell someone a car?

It seems that someone at one of Hyundai's ad agencies felt that selling a healthy car merited flogging a dead man. Or, at least, a man who wanted to be dead by his own hand.

The perfect opportunity, the agency must have thought, came with the Hyundai iX35. It has 100 percent water emissions -- nothing noxious, you see. That's a killer feature.

So they made an ad in which a man tries to commit suicide in his garage … Read more

Sunil Tripathi, falsely linked on social media to Boston bombings, found dead

Sunil Tripathi, the Brown University student falsely identified by people posting on Reddit and Twitter as a suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings, is dead.

The 22-year-old's body was recovered from the waters around India Point Park in Rhode Island. In a post on Facebook, Tripathi's family confirmed Tripathi's death and offered the following note:

As we carry indescribable grief, we also feel incredible gratitude. To each one of you-from our hometown to many distant lands-we extend our thanks for the words of encouragement, for your thoughts, for your hands, for your prayers, and for the love … Read more

LinkedIn nurtures professional relationships with Contacts app

LinkedIn is playing personal assistant with the release of Contacts, an automated contact management service for desktop and iPhone arriving Thursday in limited release.

Contacts gives members of the professional social network a way to bring together their contacts spread across address books, email accounts, and calendar apps. The service, which comes with a companion iPhone application, also hooks into LinkedIn's desktop experience and adds a relationship module to member profiles that includes recent conversations, meetings, and personal notes.

Contacts is the first LinkedIn product to launch simultaneously on desktop and mobile, and offers members a smarter way to … Read more

How Virgin America lets you text a hottie midflight

It is possible to meet the lover of your dreams on a plane.

Usually, this involves being fortunate enough to have them sit next to you. Idle chatter is exchanged and, before you know it, you're living together.

A serious amount of serendipity is needed for a happy ending in the air. So Virgin America has decided it should broaden your chances.

As ClickOrlando teases it, your in-flight entertainment system will now offer the potential of some off-flight entertainment too.

For, should you see a man, woman or stuffed toy that sparks your amorous aspirations, you will be able … Read more

Bill Clinton joins Twitter (for real this time)

I can only hope he was influenced more by Stephen Colbert than by Anthony Weiner.

Whichever it was, Bill Clinton is now officially on Twitter. As himself.

Within what seemed like minutes of his arrival, he garnered more than 198,000 followers, all of whom, no doubt, will be hanging on his every syllable.

You may recall that the president was inveigled recently by Colbert to joining Twitter against his own volition. Colbert even opened the @PrezBillyJeff account without the president's apparent knowledge or approval.

Former President Clinton freely admitted to Colbert he was worried about tweeting and getting … Read more

Zynga launches Draw Something 2, kills four other games

Zynga executives say they're "doubling down on big bets," which means killing off games that won't bring in big bucks in the long run and sticking to franchises that do.

The company announced Wednesday that Draw Something 2, the sequel to the popular Draw Something mobile drawing game, goes live this evening. On the flip side, Zynga is killing off four other games: The Ville, Empires and Allies, Dream Zoo, and Zynga City on Tencent.

The new Draw Something 2 includes a social feed, where you can like or comment on drawings, and follow people. There'… Read more

Zynga revenue drops 18 percent as player base shrinks

Zynga posted a small profit in the first quarter of 2013, earning 1 cent per share and bringing in $263,589 in revenue, the company reported Wednesday.

That beats expectations, but is down 18 percent from the same period last year. Bookings brought in $230 million, which is down 30 percent from the previous year.

Some Wall Street analysts expected the company to report a loss of 4 cents per share with a revenue of $209.79 million, according to Nasdaq. The company's own expectations was a loss of 5 to 4 cents a share with revenue between $255 … Read more

Top-trending music topics on Twitter to fuel new TV show

Do you like music and want to know what the hottest music-related stories are? A new TV show that features the top trending music topics on Twitter hopes to have you covered.

Known as "Trending 10," the new show is being produced for music-oriented cable TV network Fuse, in partnership with Twitter and gum company Trident.

The idea, the companies said in a release, is to build "Trending 10" around the Top 10 music-related Twitter topics of the day. Those stories will be selected based on Fuse's "heat tracker" algorithm, a system that … Read more