tweets

Seattle residents now have the option of following the local police department on Twitter. In a first-of-a-kind program, the city's authorities are launching a new initiative that involves cops translating the news they get on the streets to tweets.

Dubbed "Tweets-by-beat," this program attempts to replace the police blotter that normally runs in local papers with a tech version of basically the same thing, according to the New York Times. When residents follow the department on the social network, they'll get routine tweets of the up-to-the-moment crime happenings in their neighborhoods.

"Liquor violation -- intoxicated … Read more

If you're on Twitter, you've probably followed a live-tweeted gadget reveal or political convention or Olympics event or Mars rover landing in your day. You probably have not, however, followed a live-tweeted surgery. That could change tomorrow.

As Dr. Douglas Backous performs a cochlear implant operation at Seattle's Swedish Medical Center, his moves will be tweeted live, with still photos from inside the operating room posted to Instagram (presumably not by Backous himself). … Read more

Twitter today unveiled the latest iteration of its Discover tab, a move it said will show users a steady stream of tweets deemed relevant to them.

The company first launched the Discover feature on Twitter.com last December, aiming to "bring you essential information from the Web [and in] May, we added stronger signals and a new design that made it more personal for you with better stories and tweets from people you know."

And in a blog post this morning, Twitter wrote that "Now we're improving Discover again: When you visit the Discover tab on … Read more

How can you tweet in iOS 6? Let us count the ways.

The latest version of Apple's mobile OS offers eager tweeters a variety of ways to get their message out. Here's a look at a few different ways to tweet.

The old standby, of course, is to just fire up the official Twitter mobile app or a third-party Twitter client for iOS. From your favorite Twitter app, you can either type your tweet or use your iPhone's built-in voice dictation to speak your tweet.

You can tweet directly from the Notification Center without having to call … Read more

TweetDeck for Mac now ships with a brand-new, well-designed user interface and a Twitter-for-Mac-like look, and it has multiple additional features that power users will love. By switching to HTML5, the developers have eliminated the need to continuously update Adobe Air, and now users can enjoy a neat app for reading, tweeting, and searching for specific topics of interest.

We liked how simple to use TweetDeck is. As soon as you set up your Twitter (or Facebook) account, you are off. While Twitter for Mac does a very good job for everyday use, it can't compete with this app'… Read more

Twitter users should be able to download their entire archive of tweets by year's end, the company's CEO, Dick Costolo said today.

During a keynote conversation at the Online News Association conference in San Francisco, Costolo told interviewer Emily Bell of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism that Twitter expects to provide its users by the end of the year with one of the most-desired capabilities of all -- being able to download their entire tweet history.

"The caveat is that this is the CEO saying this," Costolo joked, "not the engineer who's … Read more

Birds were tweeting long before you started sending out 140-character messages about your daily commute. And British birdwatcher Bill Oddie doesn't want you to forget it.

So, today at least, Oddie did his part to turn Twitter over to the original tweeters of the world. He and the ZSL London Zoo's head bird keeper, Adrian Wallis, arrived early at the zoo's tropical aviary to interpret the roughly 70 residents' chirps in tweet form.

"Very territorial call from the Scarlet Chested Sunbird -- protecting its nest," read one tweet from Oddie with a sound file attached. Read another: "Here's the Roul Roul Partridge -- listen for high-pitch whistling -- a great way of keeping in touch in the dense jungle." … Read more

Three years ago (an eternity in the social media world), Facebook was trying to become more like Twitter. Facebook, while big, wasn't the dominant force it is today, and Twitter was growing at record speeds.

This scared Facebook, of course, so Zuckerberg and his team set out to counter the Twitter threat with updates of their own. Facebook added public status updates and a real-time search engine. It even released Facebook Lite, a simplified Facebook interface that drew a lot fo comparisons to Twitter's sparse and simplistic design.

Fast-forward to today. Facebook has grown to 950+ million users … Read more

The tweets were flying in reaction to the launch of the iPhone 5 on Wednesday. So what types of responses did the new phone elicit?

A full 39 percent of the tweets about the iPhone 5 were positive, according to a report from research firm Crimson Hexagon. Among those, 14 percent said they were excited about the new phone or planned to buy it and 18 percent were eagerly anticipating or were excited about the launch itself. Just 7 percent of the positive tweets centered around new features such as the support for 4G LTE.

As examples, one eager iPhone … Read more