Twitter

This is not a whopper of a tale: Jeep is the second big brand this week -- after Burger King -- to have its Twitter account hijacked.

The American automaker's official Twitter account was the victim of a hacking attempt early Tuesday. Jeep's Twitter profile was updated with a description that said the Chrysler-owner brand was sold to Cadillac, a General Motors company, which is not true. The account was restored to its original state at around noon PT.

The temporary account holders also posted several disparaging updates saying the brand was sold to Cadillac because the CEO … Read more

Like many things in life, Twitter is best used in small doses. Check in on a trending topic. Get the latest tweets about live sporting events. See what Neil deGrasse Tyson has to say about anything. Just don't try to take it all in. You'll drive yourself mad.

Considering the sheer volume of tweets flying around at any given moment, you might feel like Twitter is passing you by like so many raindrops smearing together across your windshield as you drive at high speeds. Perhaps you'd like to know just how much of Twitter is whizzing past you. Guess what? There's a handy calculator just for that.… Read more

For all five of us who stuck with Posterous and chose the blogging service over Tumblr, today is a mournful day. Sachin Agarwal, founder of the now Twitter-owned service, announced that Posterous will shut off the lights come April 30.

The news comes as little surprise. Posterous was picked up by Twitter in March of last year and we've barely heard a peep from the team since then. At the time, Agarwal and Twitter both insisted that they'd leave Posterous "up and running without disruption." The promise was partially fulfilled -- the service was left unattended … Read more

If you've always wished you could embed Twitter follower buttons directly into video, your wait is over.

Thanks to the folks at Wistia, it's now possible to do just that, reports The Next Web.

Wistia's new Follow Lab has come up with a way to add one or more Twitter follow buttons -- like the ones now plastered onto just about every Web site in the world -- directly into videos. The company's new tool lets you embed the buttons wherever you want in a video, and allows you to include follow buttons for more than … Read more

President Obama's State of the Union speech didn't generate any memes, but Florida Sen. Marco Rubio gave the Twitterverse something to shout about: his awkward reach for a tiny bottle of Poland Spring water during his official Republican rebuttal address. Almost instantly, the moment was a trending topic.

Unfortunately for Poland Spring, its social media people -- if it even has any -- dropped the ball. What appear to be its official Twitter accounts, @PolandSpringWtr, and @PolandSpringInc, were both dormant after Rubio's instantly panned water break. In fact, the most recent tweet from either account came in … Read more

Twitter and American Express today launched a partnership that will allow Amex card holders to make certain purchases simply by tweeting.

According to an Amex Web page, the arrangement works like this. Amex cardholders first sync their card with Twitter. Then, when they come across products that are eligible to purchase under the plan -- products that American Express will promote through a Twitter feed -- they simply send out a tweet that includes a special hashtag. Amex will then send them an @-reply with a confirming hashtag. Finally, the buyer has to send out a second tweet with the … Read more

In a sign that suggests healthy demand for Twitter's advertising, the microblogging site has reportedly increased the daily price of its Promoted Trends to $200,000.

The new price, which is a 33 percent increase over the previous price, went into effect earlier this year, according to an All Things D report. The price has increased 150 percent since the program launched in 2010 with a daily price of $80,000.

Twitter promotes the feature as a way for business to increase interest in a brand or product. Promoted Trends appear in Twitter's Trends section to the left … Read more

Twitter said today that it has begun slowly rolling out the ability to search for tweets older than a week.

In a blog post, the social-networking giant said it plans to enable users to find more than just the most recent tweets.

The announcement is the second this week aimed at letting users surface more content on Twitter. Yesterday, the company rolled out updates to its iOS and Android apps, as well as to mobile.twitter.com, designed to streamline the discovery process on Twitter.

Among the many curiosities about Twitter's Vine app has been how the company decided six seconds was the magic number for a clip's length.

Well, guess what? It turns out that the maximum length of a Vine isn't six seconds at all. In fact, they top out at six and a half seconds.

And how do we know? After watching a Vine today that was tweeted by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, I came away with the feeling that it felt longer than advertised. A bit of quick work by CNET videographer Jared Kohler, using iShowU, then proved … Read more