Articles about Twitter

Image and video sharing service Twitpic is closing its doors. Threatened with loss of access to the Twitter API if the company refused to abandon a trademark application, Twitpic has decided it does not have enough clout to take on the microblogging giant. Twitpic founder Noah Everett used a blog post to break the news and give a little background to help explain the move. He stressed that the closure was a difficult decision and thanked users for their support.

The problem seems to stem from Twitpic's name. Everett explains that the company was contacted by Twitter a few weeks ago and asked to give up on the trademark application. The timing is a little strange because, as Everett points out, Twitpic's name has been in use since 2008, and the trademark application was filed the following year. The company managed to fight opposition from some parties, but it seems as though Twitter dealt the killer blow.

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There are lots of reasons to be concerned about privacy online -- not least the spying carried out by the NSA and other governmental agencies. While some companies are trying to stick up for the rights of their customer, many web users have now taken to censoring themselves. New research by WP Engine shows that the level of paranoia is higher than many people may have thought -- a staggering 91 percent of Americans are concerned about their online privacy. This is interesting in itself, but the steps that web users are willing to take if they feel their privacy is threatened makes for particularly interesting reading.

Of course there are some people who would take things to the extreme, going as far as changing their name in a bid to protect their privacy, but others would take slightly less drastic action. In fact only five percent of those surveyed say they would take no action to protect their privacy. The most common reaction to feeling threatened is to change passwords (79 percent of people), but some would go further, admitting they would consider changing their email address (48 percent) or change their credit cards (48 percent). Well over a third of those surveyed (42 percent) said they would be willing to delete all of their social media accounts. Three percent of people indicated that they would even move house as a result of having their privacy threatened online.

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Many Twitter users have become frustrated by a problem with the social network. Increasing numbers of people are finding that they see tweets from people they do not follow. Twitter CEO, Dick Costolo, has an explanation: it's your own fault. He's not talking about promoted tweets or anything like that, but tweets that have been favorited by people you follow. The explanation came over the weekend in a couple of tweets in which Costolo put the appearance of such tweets down to users' impatience.

Freelance science writer Katie Mack pointed out that Twitter feeds now include "random tweets from people others follow, ads, other people's favs". Costolo replied:

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Social media is a necessary evil for many. Even if you want to stay away from services like Facebook, staying in contact with friends and family may keep you tethered. I have tried to get away from Facebook many times, but much like Al Pacino in Godfather 3, "Just when I thought I was out...they pull me back in!" However, I do rather enjoy services like Twitter and Google+.

Regardless of your opinion of social media, there is one thing you cannot deny -- accessing other sites with your social media login credentials is very convenient. The idea of creating a unique username and password for every site you visit is foreign to many younger internet users. Today, Dell announces that it too is jumping on the bandwagon, by letting customers sign in and buy computers with their social media credentials.

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A week ago I wrote about my feelings of ennui towards the iPhone 6, asserting that there was just nothing to get excited about. Some people agreed, but many didn't -- it was to be expected really. What was particularly interesting was not just the discussion that started here in the comments on BetaNews but also that the article spread further afield. It was picked up by Macworld whose resident columnist The Macalope, er, disagreed with what I had to say. You'll notice that I've provided a link to the Macworld article which, despite quoting 46 percent of my post, The Macalope failed to do initially.

If you take the time to read the Macworld article you'd be forgiven for thinking that I was hurt at having my work pulled apart. Not a bit of it. No, I'm not concerned about being criticized. I've been writing for approaching 15 years now, and I know I'm going to piss people off from time to time. That's not to say that this is necessarily my intention -- in addition to news, I like to share my opinion and there will, of course, be some collateral damage that follows. Despite The Macalope's suggestions to the contrary, this was not designed to be a "link-baity" piece. Like Joe Wilcox, I've written about the importance of writing for the reader rather than writing for Google, and this is an ideology I firmly subscribe to.

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For a while now, verified users and advertisers have been able to check statistics about their Twitter account so they can see how many times individual tweets have been viewed, check what types of tweet encourage the most engagement, and so on. Now Twitter Analytics is available to everyone -- free of charge.

It doesn’t matter if you have a blue verified tick next to your name or not, now you can use the analytics dashboard to check the performance of tweets. While this is a useful tool for businesses, for the average Twitter user it is a tool that will satisfy an idle curiosity and provide a way to while away the time obsessing over what key phrases yield the greatest return.

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It's a fact that most software has bugs of some sort when it gets released. More significant are fundamental flaws in the design, yet whilst bugs generally get fixed, design flaws are often overlooked.

In an effort to address this professionals organization IEEE is bringing together leading figures from Google, HP, Twitter and Cigital to form a Center for Secure Design group with the aim of tackling serious design flaws in software.

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The effects of Edward Snowden's revelations about the activities of the NSA continue to be felt. Internet users are now familiar with the idea that what they do online is possibly (probably?) being monitored in one way or another. Some users have taken to the likes of Tor in a bid to increase security and anonymity, but there has also been a more interesting side-effect. Figures released by "nonpartisan fact tank" the Pew Research Center suggests that a "spiral of silence" has developed as Americans start to censor themselves online.

The research group conducted a survey of more than 1,800 people in the middle of last year and found that while most people (86 percent) were quite happy to talk about state surveillance in person, less than half (41 percent) were willing to do so on Twitter (itself involved in censorship). This self-censorship is an interesting repercussion of the NSA's activities, and it seems that social network users have been hardest hit:

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In the wake of the death of Robin Williams, Twitter announces that it will now accept image removal requests from relatives of deceased individuals. Williams' daughter Zelda was forced to leave Twitter having been inundated with a barrage of mocked up images of her deceased father.

In the aftermath of the actor's suicide, Twitter explained that it would improve its policies. The result is an update to the way in which death is handled on Twitter. The families of deceased people have been able to request the deactivation of an account, but now new rights have been introduced.

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Many of us use Twitter, and we do so for a variety of reasons that include both following friends and family, as well as keeping up with current events. Services like Breaking News and Breaking Weather can be indispensable in daily life.

What many don't know is that some of these services are little more than automated bots. While that sounds scary, and in some cases it is, it's not always something to worry about.

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Can spending too much time reading and writing in 140 characters or less really send you crazy?

A quick glance at news headlines today would have been enough to send every Twitter user into hiding -- "Woman Hospitalised with Twitter Psychosis" and "Twitter can trigger psychosis in users" -- common headers.

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Online security and privacy are hotter topics than ever. Just this weekend, Edward Snowden made an appearance at the Hope X 2014 hacker event, and called for those in attendance to help make encryption tools easier to use. Another fierce advocate of online privacy is the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation), and today the group released a beta version of Privacy Badger, a beautifully named extension for Chrome and Firefox designed to stop a number of tracking techniques used online. The idea of tracking cookies is something that will be familiar to most, but tracking takes many forms, including advertising and social media. Privacy Badger aims to block this tracking.

Peter Eckersley, EFF Technology Projects Director, said: "Widgets that say 'Like this page on Facebook' or 'Tweet this' often allow those companies to see what webpages you are visiting, even if you never click the widget's button. The Privacy Badger alpha would detect that, and block those widgets outright. But now Privacy Badger's beta version has gotten smarter: it can block the tracking while still giving you the option to see and click on those buttons if you so choose".

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The official Twitter app may be good enough for casual Windows Phone use, but only a third-party client has all the right features for the social network's power users. While there already are a couple of good picks available in Store, the arrival of Tweetium, best known as one of the most fully-featured Twitter clients for Windows 8.x, just beefed-up the selection.

The developer, B-side Software, has released Tweetium as a beta. It is meant to be tested just by "select" existing "customers", according to its Store description, but we can still take a look.

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News and review website CNET has been targeted by a team of Russian hackers called W0rm. CNET's servers were hit over the weekend, but details have only just been released.

Although CNET has not given a concrete confirmation of exactly what happened, the site explains that a representative of W0rm claims to have stolen a database containing the usernames and passwords of over a million users. It seems a security hole in the Symfony PHP framework was exploited, and it is not yet clear what the fallout could be.

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Twitter may have an official Windows Phone app, but the offering is sorely lagging behind its Android and iOS counterparts in the features department. That is because the updates come only a couple of times per year, and, even then, they fail to bring the latest goodies on the platform.

Luckily for those who are willing to put up with the offering, Twitter has finally released a new update for its Windows Phone app, the first one to come in 2014. And to show just how much it cares about the platform and its users, Twitter has not even announced the update on its blog (but, Microsoft did).

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