Twitter posts

A study by the Center for the Digital Future at USC has done us a great service. Polling a selection of 1981 internet users, the study found that 49% use micro-blogging services such as Twitter. And 0% would be willing to pay for it. No, I didn’t forget a digit. Zero percent, as in nobody, would be cool with paying for social networking. Considering the average Joe’s Twitter account has five tweets four months apart, most of which are about how stupid Twitter is, I think I’m feeling that. “Such an extreme finding that produced a zero response underscores the difficulty of getting Internet users to…

The other day, while digging around for the day’s news, I chose not to cover an iPad app that seemed to be grabbing a bit of attention. This iPad app was Flipboard, the social news doodad that presents your Twitter and Facebook accounts as a sexy analog of print media. ‘So what,’ I said, ‘it’s an app. Whatever.’ Boy, do I have egg on my face. Colour me all kinds of mistaken. Hype for the app has reached a fever pitch, and an ocean of users attempt to log in. ”Due to overwhelming interest,” the app’s error message reads, “we are currently limiting the rate at which we are accepting new Facebook and Twitter…

Twitter has always had problems keeping its service up. Although twitter only deals with tiny amounts of information, the number of constant reoccurring requests, particularly by third party clients via Twitter’s API. The Fail Whale sees way more action than he should these days, but Twitter has a plan to fix the problem once and for all. A new data center in Salt Lake City will power Twitter’s unique needs, and with more data centers planned for the next 24 months, it’s possible the whale will disappear to the depths, never to be seen again. Apparently, there are over 300,000 people signing up for…

So often in the contemporary era, we talk about how the web is changing the world around us: of how media industries are having to adapt, or how the practices and concepts of doing business are being affected. Less often discussed, however, is how the internet is changing us. Sure, there’s a lot of chatter about how the internet might be making us stupid or destroying our capacity to focus on things. But there’s a lot less talk about how it might change – or have already changed – what you might call ‘our experiences of ourselves’. To wit: how is the web changing our identities? What’s an identity? Well,…

Wordpress, the indomitable blogging platform has a surprising new enemy – the developer of a theme for Wordpress. Matt Mullenweg, the primary developer of Wordpress is unhappy because theme developer Chris Pearson refuses to honor the GPL license Wordpress is covered by. The GPL, or General Public License is designed to ensure that any derivative work is distributed under the same terms. Pearson sells his themes with a license that protects his work completely, but ignores Wordpress’ license requirements. The debate because extremely public a couple of days ago, when Mullenweg began advising…

Could we witness a retelling of David versus Goliath with an epic battle between the two largest social networking networking competitors? You have Facebook, which continually grows amidst its privacy woes. Then you have Twitter, which faces scalability issues with increasing usage. As big as they both are, Twitter is tiny compared to Facebook’s massive user base, but maybe not for long. These two services were, at a time, very different from each other. They both had separate methods to their madness: one focusing on a tight-knit network of close friends and the other offering massive community…

Twitter has rolled out a brand new feature that considerably boosts its accessibility and outright explodes its user discovery. Upon searching a name – y’know, like all those times you’ve searched your own – Twitter now brings to your attention possible accounts you might consider following with that name. Not exactly breakthrough in concept, but certainly in execution. Simply type in a name and Twitter will go grab people you might have been looking for, displaying them in a handy list above the traditional roll of tweets. That this list is horizontal is a slick design decision in terms of directing…

Canada is great. The meds are cheap, we’re easy on pot and we love beer. what’s not to like? But the Canadian Tourism Commission wants to really push this message in the US, and they’ve come up with a pretty innovative and cool way to do it. As the video shows, The CTC setup giant live action murals around New York, Los Angeles and Chicago showing a stream of tweets about Canada and tourist’s wonderful experiences in Canada. Staff show passersby how to interact with the giant screens showing hundreds of images and messages containing Canadian propaganda. This is certainly a better approach than TV…

If there’s one thing I know you want, it’s a bizarre blobby ghost-thing for your desktop. Have I got a treat for you. Students at the University of Tokyo and Waseda University have teamed up to create just such a thing. The Kokonatchi is an aforementioned bizarre blobby ghost-thing that monitors your Twitter feed for incoming messages and, after scanning them for content (via trigger words, emoticons, etc), alerts the user (you) by lighting up (via RGB LEDs), making totally freaky bird noises, and wiggling all over the place. On its own, that’s not terribly exciting. I’ve written about similar…

Even I’ve got to admit that while Twitter is unquestionably the hippest most awesome way for totally rad and attractive people like myself to stay in touch… it’s still pretty inane. Case in point: last night, I received an important update from a friend, who announced that they had accidentally given their cat a boner. Guys? This is the internet. And it’s serious business. Not ones to transform Twitter into anything it’s not, Sega have announced that the arcade version of Virtua Fighter 5: Final Showdown will feature Twitter integration. Because I absolutely needed more garbage sailing into…