 |
According to their website, “SportStream is built in San Francisco, by a group of die-hard sports fans dedicated to combining their love of sports and technology. The company’s patent-pending technology surfaces the highest quality tweets, Facebook posts, Instagram media, stats, news and more for every league, game, team and player across sports.”
Facebook has yet to comment on the acquisition on their press website. However, according to a press release on the SportStream website, “Facebook sees the value in our technologies and team, and we’re excited to be a part of their continued investment in their platform. With this next step for SportStream, we’ll have greater resources to continue to do what we do best.”
The company, founded in 2012 by entrepreneur Paul Allen, aggregates social chatter and updates in a personalized social feed for sports fans. The website states that with the acquisition, they intend to scale and further develop tools and capabilities.
 |
| Twitter launches emergency alerts feature |
Fourteen Australian organisations, including state police and fire services, have signed up for the service, called Twitter Alerts.
During disasters and emergencies, the organisations will be able to mark chosen tweets as alerts, giving them an orange bell to draw attention within a user's Twitter feed.
Users can also sign up to receive the tweets as SMS messages. iPhone and Android users will also receive the tweets as push notifications.
The service launched in September in the US, and has since been used by the US Senate sergeant at arms to warn personnel to "shelter in place" after reports of gunshots around Capitol Hill.
It's also been used by environmental and police agencies in the UK to send out warnings about flooding risks.
"Getting timely information out in an emergency or natural disaster is critical," said Danny Keens, Twitter's director of media partnerships in Australia.
"We hope this will be a useful, additional channel for emergency service organisations to broadcast need-to-know information that will rise above regular tweet activity."
Twitter's value as an emergency communication medium was underlined during the recent bushfires in NSW, when the Rural Fire Service (RFS) website crashed due to massive demand.
The RFS directed the public to its Twitter feed for up-to-date information and warnings, later claiming that its messages were retweeted more than 18,000 times.
"Twitter alerts gives us another way of delivering important safety information directly to people when they need it most," said Rob Rodgers, the service's deputy commissioner.
Via: ZDNet
 |
Twitter said this was designed to protect victims of harassment who feared that blocking a user would lead to retaliation.
But after a wave of online protest, Twitter re-instated its previous policy, whereby blocked users are notified, and are prevented from following and interacting with their blocker.
Michael Sippey, vice president of product at Twitter, said: “We have decided to revert the change after receiving feedback from many users — we never want to introduce features at the cost of users feeling less safe.”
Several online petitions had been launched and users rallied behind the hashtag to complain about the change.
 |
| Twitter show taste of its power with blocking-change uproar |
The power of Twitter was turned against the company this week after a furious online backlash caused the San Francisco microblogging company to quickly reverse a change in the way members could block unwanted followers.
"Earlier today, we made a change to the way the 'block' function of Twitter works," Twitter Product Vice President Michael Sippey wrote in a blog post late Thursday. "We have decided to revert the change after receiving feedback from many users - we never want to introduce features at the cost of users feeling less safe. Any blocks you had previously instituted are still in effect."
Twitter said it made the earlier change to protect members from unwanted harassment and threats. Before, when a Twitter member blocked a follower, that member could no longer see the person's tweets. Twitter changed that function to allow the blocked follower to still see, favorite and retweet messages from the member's timeline. But the Twitter member who instituted the block could no longer see the activities of the person he or she blocked.
Critics took to Twitter almost immediately, arguing that the company had made things worse. And just as Twitter has been used in revolutions against governments, critics tweeted dissent marked with phrases like "#restoretheblock" aimed at the company.
 |
| There have been concerns over the rise in the number of cases of trolling on Twitter |
Twitter said it was reverting to old rules, under which users are not able to follow an account once blocked.
Blocking is used by people to stop trolls and rude online commentators from interacting with them.
"We have decided to revert the change after receiving feedback from many users - we never want to introduce features at the cost of users feeling less safe," Michael Sippey, Twitter's vice-president of product, said in a blogpost.
"Any blocks you had previously instituted are still in effect."
Source : BBC News
Snowden's revelations have included alleged wiretapping, the storage of phone call records illegally, fibre-optic cable infiltration used to monitor communication on an international scale, and the use of malware to monitor computer networks by the U.S. agency.
According to the latest document leak, the NSA is gathering close to 5 billion records a day on cellular devices worldwide. The Washington Post says large amounts of domestic data is "incidentally" recorded, which allows the agency to track millions of people worldwide based on how and where mobile devices are used.
On the alliance's website, an open letter to President Obama and Congress signed by the firms acknowledges that governments have "a duty to protect their citizens," but argues that Snowden's information leaks over the practices of the NSA and U.S. government in wholesale spying have highlighted "the urgent need to reform government surveillance practices worldwide."
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that the revelations show a "real need for greater disclosure and new limits on how governments collect information." Brad Smith, Executive Vice President of Legal & Corporate Affairs at Microsoft said that "surveillance should address specific, suspicious targets under defined legal process rather than bulk collection of Internet communications."
Marissa Meyer, CEO of Yahoo, said "recent revelations about government surveillance activities have shaken the trust of our users, and it is time for the United States government to act to restore the confidence of citizens around the world." Google CEO and chairman Larry Page commented that user data security was "critical" for firms, but this has been "undermined by the apparent wholesale collection of data, in secret and without independent oversight, by many governments around the world."
"The balance in many countries has tipped too far in favor of the state and away from the rights of the individual -- rights that are enshrined in our Constitution," the letter states. "This undermines the freedoms we all cherish. It's time for a change."
The U.S. President agrees to an extent. During a recent appearance on MSNBC's Hardball, Obama said that he plans to "propose some self-restraint on the NSA," and push for "some reforms that that can give people more confidence." At the interview, Obama said:
"All of us spend more and more of our lives in cyberspace. We've got to be in there in some way to protect the American people, even as we're making sure the government doesn't abuse it. The Snowden exposures have identified some areas of legitimate concern, but some of it has also been highly sensationalized.The company alliance states that they are all taking steps to keep user data secure, including the deployment of encryption technology to scupper "unauthorized surveillance on our networks," and plan to push back government requests to ensure they are both legal and reasonable.
The people at the NSA generally are looking out for the safety of the American people. They are not interested in reading your emails or text messages, and that's not something that's done."
Source : ZDNet
 |
| People holding mobile phones are silhouetted against a backdrop projected with the Twitter logo |
Twitter Inc is tying up with a Singapore-based startup to make its 140-character messaging service available to users in emerging markets who have entry-level mobile phones which cannot access the Internet.
U2opia Mobile, which has a similar tie-up with Facebook Inc, will launch its Twitter service in the first quarter of next year, Chief Executive and Co-founder Sumesh Menon told Reuters.
Users will need to dial a simple code to get a feed of the popular trending topics on Twitter, he said.
More than 11 million people use U2opia's Fonetwish service, which helps access Facebookand Google Talk on mobile without a data connection.
Twitter, which boasts of about 230 million users, held a successful initial public offering last month that valued the company at around $25 billion.
U2opia uses a telecom protocol named USSD, or Unstructured Supplementary Service Data, which does not allow viewing of pictures, videos or other graphics.
"USSD as a vehicle for Twitter is almost hand in glove because Twitter has by design a character limit, it's a very text-driven social network," Menon said.
Eight out of 10 people in emerging markets are still not accessing data on their phone, he said.
U2opia, which is present in 30 countries in seven international languages, will localize the Twitter feed according to the location of the user.
"So somebody in Paraguay would definitely get content that would be very very localized to that market vis a vis somebody sitting in Mumbai or Bangalore," he said.
The company, whose biggest markets are Africa and South America, partners with telecom carriers such as Telenor, Vodafone and Bharti Airtel Ltd. U2opia usually gets 30 to 40 percent of what users pay its telecom partners to access Fonetwish.
"For a lot of end users in the emerging markets, it's going to be their first Twitter experience," Menon said.
Source : Reuters
Image Credit : REUTERS/KACPER PEMPEL
Facebook is more than three times as popular as Twitter on mobile and a host
of other apps, according to a survey.
Of smartphone buyers asked to name the three most frequently used apps on
their mobile phones, 45 per cent said Facebook, while 13 per cent said
Twitter and 11 per cent said Candy Crush Saga, the popular mobile game.
The survey of 500 phones buyers in the US between June and September of this
year shows that Facebook is unchallenged as the leading app on smartphones,
according to the company which conducted the research.
Mike Levin, co-founder of Consumer Intelligence Research Partners (CIRP),
said: “Facebook just dominates mobile phones, in terms of most frequent use,
not just downloads.
“For most other apps, including some well-known ones like YouTube and Pandora,
fewer than 10 per cent of phone buyers included them among the most
frequently used”.
Source : Telegraph
Source : Telegraph
 |
| Massive hack stolen 2 million Facebook, Gmail and Twitter passwords |
Hackers have stolen usernames and passwords for nearly two million accounts at Facebook, Google, Twitter, Yahoo and others, according to a report released this week.
The massive data breach was a result of keylogging software maliciously installed on an untold number of computers around the world, researchers at cybersecurity firm Trustwave said. The virus was capturing log-in credentials for key websites over the past month and sending those usernames and passwords to a server controlled by the hackers.On Nov. 24, Trustwave researchers tracked that server, located in the Netherlands. They discovered compromised credentials for more than 93,000 websites, including:
- 318,000 Facebook accounts
- 70,000 Gmail, Google+ and YouTube accounts
- 60,000 Yahoo accounts
- 22,000 Twitter accounts
- 9,000 Odnoklassniki accounts (a Russian social network)
- 8,000 ADP accounts (ADP says it counted 2,400)
- 8,000 LinkedIn accounts
Twitter’s automatic expansion of photos in the timeline has been controversial as some people complain that images dominate the experience. But it also has some unintended consequences: awkward crops.
I was browsing the timeline of Eventbrite CEO Kevin Hartz when I saw this tweet about his wife Julia’s appearance on Bloomberg West.
When viewed in timeline mode, Twitter expands the image, but the cropping only shows the butts and legs of Hartz’s wife and co-founder Julia and the show’s host, Emily Chang.
Source : VentureBeat
Image : VentureBeat
The desktop Linux Twitter app Turpial is undergoing something of a regeneration for its upcoming ‘Version 3′ release.
The python-based social networking client, first released back in 2010, has proven popular with users over the years. But after Twitter axed access to the API it used earlier in the year, this birds’ song came to an untimely and abrupt end.
Not ready to admit defeat, the developer of Turpial, Wil Alvarez, got to work. Rather than simply patch up the (now) ageing version of Turpial so it could tweet again he sought to reinvigorate the app; make it more than it was.
Now, with a redesigned interface and some powerful new features proffered by a rewrite of the libturpial backend, Turpial 3 is poised to take flight.
Among the new features on offer:
- Multiple Columns
- Multi-Account Support
- Configurable Update Frequency
- Tweet Queuing
- Tweet Filter (Hashtag, Phrase or User)
A public beta of Turpial 3 is planned for later this month. We’ll bring you all the necessary information as soon as we have it.
Source : OMG Ubuntu
Twitter said it has stepped up encryption of its service, in the latest effort by a technology company to beef up security following reports of spying on digital content by the National Security Agency.
The San Francisco-based microblogging service said in a blog post yesterday that it recently enabled a technology dubbed forward secrecy for traffic going through its websites, which makes it more difficult for hackers to decrypt information.
“Forward secrecy is just the latest way in which Twitter is trying to defend and protect the user’s voice,” the company said in the post.
Amid the fallout over NSA spying on digital information, technology companies including Google and Yahoo! have taken measures to strengthen security of their information. Many are using harder-to-crack code to shield their networks and online customer data from unauthorized U.S. spying. The companies, trying to distance themselves from concerns about user data, have said they do not provide NSA direct access to their servers
Source : Bloomberg
A bunch of Twitter's alpha and beta testers for Android might have fired up their apps today, and thought they'd been kicked out of the program. After all, the social network recently scrapped the new design it debuted to intrepid early adopters in September and brought its older look back. The familiar buttons take their place on top of the app again, replacing the menu that allowed testers to swipe their way from one stream to another. Twitter took elements from both designs, though, so it isn't a complete throwback to the old interface. Alpha users, in particular, see an entirely different Discover section that features a basic list view and a detailed view that shows sample tweets. Also, the prompt that pops up when you post a tweet comes with a note that reads "Are you in [city, state]?" below "What's happening?" According to TechCrunch, the microblogging site has been getting mixed feedback from its testers, which could've influenced the firm's decision. Whatever the real reason is, it looks like Twitter has more than a few kinks left to iron out before it unleashes an overhauled app to the general populace.
Source : TechCrunch
In January 2012, the Federal Bureau of Investigation made an open request to "industry" for a "social media alert, mapping, and analysis application" with the "flexibility to change search parameters and geo-locate the search based on breaking events or emerging threats." They wanted an app, in other words, that would allow keyword searches — for gunfire, for meth, for protests, for killings — in specific areas to locate bad guys and potential bad guys. They wanted a social media scraper. They wanted covert access to your tweets, your status updates, your Instagrammed photos. They wanted your YouTube comments and comments on websites made through Facebook. They wanted all of them, and more. This FBI request, along with similar desires among police outside the federal government, has since given birth to a cluster of companies that hope to capitalize.
With names like BlueJay, SnapTrends, and even the multibillion-dollar public-records database company LexisNexis, these companies claim to offer an unprecedented tool to police officers — a definitive, easy-to-use product that can keep police informed when people publicly announce crimes or potential crimes on the web.
This may sound like a potential violation of civil rights and freedoms. But analytics experts — who have used big data to predict how we shop and how we vote and what we look for on the web — bring up another point: scouring social media may not be useful to predict crimes. It may, in fact, be the opposite — an expensively wild goose chase, an endless search for a needle. It may lead to fruitless searches and false arrests. And if they’re right, these companies, these police departments, and the FBI may be scouring the web for something that isn’t there — a simple way to locate criminals on social media.
Source : The Verge
Twitter has evolved from its early days of tweets about what folks ate for breakfast, and for many of us it is now a valuable source of information. From breaking news to tweetversations about tech, Twitter plays an important role for some. Sadly, the limited choice of apps to work with Twitter on Windows 8 are not very good.
I am a heavy Twitter user, as the fact I am closing in on 50,000 tweets demonstrates. I am on the network all day so I have heavily tested many apps on all mobile platforms. I have favorite apps, sometimes more than one, on all platforms save Windows 8.
I don't want to pick on the Windows 8 Twitter app developers so I'm not going to point fingers at them one by one. It's sufficient to say that for me, none of them are very good. Some of them are buggy on top of that, rendering them almost unusable.There aren't a lot of Twitter apps on Windows 8 and I'm sure I've tried all of them. I find glaring problems with each of them, severe enough to make working with Twitter unpleasant on my Windows 8 tablet. Even Twitter's own app on Windows 8 is annoying, with slow operation and less than optimal design choices that make it so.
Either they don't stream updates consistently, don't handle lists well, or have direct message access poorly implemented. Some apps don't handle several of these functions well. On top of these issues, often the user interface on most of them is not simple and clean, with some odd designs that don't display lots of information at once.
I will point the finger at Twitter and its Tweetdeck web site on Windows 8. It's not the smoothest interface but it's decent, until you hold the tablet in portrait. Tweetdeck is almost unusable in portrait, making it no good on a tablet. It also doesn't handle snap view in Windows 8 very well either, another deal-breaker.
I love using my Windows tablet but this lack of good Twitter operation is making it hard to head out each day with this tablet. Both the iPad and my Android tablet serve me well on daily work outings, including Twitter use, so the Windows tablet will sit at home more often until this glaring Twitter deficiency on Windows 8 is addressed by just one good app. It's a shame as I'm finding Windows 8 to work well for me in every other way.You can access Twitter using the browser but it's not as good as using apps on the iPad and Android. Tweetbot on the iPad and Plume on Android epitomize what defines good apps that makes working with Twitter a joy. And these aren't the only ones on those platforms, there are plenty others. There is a desperate need, at least for me, for an equivalent app on Windows 8.
Via: ZDNet
A bunch of Twitter's alpha and beta testers for Android might have fired up their apps today, and thought they'd been kicked out of the program. After all, the social network recently scrapped the new design it debuted to intrepid early adopters in September and brought its older look back. The familiar buttons take their place on top of the app again, replacing the menu that allowed testers to swipe their way from one stream to another. Twitter took elements from both designs, though, so it isn't a complete throwback to the old interface. Alpha users, in particular, see an entirely different Discover section that features a basic list view and a detailed view that shows sample tweets. Also, the prompt that pops up when you post a tweet comes with a note that reads "Are you in [city, state]?" below "What's happening?" According to TechCrunch, the microblogging site has been getting mixed feedback from its testers, which could've influenced the firm's decision. Whatever the real reason is, it looks like Twitter has more than a few kinks left to iron out before it unleashes an overhauled app to the general populace.
Via: Engadget
Twitter today unveiled custom timelines, which let users create a stream of tweets they choose and organize themselves.
The feature, housed within TweetDeck, sounds very similar to Storify, which lets users pull in tweets and other content from around the Web to create stories about certain events. On Twitter, users can create custom timelines by adding tweets by hand or programming tweets to automatically pop up using the company's API.
"This means that when the conversation around an event or topic takes off on Twitter, you have the opportunity to create a timeline that surfaces what you believe to be the most noteworthy, relevant tweets," Twitter said in a blog post.
Twitter served up a few examples, like one from The Voice host Carson Daly, who pulled together tweets about a recent show. Politico will also organize tweets from policy industry experts in a new Tweet Hub, while Bleacher Report tonight will help sports fans keep up with the Champions Classic match-ups.
Politico used the custom timelines API beta, which lets the more tech-savvy users program "custom timelines based on the logic that you choose, or building tools that help people create their own custom timelines, as TweetDeck does."
Custom timelines will roll out to TweetDeck for Web, Chrome, and PC over the next several days, and will hit the Mac app "soon." When it arrives, look for the new "custom timeline" column type in TweetDeck, and hit the "+" icon or use the "A" keyboard shortcut to add.
"To add a Tweet to a custom timeline, simply drag the move icon and drop it on the custom timeline column that you would like to update," TweetDeck said in a separate blog post. "Removing a Tweet is just as easy - simply click on the 'X' icon on a Tweet in a custom timeline column and it will be removed."
Source : PCMag
What started as a side project in
2006, created a frenzy on Wall Street today as investors were quick to
snap up Twitter shares.
Twitter Inc, the 140-character
messaging service favored by everyone from the Pope to U.S. President
Barack Obama, began as a side-project but rapidly morphed into one of
the most powerful social and cultural media forces of our time.In its market debut on Thursday, Twitter soared as much as 92 percent as investors snapped up shares in the microblogging site in a frenzy that recalled the days of the dot-com bubble.
Here are some milestones in Twitter's growth:
March 21, 2006: Co-founder Jack Dorsey sends the first tweet: "just setting up my twttr."
Twitter is a side project within Odeo, a struggling podcasting company where Dorsey worked as a software engineer alongside Twitter co-creators Noah Glass and Biz Stone. The length of tweets are capped at 140 characters in order to include a user's name and still fit within the 160-character SMS messaging format used by mobile phones.
Oct. 25, 2006: Evan Williams, CEO of Odeo, forms a company called Obvious Corp, which acquires all of Odeo's assets, including Twitter.
March 2007: Twitter stages a big promotion at the South by Southwest conference in Austin, Texas, lining the hallways with flat-screen panels that display a constant stream of Twitter messages. The service gains a loyal following among influential bloggers and tech enthusiasts that will prove key to its future growth.
April 2007: Twitter is spun out as a separate company, with co-founders Dorsey, Williams and Biz Stone. Dorsey is appointed CEO.
Source : MSN News
For technology executives weighing market flotations for Silicon Valley startups, this week's gangbusters Twitter Inc initial public offering sent a powerful signal: full speed ahead.
About a dozen private companies are valued at more than $1 billion, and many of them have already been holding informal talks with bankers. Now, many - including Box, Square and Airbnb - are likely to accelerate their IPO plans, according to venture capitalists.
File-sharing company Box picked Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse and JP Morgan to lead its IPO, Reuters reported Friday. The company has been valued at more than $1.2 billion by private venture capital investors, but it remains unclear whether it is profitable.
Twitter's lack of profits proved to be no obstacle to the micro-blogging site raising as much as $2.1 billion in its IPO. Its current share price of around $41 gives it a market value north of $22 billion.
That opens the door for other big-name private companies including Square, the payments company founded by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, which has begun exploring the possibility of an IPO next year, according to the Wall Street Journal. Profits are not expected until 2015. Square declined to comment.
Airbnb, an accommodation service, is also often cited as a potential IPO candidate. "They don't have inventory and have pretty low overhead," said analyst Michael Pachter, who believes the company is profitable. The company declined to comment.
'SOME GUY ON MADISON AVENUE'
At Dropbox, a file-sharing service, Chief Executive Drew Houston said in September that his company, valued at $4 billion, has cash left from a recent fundraising round and is in no hurry to hold an IPO.
"I'm sure we'll go public at some point, but fortunately it's not something we have to think about right now," Houston said at a Techcrunch conference.
Social media service Pinterest, meanwhile, raised $225 million at a $3.8 billion valuation in October even though it had only begun to make money in September by showing ads. Chief Executive Ben Silbermann has consistently denied that the company is considering an IPO.
Jeremy Liew, a partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, which invested in photo-messaging application Snapchat, said Twitter was the latest company to prove to investors that social media services can eventually turn their mass audiences into reliable revenue sources, even if they have yet to turn a profit.
"Once you touch that many people, you will always figure out ways to make money," Liew said. "After you enter the popular consciousness, there'll be some guy on Madison Avenue asking, 'What's our Twitter strategy? What's our Tumblr strategy? What's our Facebookstrategy? What's our Snapchat Strategy?'"
Snapchat is perhaps one of the furthest down the line. It raised $60 million earlier this year at a valuation of $800 million. A Pew Research Center study released last month said that 9 percent of U.S. mobile phone users use Snapchat.
Notetaking service Evernote, which has been valued at $1 billion, has signaled for several months that it is beginning to mull an IPO, although CEO Phil Libin said an offering would still be at least two years away.
"I don't think we're at a point yet where we are the best company we can be to go public," he said in an interview, noting that predictable and balanced revenue streams would have to be precursors to any IPO.
The company, which has more than 80 million users and generates revenue from selling a $5 a month premium version of its app as well as a version for businesses, is "educating" itself about how to become IPO-ready by talking to bankers and other CEOs, including Twitter's Dick Costolo and Microsoft's Steve Ballmer, said Libin.
The market's embrace of Twitter comes right as the IPO market enters what is typically a seasonal lull. Public offerings typically come to a halt around the time of the Thanksgiving holiday and do not really get started again until February or March.
Kevin Hartz, a serial entrepreneur and investor who founded Xoom, a digital money transfer service that went public in February, said many in Silicon Valley believe the appetite is growing for tech IPOs.
Source : Reuters
After skyrocketing more than 70% on its market debut, Twitter
TWTR
-7.24%
gave up 7.2% on Friday, its second day of trading, drawing even more comparisons with Facebook Inc.
FB
-0.06%
. Like Twitter, Facebook’s initial public offering in May 2012 had been
the marquee IPO of the year. But after a first day pop, the stock failed
to live up to the hype and traded below its IPO price of $38 until
earlier this year when investors saw visible proof that the company’s
monetization effort was bearing fruit
Twitter faces much of the same obstacles in convincing skeptics that it
has a viable product in its microblogging service, and its key task will
be to demonstrate that it can continue to attract enough active users
to continue growing its revenue.
“Twitter is likely in the early innings of its growth. We believe that
the majority of the world’s 2.4 billion Internet users have great
potential to find something or someone on Twitter that they are
interested in,” Michael Pachter, an analyst at Wedbush, said in a
report.
He initiated coverage of Twitter’s with a neutral rating and a price target of $37.
Source : MarketWatch
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