microblog

President Barack Obama's campaign yesterday opened up its first Tumblr account to help get the word out about their candidate.

"We'd like this Tumblr to be a huge collaborative storytelling effort--a place for people across the country to share what's going on in our respective corners of it and how we're getting involved in this campaign to keep making it better," the campaign wrote its first post on the page.

Currently, the Tumblr page has three posts, including an image of the campaign's Ohio offices and an excerpt from the President's address … Read more

Twitter has long said that its business is growing, but earlier today at a press conference at its headquarters in San Francisco, the company offered up a host of stats to prove it.

According to Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, whose comments were reported on by Search Engine Land, the service now has 100 million monthly active users worldwide. Out of that group, 50 million folks log in to the service every day, Costolo said.

Twitter's growth over the last several months has been nothing short of astounding. The firm reported, according to Search Engine Land, that its monthly active … Read more

The Chinese government can't stand online rumors, and in a commentary today from state-run media organization Xinhua it made that abundantly clear.

According to Xinhua, a mouthpiece for the country's ruling party, the growth of microblogging services, as well as blogs, is helping to fuel "toxic rumors" that, the government says, could lead to the rapid disintegration of the quality of the Internet.

"The rapid advance of this flood has also brought 'mud and sand'--the spread of rumors--and to nurture a healthy Internet, we must thoroughly eradicate the soil in which rumors grow," … Read more

Noah Everett is looking to take out the bird with one clone. The Twitpic founder appears to be serving up a bit of revenge with his latest venture, Heello, a feature-for-feature Twitter clone, right down to the "@" symbol and the pastel tones.

The start-up may or may not be motivated by vengeance, but it's tough to ignore the fact that Heello was launched a day after Twitter announced its own photo-sharing service, which competes directly with third-party photo services built on Twitter's API like Twitpic.

Still, Everett claims the launch date has more to do with a certain anniversary than a jab at the blue bird.

"We launched Heello the company one year ago today and today we're launching Heello the service," he pinged to his Heello listeners earlier today. Pings are the Heello equivalent of tweets and a listener is the same as a Twitter follower.

CNET has contacted Everett for comment and will update this post when we hear back.

Everett tells VentureBeat that the project started last year as a way to make Twitter "suck less" and revolve more around e-mail, but later opted to stay closer to Twitter's social formula.

If Heello's initial offering is any indication, they didn't change much in the formula, but Everett says video and texting integration are on the way, as well as a feature called "channels" that allows listeners to be grouped together in a manner that sounds awfully similar to Google+ circles.

Perhaps Everett really has no score to settle with Twitter. He's likely more focused on celebrating today anyhow--aside from the launch, it's also his 27th birthday, or so he just notified all his fans... on Twitter. … Read more

The days are numbered for Twitter's old site.

The popular microblogging site announced today that it will migrate users still using the old home page to the new interface design this week.

"If you're currently using Old Twitter, we want to let you know that you'll be upgraded to New Twitter this week," the company said in its official Twitter feed.

Last September, Twitter began rolling out a complete redesign of its home page that provides users with a second viewing pane for different kinds of content, such as photos and videos, user profiles, and … Read more

A company called UberTwitter that operates a suite of third-party Twitter applications--and hopes to do much more, with $17.5 million in new funding and the planned acquisition of popular client TweetDeck--has apparently run afoul of Twitter big-time. The microblogging service has suspended its apps, which include mobile clients UberTwitter, Echofon, and Twidroyd, as well as an advertising product, citing a number of violations.

"These violations include, but aren't limited to, a privacy issue with private Direct Messages longer than 140 characters, trademark infringement, and changing the content of users' Tweets in order to make money," a … Read more

After experiencing an outage that started on Sunday afternoon and stretched through most of the day yesterday, Tumblr has explained what happened.

"Yesterday afternoon, during planned maintenance that was not intended to interrupt service, an issue arose that took down a critical database cluster," Tumblr founder David Karp said on the company's blog last night. "This brought down our entire network while our engineers worked feverishly to restore these databases and bring your blogs back online."

Karp also acknowledged that the site has been experiencing some "errors" as of late, and admitted that … Read more

Twitter is trying out a new feature to display ads, or promoted tweets, directly in a user's Twitter stream, but the company admits it's watching carefully to see how people react.

The site expanded its "promoted tweets" feature yesterday, starting slowly by displaying the ads only for those who use HootSuite, a third-party Twitter client. Promoted tweets are tweets that advertisers pay to show to a large number of people, similar to the way advertisers pay for sponsored links that appear among search results at Google.

Those who access Twitter through HootSuite will begin to see … Read more

We've made it to episode #666, and there's even a Call From the Public from the Dark one himself congratulating us on making it this far. The truth is that every day we get to do The 404 is a miracle, so thanks to all the listeners who make this show possible!

On this especially evil episode, we're chatting about researchers working to develop prescription music playlists, Caroline McCarthy's first look review of Sorkin's Facebook movie "The Social Network", and a whole lot of backlash from the entire state of Tennessee.

With more and more music discovery sites like Pandora and Apple's Ping network popping up, it seems the next evolution of music classification is coming in the form of prescription music playlists.

The Emotion Classification in Contemporary Music is a three year project led by a team at the Glasgow Caledonian University in the UK, who are the trying to classify music for search and organization according to emotional content. Of course, one of the major hurdles in the research are all the genre-bending artists in addition to your own personal relationship to a piece.

The article uses The Cure as a good example or a emotionally polarizing artist, which leads us to a discussion about what songs invoke certain feelings or memories within our own canon. It's probably easy to guess which of us connects to each of these three songs.

"The Social Network" finally drops in theaters on October 1st, 2010 but CNET's own Caroline McCarthy got to check out an advanced screening and posted her thoughts on her CNET blog, The Social.

She tells us that the movie is more than just a bunch of glorified status updates and poking- it's a story about how a Web site changed the way that friends communicate with each other, or in her words: "the ambiguity of friendship, identity, and social status."

She also runs down quick performance reviews of all the actors in the movie, including a surprisingly positive take on Justin Timberlake's depiction of Napster co-founder Sean Parker.

Be sure to check out the full review for more in-depth analysis, but if you're just looking for a quick take, Caroline awards "The Social Network" four out of five stars...but seriously, read the review.