tweet

'Tis the season to be jolly. And a lot of us are during the holidays, if statistical analyses of our tweets provide sufficient measure.

But overall happiness appears to be on a gradual decline since 2009, according to a University of Vermont analysis of some 46 billion words tweeted by 63 million users since 2009.

The team compared a wide range of words and phrases--including hahaha and lol--to "happiness scores" of the 10,000 most common English words. Words such as happy and laughter appear at the top of the 1-to-9 scale, while terrorist gets 1.30.

Not … Read more

The new TweetDeck (download for Windows and Mac) has launched, and it's the first version since Twitter bought the company. There's a new logo and blue skin to reflect that, but far bigger changes happened under the hood.

It's not entirely clear when the new versions were released, since Twitter didn't announce them, but the company has completely abandoned the old program. Gone is the cross-platform program built on Adobe AIR, and gone are many of its features. In its place, Twitter has built two new programs native to Windows and Mac, respectively, and streamlined their … Read more

HootSuite for iOS lets you sign in to your Twitter, Facebook, and Foursquare accounts from a single application window. While the app may not be versatile enough for the most active social media personalities, it is a convenient option for frequent users of these three social networks.

The first thing you should know about HootSuite for iOS is that it's nowhere near as powerful as its browser-based sibling. While the desktop version lets you sign in to and post from no fewer than nine different networks, the iOS app is limited to the three mentioned above. That said, the … Read more

"Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die."

If that line, from "The Princess Bride," seems familiar, you're not alone. You may even have tweeted it at some point. After all, every day, as many as a dozen people do just that.

And every time someone does, somewhere on the Internet, a Web robot sees it and fires back its own line from the movie.

This is Emeraq, a movie-loving bot whose job consists of nothing more than looking out for and responding to tweets of choice movie quotes.

I … Read more

PARIS--Power users have criticized Twitter's new design, but the company made its choices carefully about what to spotlight and what to hide in the new interface.

"When you're trying to simplify a product, you have to make some tough decisions," said Ryan Sarver, Twitter's director of platform, at the LeWeb conference here today. Thus, direct access to direct messages and Twitter user lists got pushed deeper into the interface.

"They are still one click away and part of the product," Sarver said. "We wanted to focus on the main timeline, the ability … Read more

Your tweets are about to become part of American history.

The Library of Congress plans to create an archive of every public tweet sent in Twitter's five-year history.

The library has an agreement with Twitter to move the billions and billions of public tweets from Twitter servers to its own servers, Bill Lefurgy, the digital initiatives program manager at the library's national digital information infrastructure and preservation program, said in an interview with Federal News Radio yesterday.

Twitter is full of uninteresting noise, no doubt. But its aggregate data will be a valuable tool for researchers who want … Read more

As 2011 draws to a close, Twitter has given us a snapshot of what events in the past 12 months seemed to have captured our interest the most.

Twitter's version of the Year in Review lists prominent events throughout the year along with the tweets they generated per second worldwide on the microblogging site.

It may surprise you to learn that the October 6 death of Steve Jobs was not No. 1 in per-second tweets; indeed, it didn't even make the top 5. Its 6,049 tweets per second were about a 1,000 shy of the per-second … Read more

"A Midsummer Night's Tweet"? "A Hashtag Named Desire"? "Jesus Christ Twitterstar"?

You can't help but wonder what sort of productions we'll begin seeing as more and more performance venues, theater companies, symphony orchestras, and the like begin experimenting with "tweet seats," sections reserved for audience members who just can't tear themselves away from their Twitter feeds.

As USA Today reported recently, though storied venues such as the Kennedy Center and Carnegie Hall still ask patrons to shut off their cell phones during shows, a growing number of performance spaces/companies are succumbing to the social-networking and smartphone crowd. They're providing special seating so patrons can send and receive tweets without their wiggling thumbs and glowing touch screens disturbing fellow event-goers.… Read more

When Twitter tweaks itself, most users don't see much.

That's because when the social-networking and microblogging service tests or rolls out new features, it often does so incrementally and with a limited number of users.

That seems to be the case with Twitter's new activity and username streams that the company announced back on August 10 and that TechCrunch started to see cropping up over the past day or so.

So while Sean Parker, the digital impresario behind Facebook, Spotify, Plaxo, and Causes, was one of the lucky Twitterati (@sparker) to see the latest changes today, user … Read more