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Overlay your shared photos with good-looking typography

Over for iOS lets you jazz up your Instagram photos with beautifully rendered typography to make them more than just photos with filters.

This is not a complete photo-editing app. Instead, with Over, you're adding great-looking fonts to your images to tell more of the story, make a meme, or simply to add a label. You start by picking an image from your iPhone photo library. A wheel-like interface on the right gets you to the apps main functions where you can choose your fonts, edit what you have on screen, save to your camera roll, or share to … Read more

Twitter hit with $50M suit over anti-Semitic tweeter data

The Union of Jewish French Students, UEJF, has doubled down in its battle with Twitter and said it filed a $50 million lawsuit against the social network yesterday.

The cause of the suit? User data for anti-Semitic tweets.

The fracas goes back to October when Twitter was awash in anti-Semitic French-language tweets tied to the hashtag "#unbonjuif" ("a good Jew"). This prompted the student union and other anti-racism groups to ask Twitter to remove both the tweets and the hashtag. The social network complied by deleting the tweets in France that it deemed racist.

While deleting … Read more

Bring Instagram thumbnails back to Twitter in Chrome

Remember when Twitter stopped showing Instagram photo previews to users, both online and in apps? Now you can add those photo previews for Instagram and other third-party photo services back to your Twitter feed, at least on the Web.

This is done through the use of a Chrome extension called Previeweet. The extension actually works for more than just Instagram. While testing it out, I was able to see previews from Instagram, Photobucket, Facebook, Yfrog, Twitpic, Twitvid, Flickr, and Imgur -- which is great, since those are in the list of services that Previeweet says it supports.

To get started, … Read more

Fix 'Connection to Twitter failed' when tweeting from OS X

A while back Twitter announced that any URLs being shortened by its t.co service were going to cost users two extra characters. When you only have a 140 characters to begin with, the extra characters could be disastrous when trying to get your point across in a tweet.

It seems Apple didn't take the change into account with its integration of Twitter in OS X Mountain Lion. I discovered this when attempting to tweet a link from Safari. According to the tweet sheet, I had composed a perfect tweet, using up my entire 140-character allotment.

But every time … Read more

'Syrian Electronic Army' hacks a BBC Twitter account

The Twitter account of the BBC weather service was hacked today, and hacker group the Syrian Electronic Army -- which supports Syrian President Bashar Assad -- is taking credit.

The BBC confirmed to Reuters that its account was hacked. The @bbcweather account was posting strange messages today, ranging in content but often mentioning Syria and Middle Eastern politics.

"Long Live #Syria Al-Assad #SEA," read one tweet. The group also claimed to have hacked @BBCarabicOnline and @Bbcradioulster as well. The BBC tweeted that the issue has been resolved.

The Syrian Electronic Army has claimed hacks before, including one on … Read more

Twitter turns seven, releases greatest-hits video

Twitter turns seven today, and to commemorate its birthday, the social networking service has released a video that highlights its many accomplishments, including surpassing 200 million active users.

The service has come a very long way since co-founder (and now patent holder) Jack Dorsey posted the first-ever tweet on March 21, 2006: "Just setting up my twttr."

Of course, it turns out that that tweet was not unique to Dorsey. Many Twitter employees tweeted the very same words that day, evidence of automated language on day one.

just setting up my twttr

— Jack Dorsey (@jack) March 21, 2006 … Read more

Talk on Twitter corresponds to higher TV ratings

This is a classic "which came first, the chicken or the egg" scenario: more talk on Twitter and higher TV ratings, or is it quality TV and more talk on Twitter?

Whatever the case, market research firm Nielsen has discovered that there is a correlation -- but not necessarily causation -- between Twitter and live TV ratings.

Using data from analytics platform SocialGuide, Nielsen found that 32 million unique people tweeted about TV in the U.S. in 2012. This may have led to Twitter being one of the top three variables aligned with TV ratings. The other … Read more

Oops! U.K. budget leaked on Twitter

The U.K. budget was leaked on Twitter today, granting politically minded surfers a sneak peek at George Osborne's number crunching ahead of time.

The key aspects of the chancellor's new measures -- including plans for the U.K.'s Internet speeds -- emerged early when London's Evening Standard newspaper tweeted its front page, which detailed the most crucial aspects of the annual ploy to make the U.K. more economically healthy.

The Standard posted an apology on its site, with editor Sarah Sands saying, "An investigation is immediately under way into how this front page … Read more

Twitter scores a patent for Twitter

If you're thinking about copying the way Twitter works, you might want to get a good lawyer: the technology at the core of the social network is officially patented.

As first reported by The Verge, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office granted Twitter a patent today for what it termed a "Device independent message distribution platform:"

A system (and method) for device-independent point to multipoint communication is disclosed. The system is configured to receive a message addressed to one or more destination users, the message type being, for example, Short Message Service (SMS), Instant Messaging (IM), … Read more