twitter

According to HTC's Twitter feed, the Touch Pro2 is officially coming to North America. We had every indication that it would, but this confirms it.

What's interesting isn't that the phone's headed our way, but that HTC used Twitter to announce it. Twitter is becoming a useful way for companies to reach out to journalists and fans alike.

The feed also says that while there's no specific date, it will "start to roll out late Q2" this year. That means those of you who are waiting for the Pro2 hotness only have to … Read more

Natali opens with some rage against Verizon Fios over a billing problem after she canceled the service. She feels somehow, well...Jason explains it best in the show. We also get a Molly rant over Ireland's new content filtering on the Internet and TechCrunch's reporting that Last.FM was giving data to the RIAA. Which it was not.

Microsoft asks for severance back from laid off employees http://news.cnet.com/8301-10805_3-10169119-75.html

Workers ’stealing company data’ http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7902989.stm

Xbox Live denial … Read more

Twitter is working to convert its popularity into a business, and Google has shown that search can make money. So it's notable that Twitter is giving its search function new prominence.

Rather than consigning its Twitter search page to a separate corner of its Web site, Twitter has begun testing its use on the main Twitter.com page. "We've placed Search and Trends into the signed-in home pages of a limited set of accounts to get a better sense of how it works for folks before we release the feature completely into the wild," Twitter co-founder Biz Stone … Read more

Google announced Friday that AdSense users will now be able to change the font face of the text in its ad units. According to the company's AdSense engineers, users will be able to choose between Arial, Times, and Verdana in their ads, but they will only be applied to units on pages primarily in Latin-based characters.

To customize the ad units, AdSense users will need to visit the "Ad Display Preference" section in their Account settings and select the custom font they want to use for their ad. Once they pick that font, they can update their … Read more

I hate it when someone else beats me to a post, but no sense crying about it. Besides, David Kirkpatrick sums up the situation far more eloquently than I ever could:

"All those people on the blogs and in the press who are obsessed over Facebook's valuation are really a bore. Anybody who thinks Microsoft's $15 billion valuation ever was a real common-stock valuation doesn't understand much about finance. And nobody but Microsoft would have wanted to lead a round at that valuation--getting into Facebook had unique value for the company which most of all wants … Read more

Something missing from many location-aware Twitter applications for iPhone is the option to stick a Web map into a tweet. Most simply change the home city in your Twitter profile and slap on some latitude and longitude coordinates. This is great if you feel like looking those up, but otherwise it's a less than ideal way to tell people where you are.

Schmap, the social-mapping service, has a new and free iPhone app out called GeoTweeter (not to be confused with GeoTweeter.com) that lets you do just that. You can broadcast your location on a map that gets … Read more

Dan Levy has us on his podcast On the DL, where we discuss the future of online media and why Wilson hates the chat room. Twitter says that Justin is the best dressed on the show. T-Mobile announces a $50 unlimited voice calling plan. Justin's dad kills the world's largest rat. Nintendo launches the DSi, and Boxee pulls Hulu support as well as TV.com. Wow, we are actually discussing some technology news today.

Brought to us by voice mail, the biggest news of the day is that your favorite podcast, The 404, is No. 8 on iTunes … Read more

During New York's inaugural "Social Media Week" festivities earlier this month, media-industry research firm Abrams Research (that's "Abrams" as in MSNBC's Dan Abrams, for the news junkies out there) conducted a survey about the perception of various social-media services within the industry. The results weren't too surprising: 30 percent of respondents would pay for Facebook (keep in mind that these respondents are people already active in the social-media world). They encourage businesses to think seriously about Twitter for marketing. Etc.

That's all good and fine. But what we really found hilarious … Read more

For the past few weeks, I've kept a log of all the activities I've engaged in to see how the Web is impacting my life--at least when it comes to my consumption of media. But before I get into my findings, I should first offer some perspective. Years ago, before the days of Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and others, I was a book and movie fanatic. I would read any book you put in front of me, and any time I had the chance to watch a film, I took it. The same was true with gaming. At times, I would play a game for an entire afternoon, take a break for a while to watch a TV show or movie, and go back to that game after dinner. I was an entertainment nut. I did everything I could to find out about new books, shows, movies, or games, and spent much of my time enjoying them.

But media technology has changed and so has my consumption of it. The Web now consumes my life. How much? The log I've kept over the past few weeks shows it, in minute-by-minute detail. … Read more