twitter

If you've been thinking about starting a Twitter account under the pretense of being someone else you might want to think twice if it has anything to do with someone else's intellectual property.

In the past few weeks users, who have been trying their best to emulate characters from AMC's television series Mad Men have apparently had their accounts wiped clear and de-authorized by the microblogging start-up at the request of AMC's lawyers.

That's not the only instance, though.

More troubling is the story of Rich Johnston, a columnist for ComicBookResources.com. Johnston had gotten … Read more

It's the ultimate summer Friday news story: CNN Webcasting a press conference hosted by the men who claim they nabbed a dead body of the legendary creature known as Bigfoot.

Bigfoot hunter Tom Biscardi held the press conference in Palo Alto, Calif., in conjunction with Matthew Whitton and Rick Dyer, the two men from Georgia who claim that they found the corpse while hiking. Biscardi wouldn't actually show the body, saying that he had invited Fox News reporter Megan Kelly to show it on-air and that a number of scientists would be performing an autopsy on Monday.

"… Read more

There's been a lot of chatter this week about the importance (or unimportance) of PR in Web 2.0. My take on it is that unsolicited pitches can be just as fun as things I discover on my own, including this Spanish start-up called Poukker, which e-mailed to let us know about its launch.

It's a sister service to poker site Pacopoker.com, and is an unadulterated copy of Twitter. It uses fish instead of birds as a mascot and, according to the loose documentation, it was meant to be a place where poker players could announce their … Read more

Kathy Sierra tweets:

Twitter extreme eg.--many of us non-users couldn't perceive benefits. Low barrier made it OK to say, "just try it..." Not true w/all things

This is a sometimes overlooked advantage of software as a service (SaaS) in its various forms. Even installing free or trial software can be challenging enough that all manner of virtual appliances and application virtualization have been suggested as possible solutions to this "pain point."

Of course, no barrier is truly zero height. Even signing up with a Web site, getting the hang of the basics, and (… Read more

European users of Twitter can no longer receive text message updates on their cell phones, in a temporary move designed to keep the start-up's telecom bills down.

Twitterers can still use its U.K. number, +44 762 480 1423, to send updates to the site. But that number will no longer deliver text-message updates back to users, and recommends that they use the Twitter mobile site or a third-party client like TwitterBerry, Twitterrific, TwitterMail, or Cellity.

"When you send one message to Twitter and we send it to ten followers, you aren't charged ten times--that's because … Read more

Sen. Barack Obama has already proven himself to be the most popular presidential candidate on the Internet, what with his more than 1.3 million Facebook supporters and lofty aims of 2 million online donors. Now the presumptive Democratic nominee is not only outshining other politicians on the Internet, but also the very stars of social networking--Obama has just overtaken Kevin Rose's spot as the most followed person on Twitter, according to Twitterholic.

By Twitterholic's last count, Obama stands at 56,661 followers, compared with Rose's 56,442. Obama also has the second highest number of friends … Read more

Congress learns all about cookies (not the delicious kind...but maybe the del.icio.us kind), Gmail goes down, and Google proves to be a terrible communicator. Also, the Amazon Kindle may take off after all (har har), and Twitter baffles us completely regarding its follow/follower spam prevention thing. In sum, it's a Tuesday, but it feels like a Monday.

Google apologizes for Gmail outage http://www.crn.com/software/210002714

PC World: Google Apps hit by prolonged Gmail access problem http://www.pcworld.com/article/149524/

Android may be … Read more

This was one of those rare events in the calendar: Google's Gmail went down for the count while Twitter, everyone's regular punching bag, was full of chatterers who couldn't stop blabbing about the outage.

As my colleague Dan Farber recently reminded everyone in these pages, sometimes it does rain on the cloud. That's just the nature of cloud computing, which is still in its relative infancy. Truth be told, considering the load being shouldered, I'm more surprised that systems aren't breaking more often than they do.

For more, check out the video interview I … Read more

Did you know that you can only follow 2,000 people on Twitter--unless there are at least 2,000 people who have opted to follow you?

This was one of the measures that the microblogging service formally announced Thursday as part of a new system to cut down on spam. The company acknowledged it only obliquely, but bloggers like David Risley picked up on the news and spread the word.

Twitter spam accounts are known for adding thousands of followers and then hoping that some of the unwitting Twitter users will follow the spam account in return--most don't, … Read more