tweeting

TweetDeck tweaked to handle 'high-velocity' tweets

If you happened to have set up a TweetDeck column to filter tweets with the "#Debate" hashtag during any of the recent presidential or vice-presidential debates, you may well have had the same experience I did: the application crashing under the weight of thousands and thousands of posts per second.

With Twitter becoming a bigger and bigger part of mainstream culture, there are an increasing number of big events that generate huge numbers of tweets, and today the microblogging company announced it is attempting to address the dynamic of TweetDeck buckling when those events generate incredible amounts of … Read more

Tweet failures plaguing Twitter's official apps

Twitter users are reporting problems receiving tweets in their official Twitter apps this afternoon.

In a post to its official status blog, Twitter acknowledged the issue, saying: "Some users may be experiencing a delay with new tweets in their timelines. Our engineers are currently working on this issue."

A search for "Twitter app" reveals a lot of unhappy people, though people using clients like TweetDeck seem to be having no problems.

In recent days, there's been much talk of the end of the so-called "fail whale" in light of Twitter's performance having … Read more

Hashtag hits the red carpet with dress that tweets

As fashion fiend Tim Gunn likes to say, you can never go wrong with a classic black dress. And if it's fitted with 2,000 LEDs and broadcasts tweets in real time, all the better, right Tim?

Nicole Scherzinger took that fashion rule to heart when she showed up at a launch party for new British 4G mobile network EE last week wearing a haute couture gown that flashes like a light show on top while displaying scrolling tweets on the skirt below.

CuteCircuit, a London-based fashion company that designs interactive clothing, created the electronic dress especially for the … Read more

Twitter: Over 20M tweets sent about Hurricane Sandy

More than 20 million tweets were sent about Hurricane Sandy between Saturday and yesterday, according to Twitter, and the site says that's probably a conservative estimate as it only tracked certain keywords.

The site, which followed the terms and hash tags for "Sandy" and "hurricane," also said it saw a peak at about 9 p.m. Monday in the number of times users in New York accessed their home timeline from a mobile device. That coincides with the approximate time much of the city lost power.

Also Monday, search queries related to Sandy peaked at … Read more

The 404 1,157: Where we live in a van down by the river (podcast)

Leaked from today's 404 episode:

- Anthropologist says Apple is definitely a religion.

- Google brings Street View to the Grand Canyon.

- Apple now owns the trademark to The Beatles' Apple Corps Logo.

- What I learned while live-tweeting a friend's funeral.

Video voice mail: Mossimo has a positive update on a previous video voice mail.… Read more

Twitter predicts users' gender for targeted advertising

Twitter is trying to suss out which of its users are male and which are female. And so far, it's gotten its prediction science down to a 90 percent accuracy rate.

But, let me back up. Why in the world would the social network want to figure out the gender of its individual users?

Why for advertising, of course.

According to Twitter, the fairer sex might like to see a promoted tweet featuring cosmetics, while men would most likely ignore such advertising. All of this apparently matters when trying to generate ad revenue and monetize the site.

Unlike some … Read more

Twitter suspends account briefly after U.K. pol attacks gay couple

A right-wing political figure in Great Britain has stirred up trouble for tweeting the address of a gay couple denied a single room in a bed and breakfast.

The Twitter account belongs to the controversial Nick Griffin, Chairman for the British National Party Chairman and Member of the European Parliament for the North West region. Griffin and other members of the extreme right-wing British National Party have ruffled feathers in the past with their open hostility toward gays, Muslims, and immigrants.

This time around, Griffin expressed his outrage over a case in which two men requested a single room with … Read more

Sparks fly over anti-Semitic tweets in France

A controversy over an explosion of anti-Semitic tweets in France has raised complaints that Twitter makes it too hard for users to report offensive posts.

Over the last week, Twitter has been awash in anti-Semitic French-language tweets tied to the hashtag "#unbonjuif" ("a good Jew"), prompting arguments that social media in general, and Twitter in particular, are cesspools of objectionable content (article in French).

#UnBonJuifx-( twitter.com/CosaNostraAmli...

— J U L I ABOND JR(@CosaNostraAmlia) October 14, 2012

#UnBonJuif twitter.com/racyyne/status...

— Serre Fion 8-9 (@racyyne) October 16, 2012

Among the many objectionable tweets … Read more

Buzzworthy: Houseflies can now tweet

Anyone out there speak fly? Because I'd really like to know what these houseflies were saying when they tweeted the following last week:

``F`CZHGF`CZHGF`XZHGFDS`XZHFDS`XZHFDS`ZFD`ZFD`ZHGFD`HGFD`HGFD`HGF` HGF`HGF`HF`HF`HF``````````````````````````````````````````````````````````

The flies have joined the social-networking masses thanks to artist David Bowen, who created fly tweet, a device that sends tweets based on the activities of a colony of houseflies with too much time on their wings. The flies live and tweet inside an acrylic sphere that also contains a computer keyboard.

As the insects fly over the keyboard keys, their subtle movements trigger not-so-subtle tweets (really, flies, tweeting in all caps? Not cool).… Read more