Tag: MICROBLOGGING

As the saying goes, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. If that's true, Twitter and Tumblr should be very flattered by the Chinese copycat sites Sina Weibo and DianDian, which have plucked ideas and designs from the microblogging networks. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, Sina Weibo has eclipsed Twitter as China's leading microblogging site. Mirae Asset Securities estimates ...

Web surfers in China can finally use their very own version of Twitter -- as long as they use it to sing the praises of Mao. The new service, called 'Red Microblog,' is essentially a Twitter-like platform, devoted to Communist propaganda. According to the Telegraph, the site officially rolled out yesterday, and is run by a local propaganda department in the city of Chongqing. The typical news ...

More rumors fly around Twitter than at a high-school cafeteria. But sometimes, the social-networking site actually does break real news -- and it has once again. According to Business Insider, ESPN columnist Bill Simmons, a.k.a. "The Sports Guy," broke news yesterday about the trade of NFL wide receiver Randy Moss from the New England Patriots to the Minnesota Vikings by sending what he claims ...

Last week, Twitter unveiled a new feature, called 'Suggestions For You,' which suggests accounts you might want to follow. Located as a tab on the 'Find People' page, the new feature uses an algorithm that examines the Twitterers you follow, and, based on several factors, suggests folks that might interest you. Basically, it's the same thing Facebook has been doing for some time with its equally ...

Ivy Bean, from Bradford, England, definitely wasn't your average Twitterer. She had a staggering 57,000 people following her IvyBean104 handle, and, thanks to her viral popularity, managed to work her way into meetings with British politicians and celebrities, alike. Oh, and at 104-years young, she was the world's oldest microblogger. Late Tuesday, though, Bean passed away at the care ...

In the vast sea of the Internet, there are myriad options for self-expression. The difficulty is picking a method that best suits one's needs and technical abilities. Do we want to express our truncated thoughts via Twitter, or perhaps wax loquacious on LiveJournal? Are Facebook updates enough, or do we want to share more than our relationship status and embarrassing party photos? In recent ...

Finally, the world's biggest sports superstar has joined the Twitterverse. NBA star LeBron James announced his social networking presence with a simple greeting that read, "Hello World, the Real King James is in the Building 'Finally'." As Geekosystem reports, the verified Twitter account dubbed KingJames emerged Tuesday. Before James even sent one tweet, he had 86,000 followers. Now, he's ...

Previously, spammers have tried to spread malware by enticing Twitter users with promises of beautiful women and breaking news. Now, according to a report from Trend Micro, they're taking a different approach: using vague, random "@" replies to flood users with malware. Blogger Rik Ferguson was tagged Tuesday morning in a tweet embedded with a shortened URL. After some research, Ferguson ...

As oil continues to seep into and spread throughout the Gulf of Mexico, a newly formed Twitter account has been mocking British Petroleum's (BP) seemingly inept response to the environmental disaster. As of now, nobody is sure who started the BPGlobalPR account, which showed up last week, and now has more than 20,000 followers. According to Advertising Age, BP hasn't requested that the ...

When you send a tweet, you're saying a lot more than just what's written in the body of text. According to ReadWriteWeb, each 140-character message you send contains a ton of metadata, or information. Each tweet contains the time it was sent, your username, your location, the timezone from which you tweet, your number of followers, whether or not your account is protected, your account's URL ...

It's hard to take Jose Canseco seriously these days. If all that steroid drama, or his recent attempt to become a mixed-martial artist, didn't convince you that he's, let's say, unstable, then take a look at some of his most recent tweets. Nobody knows exactly why, but Canseco unleashed some ultra-explicit rants on the Twitterverse Monday afternoon. Yes, his account is verified, and yes, he's ...

We've already told you about the first tweet sent from outer space, and, according to Tech Crunch, a Ukrainian journalist recently became the first person to tweet while underwater. Television reporter Julia Gorodetskaya tweeted using a cell phone sealed in a plastic bag while scuba diving at the bottom of a 19-foot tank in a dolphinarium. This stunt was part of a Ukrainian mobile service ...

On the same day the Library of Congress announced it would be archiving the world's public tweets, Google announced a new feature that lets users search Twitter's archives and pinpoint a moment in time. According to the Official Google Blog, the 'replay' feature will make it possible to zoom to a specific point in time or date range and find out what people were tweeting about a specific ...

After Twitter's recent acquisition of Tweetie, it became clear that substantial changes were on the social network's horizon. And today, the site confirmed this by announcing its platform would now support special paid advertisements from specific companies. Known as 'Promoted Tweets,' the ads, according to co-founder Biz Stone's TwitterBlog, "are ordinary Tweets that businesses and ...

Share For the past year, Microsoft has been quietly testing a microblogging service for businesses, essentially developing a corporate Twitter. Taking the tweeting bird and dressing it in office park grays, OfficeTalk's resemblance to the popular microblogging service is uncanny: The experiment uses topic hashtags, has an in-built URL shortener, supports "@" mentions and limits its messages to ...