If You Printed Twitter…

Link (Thanks Andrew!)

‘Irresponsible’ Website Tells Robbers When Victims Are Not Home

A website which provides real-time updates on the location empty homes has been criticized by privacy campaigners, who say it is ‘irresponsible’ and a “one stop shop” for burglars.

PleaseRobMe.com provides minute-by-minute updates on people who have just left their house and their current location. It does this by tracking Twitter user’s activities in real-time as they tweet.

The Dutch website, which was launched last week, has hit back saying they were simply highlighting the dangers of the newest social networking craze.

So, is this website an aid to robbers or an aid to our safety? Surely everyone knows that there are many potential dangers to using social media, but is providing criminals with a sorted database of opportunities the right way to go about helping us become aware of our privacy?

Yahoo! Owns Google?

Yes, that’s right, Yahoo! dissed Google on Twitter after Google launched ‘Google Buzz’. When will these internet giants ever grow up? There’s only one way to settle this – RAP BATTLE!

How Much Is Your Twitter Account Worth?

The massive growth of Twitter has opened up a whole new advertising platform for businesses and individuals all around the world. The degree to which Twitter can be a successful advertising platform, however, depends on how many followers you have, your reputation amongst your followers and how focussed your follower group is.

With the recent news that Drew Carey will donate $1 million to Livestrong if his account @drewfromtv reaches 1 million followers by the end of the year, it got me thinking, how much is my Twitter account worth? It turns out mine’s worth just $551, which is more than I thought. How about you? How much is your Twitter account worth? Click the link to find out.

Link

The Social Media Guru

Note: Some Adult Content.

“A lot of people claim that they know this guy. There is no actual guy, hes an amalgam of a hundred different half-assed guru-wannabes Ive encountered online and in real life. For every one good guy, there seems to be ten cowboys.”

Via Laughing Squid

Drew Carey Bids $100,000 for @drew Twitter Account

Drew Carey has bid $100,000 to buy the Twitter account @drew in an online charity auction for cancer support.

The sale is brainchild of Drew Olanoff, a Twitter user who has used the internet to encourage a positive approach to living with cancer since being diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma in May.

On Friday he announced that he was inviting bids of more than $10,000 for his @drew account – a prime piece of Twitter real estate which he claimed as one of the micro-blogging site’s early adopters.
Yesterday Carey, who is also well known as the host of the US version of the improv comedy show Whose Line Is It Anyway?, posted an update from his @DrewFromTV account saying that he was willing to stump up $25,000.

He later sent a message to Olanoff saying that he would raise his offer to $100,000 if the his follower count reached 100,000 by the end of the auction on Nov 9.

The number of people subscribing to Carey’s feed increased from 13,000 to more than 18,000 within hours, as news of his bid spread around Twitter.

Let’s all follow DrewFromTV, and raise some serious cash for cancer support. Nice one Drew!

Link

Hacked Big Mouth Billy Bass Fish Speaks Tweets

Take a look at this video, in which some bright spark decided to hack a Big Mouth Billy Bass fish so it would read Twitter updates.

He planted an ARM microcontroller into it’s head so that it would read tweets. Initially an MBED chip implanted in the fish would repeat .wav files from an SD card, but Dan Ros thought having the fish say recorded phrases was just boring so he came up with the Twitter idea, attached an Ethernet wire and wrote some MBED code.

Here’s a visual representation of how Billy works:

Billy went offline recently, but now he’s back online, so feel free to tweet him @mbedmicro, and watch him read your tweet live here.

‘Don’t Worry, Be Happy!’

Via

10 Best Things We’ll Say to Our Grandkids

Here’s a nice post I saw on Wired, about the 10 best things we’ll say to our grandkids.

1. Back in my day, we only needed 140 characters.

2. There used to be so much snow up here, you could strap a board to your feet and slide all the way down.

3. Televised contests gave cash prizes to whoever could store the most data in their head.

4. Well, the screens were bigger, but they only showed the movies at certain times of day.

5. We all had one, but nobody actually used it. Come to think of it, I bet my LinkedIn profile is still out there on the Web somewhere.
6. 英語曾經是統治語言。 瘋狂，哼？ *

7. Our bodies were made of meat and supported by little sticks of calcium.

8. You used to keep files right on your computer, and you had to go back to that same computer to access them!

9. Is that the new iPhone 27G? Got multitasking yet?

10. I just can’t get used to this darn vat-grown steak. Texture ain’t right.

* Translation: “English used to be the dominant language. Crazy, huh?”

Some of the things we do seem very strange when you come think about it. Meat and calcium, hmmm.

@shitmydadsays Lands a Book Deal

I recently posted an article on @shitmydadsays, the 73-year-old dad, Sam, who has taken the Twitter community by storm with his funny quotes, which his 28-year-old son, Justin, then tweets, gaining the pair 250k followers in less than a month. Well now, Justin has landed himself a book deal for his efforts.

Until last week, Sam had no idea his youngest son had been broadcasting his anecdotes for the world to read. But you could write a book about Sam. Indeed, Justin has already signed with an agent and is considering offers from book publishers.

If you haven’t already, I urge you to check out @shitmydadsays. Please note though, it does contain some strong language.

Link

Facebook & Twitter Revolutionizing How Parents Stalk Their College-Aged Kids

Twitter Is Back!

Okay, after just over a week of my Twitter account being down, it’s finally back! That week felt like the longest week of my life.

Please feel free to follow me @pigjockey, and I’ll follow you back!

Thanks a lot guys!

Justin’s 73-Year-Old Dad Is Awesome

Justin is a 28-year-old man who lives with his 73-year-old dad. Justin decided to set up a Twitter account @shitmydadsays, to write stuff that his dad says. The Twitter account has become so popular, it has over 100k followers in less than a month.

Here are some examples of the stuff that Justin’s dad says:

“Who is this woman?….Kate Beckinsale? Well, you can tell Kate Beckinsale she sucks.”

“Don’t touch the bacon, it’s not done yet. You let me handle the bacon, and i’ll let you handle..what ever it is you do. I guess nothing.”

“Your brother brought his baby over this morning. He told me it could stand. It couldn’t stand for shit. Just sat there. Big let down.”

“I didn’t live to be 73 years old so I could eat kale. Don’t fix me your breakfast and pretend you’re fixing mine.”

I officially LOVE Justin’s dad. Go check him out @shitmydadsays.

Is Wednesday The Worst Day Of The Week?

Mondays are given a bad rap, aren’t they? The first day of the working week and nobody wants to get out of bed. Well, in fact, new research has found that Monday my not be the worst day of the week- Wednesday is!

New research by two American applied mathematicians suggests that Wednesday is the most miserable day of the week.

“Professors Christopher Danforth and Peter Dodds, of Vermont University, analysed words used in 2.4 million internet blogs such as Twitter, giving a score out of nine depending on how positive they were.

Words like free, fun, rainbow and sex all scored above eight, while words such as betray, cruel, hatred and suffocate all scored less than two.

Saturday and Sunday rated predictably well but, perhaps surprisingly, Monday came out as the second happiest day of the week, partly because people were still reminiscing about the weekend. However by Wednesday, these feelings had subsided.”

Is Monday really the second best day of the week? What’s your worst day of the week, and why?

Link

Social Media Banned from College Stadiums

Adam Ostrow just posted this on Mashable. The Southeastern Conference is proposing a ban on social media at college games. Is this really possible?

“Today, the Southeastern Conference (SEC) is expected to release a final version of its new media policy. For the sake of sports fans everywhere, let’s hope it has some significant changes from the current version, because at the moment, it can best be described as a ban on all social media usage at SEC games.

Earlier this month, the conference informed its schools of the new policy, which reads: “Ticketed fans can’t “produce or disseminate (or aid in producing or disseminating) any material or information about the Event, including, but not limited to, any account, description, picture, video, audio, reproduction or other information concerning the Event.”

Translated, that means no Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, TwitPic, or any other service that could in any way compete with authorized media coverage of the event. In the case of the SEC, authorized media coverage rights belong to CBS, who has a $3 billion deal with the conference over the next 15 years according to The St Petersburg Times.”

Good luck with that guys!

Amazing Twittering Art Sculpture

This video shows an interactive Twittering sculpture, created by Márton András Juhász, Melinda Matúz, Gergely Kovács and Barbara Sterk.

The piece is called “Where is your art?”. It uses hacked electronic toys on poles which are connected to the Twitter server. Every time someone tweets the word “art”, the toys will speak the tweet out loud using text to voice technology.

I’d like to see this technology developed to enable user choice of which tweets to be read aloud. It’s a pretty neat piece of technology for those who can’t be bothered to read!

Link

Attacked Georgian Blogger Was Meant To Be Silenced, Instead He Becomes Famous

The massive cyber attacks last week were aimed at silencing one blogger, instead, it has made him famous.

“Cyxymu” as he is known on his anti-Russian blog, who says his first name is “Giorgy”, has been the focus of worldwide news reports after he was identified as the target that took down Twitter for several hours.

“I am not happy that [my] blogs were attacked,” said the blogger, speaking on his cellphone from outside the Georgian capital of Tbilisi. “But it is good that I get famous.

“I think Obama knows about me, because he likes Internet news.”

Giorgy says that the attacks will not stop him from his writings.

“I want to create a new Internet blog,” he said, to be housed on “a server in America.”

It seems like the Russian hacker’s plans may have blown up in their faces.

Link

Twitter Releases New Homepage

Twitter has just released it’s new homepage. The new design focusses on search and popular topics. For those of you that use Twitter, I’m sure you’ll agree that it’s more sleek and pleasing to the eye than the previous homepage.

Twitter’s functionality is still the same, however it’s redesign makes it more accessible to new users and more interactive as well as putting more emphasis on Twitter trends.

This is another step forward for Twitter, in making it easy for businesses to make money from the micro-blogging site.

Get NY Traffic and Transit Updates On Twitter

Get New York traffic and transit updates on Twitter including subway lines. You can follow the 123, ACE, JMZ, 456, BDFV, LS, 7, G, and NQRW…that is of course if you can get a signal underground!

Link

White House Bans Twitter

The White house has banned access to Twitter on it’s computers. White House Press Secretary, Robert Gibbs casually mentioned to CNN that Twitter is blocked, saying that people already know enough about what he’s doing.

While Barack Obama twitters on two accounts, @WhiteHouse and @barackobama, Gibbs clearly doesn’t understand the power of the micro-blogging tool.

Talking of Twitter, you can follow us @pigjockey.

The Queen Of England On Twitter

It seems nowadays, everyone is tweeting their every move. Well how about this – Buckingham Palace has set up it’s very own Twitter account.

After several weeks of testing, @BritishMonarchy has gone live. A spokeswoman said that the Royal Family wanted to utilize the popularity of Twitter to spread information about royal engagements as well as what members of the family are doing.

One of the three people @BritishMonarchy is currently following is Andy Murray – most recently a semi-finalist at Wimbledon.

The Queen and the Prince of Wales have been informed about the Twitter account, however it’s a shame that the Royal Family will not be personally tweeting, although one must not complain.