Social Media

Twitter Now Worth One Billion Dollars

Twitter is a rather small company with just 50 employees in San Francisco, but already worth one billion dollars, as they just received an injection worth $50 million. Twitter has not officially confirmed this new $50 million, which most of it came from Insight Venture Partners in New York, but TechCrunch reports that the employees … Read more →

Twitter Cross Site (XSS) Vulnerability – Watch Out!

James Slater, IT developer with a British firm that specializes in search engine optimization, has found a security vulnerability in the social network, Twitter. The simple act of reading tweets online on twitter.com could cause somebody to steal your login cookie and potentially get access to your Twitter account – or simply redirect you to … Read more →

Facebook – Friend Or Foe ?

facebook-logoby Dino Delellis

A few days ago, I wrote an article that was republished a number of times around the internet. In it I detailed a little bit of the angst being felt by people who had been banned or suspended while diddling around in the social network – Facebook.

Go ahead, say it – so what ? Granted that being suspended from facebook pales next to world hunger and global melting or is that global warming. But, if you were the cherished one expected to invite 600 wedding guests to your mother-in-laws anniversary and suddenly you got suspended after sending out only 20 invites, well you know then that being banned at such an auspicious time is going to look a little suspicious, right?

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Facebook and FriendFeed Combine Power

facebook-logoby Ben Janke

Well, I’m certain that you’ve heard the news now that FriendFeed has been purchased by Facebook. This is working to put Facebook on the mapping for real-time search queries just like on Twitter. It sure does look like that Facebook is going after Twitter, hard-core.

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Facebook: World’s 4th Most Visited Website. Google: Brand Value $100 Billion

In just one year, Facebook has seen a phenomenal growth in the number of visits. Today there are 208 million more people visiting Facebook, than there was just a year ago. 24 million more visits last month makes Facebook the fourth most popular site in the world and the most popular site that has nothing … Read more →

Facebook App For iPhone 3.0 Coming Soon

Facebook app for iPhone 3.0For some time now, I’ve wondered why Facebook didn’t release a proper iPhone application that would let you use Faceobok more, like you would do in a browser. With the current version, you’re missing out on some features that would be nice to have, in such an application. Not to mention, where’s push notifications?!

However, there’s some good news around the corner for the almost 25% of all iPhone owners which has the Facebook app installed, according to Joe Hewitt (lead engineer for Facebook’s iPhone application). Earlier this week Joe shared some details on the upcoming 3.0 version of Facebook for iPhone, here’s some of the new stuff:

  • “New” News Feed
  • “Like” function
  • Events (including the ability to RSVP)
  • Notes
  • Pages
  • Create new photo albums
  • Upload photos to any album
  • Zoom into photos
  • Easier photo tagging
  • Profile Pictures albums
  • A new home screen for easy access to all your stuff, search, and notifications
  • Add your favorite profiles and pages to the home screen
  • Better Notifications (they link to the comments so you can reply)
  • Quickly call or text people right from the Friends page
  • Messages you are typing will be restored if you quit or are interrupted by a phone call

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My First 2 Weeks With Twitter: Experiences and recommendations

twitter_logoToday is exactly 2 weeks since I signed up for Twitter and started using it “for real”, and have I learned a thing or two!!! This post will sum up some of the things I’ve learned so far, my experiences and recommendations.

The direct impacts Twitter have had on me involves:

  • Relaunching my website, as I thought it would be interesting to see how it would turn out, when I “advertise” my blog posts through Twitter. Also, for some time I’ve been needing a public place to publish some of the things I have on my mind, so this Twitter thing seemed to be a good idea.
  • Reading a ton of blogs and articles, almost everyday. Back in my pre-Twitter days, I mostly just read the local newspaper online as well as TUAW (Apple blog), in addition to some forums once in a while. Post-Twitter, I’ve come across websites and blogs I never knew existed – and they have alot of great content, articles and theories, that I enjoy reading.
  • I’m much more updated, because the important news spread to Twitter faster than I would otherwise have received them (by my daily visit to the newspaper sites).
  • I connect with new and interesting people, that I’ve never met or known before.

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6 Highly Recommended Ways of Using Twitter Search

twitter_logoWhile some may argue that FriendFeed is more “real time” than Twitter, Twitter is still the bigger player in the “social network league”. Here’s some great tips on how to get the best out of Twitter search.

1: Stay updated with topics you care about.

I like to keep up to date with Apple and iPhone news. But what if I also wanted Palm Pre in that cocktail but avoid all the retweets, well, you should simply do a search like this:

apple OR iphone OR “palm pre” -rt filter:links

2: Managing multiple Twitter accounts but still want to stay updated on them all?

Some users might have multiple Twitter accounts, and it would be nice to see all messages to all your accounts, regardless of which one you’re logged in to, at the moment:

to:techpatio OR to:techpatio1 OR to:techpatio2 (you catch the drift…. very simple)

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Facebook Looking To Replace Twitter Tweets?

Have you heard about the Facebook “Everyone button” yet? I haven’t, so I was a bit surprised to read today that Facebook launched a beta of the new Publisher with the “Everyone button” for certain users. Basically it lets you post your status updates for the whole world to see, not only your friends, just … Read more →

How to get Twitter followers that matters

twitter_logo“Oh no, not another one of those get-thousands-of-followers-scams”, you think? You’re in luck, because it’s not. I hate those and they don’t add anything of value to your Twitter experience (so I’ve heard, but it makes sense to me).

In 10 days of being a Twitter user, I have 43 followers – of which, I only know 2 of them personally. So what about the other 41 followers? Well, I was stunned to see people follow me, even after having made only one or two tweets in total (about nothing even worth mentioning).

After a while, I learned that if I made a tweet about “poker”, shortly after I would receive one or two followers that have also tweeted about poker in the past. And if that’s not the case, then people are usually just following you, hoping that you will follow them back. I don’t mind following back, as long as I find their previous tweets interesting – that’s really what matters to me. But if I see somebody following me, that has more followers than he is following himself, then I tend to think here’s a guy that doesn’t just follow me hoping I will follow back, he actually has more followers than he’s following. There’s a catch though – in theory, he could have just unfollowed say 1,000 users recently, bringing his following down to 8,500 while he himself is being followed by 9,000. I’m not sure whether or not there’s a tool to “batch unfollow”, otherwise this process seems a bit “too much” just to get some followers…

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