It’s no secret that Facebook is worth about $100 billion because it collected personal data about its users. A lot of data. Although Twitter tracks its users too — albeit in a much less aggressive way — the company has decided to take a different route. It announced Thursday that it is joining Mozilla, the maker of the Firefox Web browser, and giving its users the ability to opt-out of being tracked in any way through Twitter. Twitter is doing this by enabling the Do Not Track feature in the Firefox browser that enables people to opt-out of cookies that collect personal
Read MoreAt 11:24 p.m. on Feb. 15, 2011, Gloria Huang -- a young social media specialist for the American Red Cross -- dashed off a tweet from what she thought was her personal Twitter account. "Ryan found 2 more 4 bottle packs of Dogfish Head's Midas Touch beer... When we drink we do it right #gettngslizzerd". When Huang clicked send, the message was instantly pushed out, not to her closest friends, but to every last one of the Red Cross' 268,000 followers. The accidental tweet quickly caught the attention of Twitter nation. Gag tweets with the hashtag #gettngslizzerd splashed across the
Read MoreiCloud is among the best products Microsoft has ever designed. Mike Monteiro , via Twitter
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Nestle, purveyor of the decades-old KitKat snack, has launched an app it says addresses a growing problem among young social media users - giving them a break from the stress of posting updates by doing it for them. The software, Social Break, automatically sends random updates to users' Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn accounts. It will be officially launched in Singapore later this week and is free to download from kitkat.com.sg/socialbreak. While the application is a tongue-in-cheek marketing gimmick, the developers behind the software, ad agency JWT, say it also highlights a serious problem among younger users, especially in Asia: growing stress about
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In the battle to prevent law enforcement from collecting data about the activities of users online for fishing expeditions, there are few tools available in the arsenal of accountholders. Which makes it all the more important for internet companies like Twitter, Google and others to fight back on behalf of users. That’s exactly what Twitter did when it filed a surprisingly feisty motion (.pdf) this week in New York City Criminal Court to quash a court order demanding that it hand over information to law enforcement about one of its account holders — an activist who participated in the Occupy Wall Street
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Twitter is making some changes to the Discover tab. Essentially, Twitter is attempting to deliver more relevant, personalized content that incites users to interact and stay engaged on the service. Customizing content is a double-edged sword, though, that involves some degree of privacy infringement--or at least erosion--to achieve. A post on the Twitter Engineering blog explains, “We’ve improved our personalization algorithms to incorporate several new signals including the accounts you follow and whom they follow. All of this social data is used to understand your interests and display stories that are relevant to you in real-time.” Sounds like a good thing at
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It is fascinating to watch the manner in which social media are affecting the political landscape. They are causing a gradual transformation in how we perceive -- and ultimately elect -- our candidates for public office. Several weeks ago, when Rick Santorum was in the race for the Republican nomination, he trended as the most talked-about candidate on Twitter. Unfortunately for him, those tweets were negative in context. In contrast, Mitt Romney seemed to receive the most positive mentions. Now that every other Republican presidential candidate has dropped out of the race, he is trending even more positively. No surprise there
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