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Twitter has updated its official iOS app to v5.6, making some significant tweaks. Above all is the the ability to see trending topics according to location, whether nearby or in other cities around the world. Retweeting has also received some attention, as replies to retweets will now include the identities for both people involved.
An annual report by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has declared that Twitter and Sonic.net are the best tech companies for protecting its users from government snooping and requests from courts and law enforcement. Out of the 18 companies examined in the report, MySpace and Verizon were judged the worst, failing to score a single star in any category, while Apple, AT&T, and Yahoo managed to attain at least one star out of a possible six.
Google Glass will have at least one app for it upon its consumer release, following reports that a Twitter client is being worked on for the device. The news of the app comes at the same time as the search company releases a video explaining to future users how to use the wearable computing system, with a heavy emphasis on controls via the touchpad.
Twitter has written to news organizations in order to help prevent their highly-followed accounts being hijacked. The memo comes in the wake of a number of high-profile attacks on media Twitter accounts, with the micro-blogging service expecting the compromising of high-profile accounts to continue in the future.
Popular video app Vine will be headed to Android in the future. Co-founder of the Twitter-owned app Dom Hofmann confirmed to The Verge it will be ported, following its successful launch on iOS devices. The app, which allows users to create six-second video clips for sharing on social networks, is also reportedly going to include the ability to tag friends to a clip, in order to foster more sharing between users.
Twitter has released an update for its official Mac client, v2.2. The update is Twitter's first for the software in years, and adds several awaited features, such as Retina support for the MacBook Pro. Another is support for a much wider number of languages, including Dutch, French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Malay, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Turkish, and simplified and traditional Chinese.
The Twitter account of the Associated Press news agency falsely declared an attack on the White House, after hackers took control of the account. The message, appearing on the AP's main Twitter feed, has since been confirmed as "bogus" by the agency, but not before it negatively-affected the Dow Jones for a short period of time.
Apple is now sponsoring the long-running "John Lennon Educational Tour Bus," a mobile audio and video studio on wheels that tours educational institutions, encouraging students to explore and produce their own music with free songwriting, recording and multimedia production workshops. Using Macs on board to help with production, children write, perform and record original music and produce music videos with the assistance of three on-board engineers. Most recently seen in Phoenix AZ last weekend, the bus is scheduled to be in Gulf Shores AL as part of the Hangout Music Festival. The non-profit organization has its own App Store iOS app (free) as well.
Twitter, which has made something of a hobby of restricting, hobbling and subsequently killing off mobile Twitter clients, will be putting the well-received mobile version of Tweetdeck out to pasture on May 7, the same day that Facebook integration will also end. All iPhone, Android, and AIR versions of the app will cease to function on that day.
BBC America has signed a deal with Twitter to of the first "in-Tweet branded video synced to entertainment TV series." The announcement, made through Twitter itself, provides little detail in the way of what exactly the service entails, but does mention popular shows Doctor Who and Top Gear in the message, suggesting that video advertisements for upcoming episodes of BBC properties could soon appear on the microblogging service.
Twitter has launched its rumored music service today, revealing both a web app and one for iOS. Twitter #music uses posts on Twitter, artists followed and mentioned by users, to generate a playable list of tracks that are either highly talked about on the microblogging service, artists it believes are emerging, and tracks that individual users may enjoy listening to.
Twitter may be launching its much-rumored music service later today, according to reports. A new page under music.twitter.com gives little in the way of clues for the service, and simply shows the Twitter logo, the hashtag "#music" and a sign-in button that requests permission to use the user's Twitter account for an app called "Trending Music Web," but currently redirects to the same page again.
In a confirmation of earlier reports, Twitter admitted it has acquired music social discovery site We Are Hunted. The main page of We Are Hunted gives thanks to staff and investors, and promises to "continue to create services that will delight you, as part of the Twitter team." No clear plan has been announced for the service's future on the microblogging platform.
For about 22 minutes earlier today, all links posted to microblogging service Twitter stopped working. During the outage, which affected "t.co" redirects, the rest of the service was functioning properly -- albeit without external links. While Twitter acknowledged the issue after it was repaired, the service is not forthcoming about what caused the problem in the first place.
In the latest phase of hacker collective Anonymous' attack against the bellicose North Korean regime, the Twitter and Flickr accounts associated with a North Korean propaganda site have been seized. The accounts taken over belonged to Uriminzokkiri, a web site which had 14,000 users' records stolen earlier this week by the same hacker group.
Social network Twitter has released a new version of its iOS app, v5.5. The update reflects recent changes to the Cards system, and lets people install or launch apps from links embedded in tweets. Although not all apps are being supported initially, people can, for instance, tap a link in a tweet from Path to go to the app's App Store page. If an app is already installed, the link may open up content there.
Twitter's April 2 developer event has concluded, with the social service implementing deep-linking into its "Cards" metaphor for content representation. The feature allows users to tap a link to either view content directly in an app, or download the app in question -- depending on whether or not the user already has the app installed. In addition to the deep-linking, three new card types have been added for developers, representing a photo gallery, physical products, and app info.
The Securities and Exchange Commission has revised its reporting requirements, enabling companies to use social media to announce information that could be of interest to investors. The Commission cites its investigation into a Facebook post by Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, which noted viewership metrics and drove up the company's stock value, as the driving force behind its reconsideration and clarification of the current Regulation FD reporting requirements.
The kingdom of Saudi Arabia has issued orders to its regulatory bodies to ensure that communication tools like Skype and Whatsapp comply with the government's stringent requirements governing Internet communications. The kingdom's Communications and Information Technology Commission (CITC) announced last week that it had "become evident that some communication applications through (the) Internet don't meet regulatory requirements." The regulatory body did not, though, specify which laws certain apps might be violating.
Twitter has released a new Mac version of TweetDeck, 2.7.1. The main improvement comes in the form of filters, which can be applied to columns and search results. This includes filtering by media, retweets, and included/excluded terms in the case of content, or verified status and list membership in terms of users.
An open invitation to an April 2 Twitter developer event is circulating as of Monday, the company says. The event is to be mobile-focused, and take place at the Twitter headquarters at 6:30PM, lasting for two and a half hours. The event will discuss how developers can "best integrate Twitter into your mobile experience," according to the blog post announcing the event.
Twitter has been issued a patent from the United States Patent and Trademark Office for Twitter itself, a request it filed in 2008. The patent, described as a "Device independent message distribution platform," is listed as invented by Jack Dorsey and Biz Stone, both of which are founders of the micro-blogging service.
Twitter has announced the release of its long-awaited official app for Windows 8 and Windows RT through the company blog. First mentioned in October, the app combines the Home, Connect, Discover, and Me tabs seen in other versions of the app with the new Windows UI. The minimized snap view bears more than a passing resemblance to the Windows Phone version, though the full screen view appears to mix between vertical and horizontal navigational flow, depending on the tab used. The Twitter app is free through the Windows Store.
Leveraging its rumored acquisition of music discovery service We Are Hunted in the last six months, Twitter is said to be launching a standalone music app, which could be released on iOS by the end of March. According to CNet sources familiar with the matter, the service generates a popularity-based chart, similar to Billboard, for online music that constantly monitors blogs, social media, BitTorrent, and other Internet sources for ranking.
Apple's official iBookstore Twitter account accidentally retweeted and favorited a potentially offensive post on Sunday night, says 9to5Mac. "Let me suck a ____ and tell you how much I love introspective novels," the original message read. Although the post quickly disappeared from the iBookstore feed, it was up long enough for some people to complain and/or unfollow.
The API keys and secrets for Twitter's official apps have been leaked to GitHub, says The Next Web. Their exposure will likely force Twitter to reset its keys and secrets, as third-party apps could potentially use the data to work around official restrictions. Alternately it could loosen those restrictions, or simply shut-out third-party access to its APIs, although the latter is extremely unlikely.
Twitter has updated its official iOS app to v5.4, making a number of improvements. Two of these revolve around search -- the app will, for example, highlight more topic and user suggestions in response to queries or entering a username or hashtag. The update also gives more weight to top tweets in search results, regardless of their age; searching for "election," for example, might bring up posts from the 2012 US Presidential campaign.
Twitter has announced that it will be discontinuing support for mobile versions of its multi-service posting client TweetDeck this spring, removing the apps from the App Store and Google Play in May and discontinuing support for existing iOS and Android versions shortly thereafter. It will -- for the time being -- maintain the Mac and Windows desktop clients, but will also drop the Adobe-based AIR version of TweetDeck and all Facebook integration, turning the program into just another Twitter client barely distinguishable from the official client.
Following widespread reports of problems with the iOS app, Twitter is planning on removing support for photo and video sharing site Mobypicture in a future update of the app. The app itself is reporting data about the shared media improperly on occasion, sometimes causing uploads to the service to not upload completely, or display properly.
Newswire Agence France-Presse had the Twitter account for its photo department hacked today, according to a statement. The account, @AFPphoto, has been suspended by Twitter until the matter is resolved. While it was compromised, the hacker(s) posted tweets attacking US President Barack Obama and promoting the Syrian government, for instance calling the Syrian civil war a "fake revolution" because of foreign intervention.
In a post on its blog, customer support outsourcing firm Zendesk has reported that a hacker had penetrated its systems, and had purloined data from its customers, including Tumblr, Twitter, and Pinterest. Zendesk officials believe that the attacker was able to download email addresses and subject lines from support mails sent to its clients.
Audible, the audiobook service and website now owned by Amazon, has re-launched its iOS app with new support for iPad and a refreshed user interface that redesigns the use of space on the iPhone and iPad. The new 2.0 version (free) adds the ability to download up to three hours' worth of audiobooks over a 3G/LTE connection, and it is now easier to hide or show completed books. The app offers Audible's 100,000-plus catalog of books, and now features the ability to switch between reading a book on the Kindle app and changing to the audio version using WhisperSync for Voice.
Apple, Facebook, and Twitter are among 40 companies that were recently attacked by an eastern European hacker group, not a Chinese one, say two Bloomberg sources. Many parties have linked the attacks to China, sometimes implicating the Chinese government, but the sources say that investigations are pointing to a criminal gang based in eastern Europe or Russia. One server involved is allegedly hosted in the Ukraine.
Recent attacks on Apple, Facebook, and Twitter may all be linked to a single website, say sources close to Facebook's hacking investigation, in touch with AllThingsD. The site, iPhoneDevSDK, is regularly visited by mobile developers. Facebook is said to have discovered that the site had malicious code inserted into its HTML, infecting Facebook workers as they visited it. It may or may not still be dangerous.
Twitter is today updating the search and discovery features in its iOS and Android apps, as well as mobile.twitter.com. Under the Discover tab, all content should now appear in a single stream, including tweets, trends, and suggested people to follow. Tappable previews for activity and trends should appear at the top of the tab.
Twitter-owned Vine Labs has released another new version of it Vine, its iOS video-sharing app. Version 1.0.5 has been reclassified from 12+ to 17+ only; the change appears to be a response to controversy over pornographic posts. At one point a porn post was featured as an "Editor's Pick" on Vine, which may have led to Apple removing it from a promoted spot in the App Store.
A blog post made earlier today confirmed Twitter's acquisition of Bluefin Labs, a leading social TV analytics company and data aggregator that provides information to advertisers, agencies, and TV networks. The move enhances Twitter's partnership with ratings firm Nielsen which was announced in December to assist in developing the Twitter TV rating, a "centerpiece of social TV measurement" according to Twitter's Chief Operating Officer Ali Rowghani.
Social networking site Twitter has been hacked, with approximately 250,000 user accounts affected. Hackers managed to gain access to the usernames, e-mail addresses, session tokens, and encrypted and salted password hashes belonging to users of the service, something that the company is quickly trying to rectify.
Social network Twitter has announced two minor improvements to its web interface. The first is the ability to enlarge images in profile pages and search results. Previously clicking on a link would force a browser to navigate away, but now images should appear in a brief pop-up.
Twitter's new six-second video sharing app Vine is no longer an Editor's Choice nor featured on Apple's App Store following a flood of pornographic submissions that are easily searchable and shareable using the app. Twitter even briefly (and accidentally) featured an adult scene as one of its "Editor's Picks" shortly after the app's release last Thursday. The Vine app is still available through the app store, but any promotion of it has been suspended and the app itself is likely to be removed if Twitter cannot quickly fix the issue.
Facebook is now blocking a friend-finding feature in Twitter's new Vine video-sharing app, says The Telegraph. Trying to use the option generates an error message. When it was working, the feature would trawl through a person's Facebook friends to find people to invite to Vine.
Twitter's new Vine video sharing service has been hit with a number of glitches on launch day, reports AllThingsD. The most critical is a security issue which is accidentally logging some people into other users' accounts, letting them post under those identities and see any private profile information. It's unknown how many people may be experiencing the bug, but it should be possible to log back into the right account after relaunching the iPhone app.
Twitter has launched a first-party version of Vine, an app for the iPhone and iPod touch that it bought the rights to in 2012. The app is similar to ones like glmps, letting users shoot small, looping videos that can be shared with others via a native social network. Vine posts can also be shared on Twitter and Facebook feeds, and any content linked in tweets can be opened inline on the web.
An unusual photo was posted to Facebook showing a CEO dinner gathering -- hosted by Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer -- that included a significant number of tech CEOs from a wide array of companies, and notably included Sir Jonathan Ive, Apple's SVP of Design. Ive was perhaps the only non-CEO at the table, but was seated next to Mayer in the rare, candid shot. Attendee Mike Cassidy -- of Google X, the experimental project arm of Google -- posted the photo, which includes executives from Dropbox, Path, Twitter, Yelp and more.
Social network Twitter has updated the Mac version of TweetDeck, its most advanced official client app. The v2.3.1 release brings Mac features up to par with those for Chrome and other platforms, for instance adding Typeahead to searches, predicting what a person is about to type. An extension of this is People Search, presenting a list of people in a user's Twitter community based on entered text.
Popular microblogging service Twitter hit another milestone today, passing the 200 million mark for monthly active users. Twitter announced the milestone in a tweet this morning, thanking its users, which it called "the pulse of the planet." The 200 million mark evinces the considerable growth rate for Twitter, which has added 100 million users in the time since September of 2011.
Popular photo sharing service Instagram updated its terms of service this week, giving Instagram expanded rights to monetize content its users upload and to serve them ads. The new terms are part of Instagram's ongoing shift toward monetization, as Facebook, which bought the service for $1 billion earlier this year, looks to capitalize on that purchase. Instagram describes the terms as "part of our new collaboration" with Facebook and says they are meant to bring about "better experiences for our users."
Noted television ratings and market research group Nielsen announced today a multi-year partnership to create the "Nielsen Twitter TV Rating" for the US market. The partnership with Twitter will result in a new syndicated-standard metric that measures Twitter conversations about TV, and it will be available at the start of the fall 2013 television season.
Social service Twitter has put its Year In Review online, a retrospective look back at the biggest stories and posts this year. As well as covering major news items from around the world, readers can also see a personalized chart of their own Twitter usage, complete with statistics on retweets, replies, and dominating subjects through Vizify.
In a day shadowed by the wide reveal of Instagram's withdrawal of its tight Twitter integration, the micro-blogging service rolled out its own in-house mechanism to apply color filters to user-uploaded pictures. Twitter's filters are powered by New York-based Aviary, developer of image-editing software for the photo-sharing service Flickr.
