Twitter has just announced that it will begin sending email notifications to users when they're retweeted by someone they follow or when someone favorites one of their tweets.
Until now Twitter has given users the option to receive email notifications when they receive a direct message or when they get a new follower. Last week, Twitter also rolled out a new look to the latter notification, giving users more information about their new followers.
The first Chief Technology Officer of one of the most important communication technology companies of our time has left his job today - and for a guy who made public disclosure easier than ever, we hardly knew the man. Greg Pass joined Twitter three years ago when his search company Summize was acquired. He went on to become Twitter CTO and today it was reported and confirmed that he is leaving the company.
People close to the company say he's a quiet, humble and very smart man. His Twitter profile, @gregpass, makes no mention of his work at the company and he never Tweets about it. He's Tweeted thousands of words over the past three years though and I just looked at every one of them. (Well, almost every one; the archive only goes back so far. Greg, could you...oh, nevermind.) Here are ten interesting things you probably didn't know about Twitter's mysterious outgoing CTO.
If the Egyptian revolution was inspired and organized on Facebook, maybe the post-revolution is destined to run its course on Twitter.
Wael Ghonim, the former Google executive who launched We are all Khalid Said, the Facebook page that acted as a clearinghouse for the uprising, has fallen under opprobrium for recent comments and a lot of the criticism is being expressed via the Twitter hashtag #unfollowedghonimbecause.
Twitter has just announced a change to the way in which it handles permissions for third-party applications. The update will give users a better understanding of how this process works and what information third-party apps can access.
When users authorize to a third-party app for the first time, they'll see a new permissions screen detailing what that integration with Twitter means. This can include activities like reading tweets, seeing who the user follows, tweeting on a user's behalf, or accessing Direct Messages.
Twitter's rapid growth shows no signs of slowing. As of today it looks like the messaging service has eclipsed 300 million accounts and is growing at a rate of close to three-quarters of a million accounts daily.
TwopCharts has the numbers. As of this writing - 7:05 a.m. PST - there were 300,869, 462 Twitter accounts with the service signing up 8.5 accounts per second. Extrapolating those numbers, we find that approximately 30,240 accounts are registered by the hour that comes to 725,760. Yet, less than a month ago it looked like Twitter had just passed 200 million accounts. Even at the amazing growth rates Twitter has had, 100 million users in a month is highly unrealistic.
Big Tech is fighting Big Government in California over a proposed privacy bill that would limit the amount of information that companies can share about their users. A coalition of tech companies including Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Skype, Match.com, Twitter and others sent a letter to the California Senate May 16 opposing the bill, saying it is unnecessary and would be detrimental to the tech industry and thus to California's economy.
Proposed by Sen. Ellen Corbett, the bill would force social networks to institute default settings upon registration of what users share on the services. Users can opt to share more information than the default, which would only list the users' city of residence. Tech companies are fighting on the basis that the bill is Draconian and unintuitive and that, as an industry, technology can do better than the California legislature.
If you were a child of the 1990s (and even the early 2000s), then you might remember pagers, those silly little vibrating devices you would clip to your supa-fly JNCO jeans that either flagged you as a teenage victim of overprotective parents, drug dealer, bike messenger or working stiff.
Such is the birthplace of Twitter, way back in 2001, according to Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey. Oh, and in case you were wondering, Dorsey is cut of the bike messenger variety.
There's just something about the Internet that makes people go meta. Want to write a blog post? Why not write a blog post about writing blog posts? Or how about check-in on Foursquare to that Foursquare meetup? Take an Instagram of Instagram? Better yet, why not make a documentary film about Twitter using the site and its users in nearly every aspect of the film's creation?
Tan Siok Siok, a documentary filmmaker from Singapore, is doing just that with Twittamentary, an "experimental documentary about the everyday people who use Twitter."
Al Jazeera reporter Dorothy Parvaz disappeared in Syria several weeks ago. Syria, whose citizens have been caught up in the Arab Spring but whose leaders most decidedly have not, has seen the death of over a hundred in the past three months. One of the reporters covering the situation was Parvaz.
Her employers subsequently discovered that the Syrians had arrested her and sent her to Iran. Her friends have responded with an instant and comprehensive social media campaign to free her. This campaign illustrates the quick roll-out that social media affords at this point in its development.
Japan's largest mobile operator NTT DoCoMo and Twitter have announced a partnership that allows the operator access to Twitter's database. As a part of the deal, users will be able to tap phones in order to follow each other on Twitter. The operator will also integrate Twitter updates and other related content in its feature phone portal called i-mode and on its smartphone portal, the DoCoMo Market. In total, the new integrations will reach 58 million NTT DoCoMo customers in Japan.
Although not part of the press release, a Twitter-based location-based alerting service is in the works too, according to reports. This service will involve harvesting tweets to alert Twitter users about local events and places, among other things.
