Twitter runs earlier than Facebook runs earlier than Tumblr. All times are Eastern Standard (ie, UK time -5hr.)

We never knew this existed. Recently updated with HT, MT, MMS, RLRT and TL. You know what they mean, of course?

"Everything we are doing is oriented around getting to 2 billion users."</p><p>
You might think that statement was from Mark Zuckerberg, as Facebook approaches 1 billion active users on its social network and focuses on the next billion. But it was Satya Patel, Twitter's vice president of products, outlining the goal his company has set for itself.</p><p>
With an estimated 140 million users today, producing 340 million tweets a day, 2 billion people using Twitter at least once a month isn't a near-term goal. Based on its current growth rate, which is accelerating as hashtags and @ signs become more embedded in everyday life, Twitter will likely reach 200 million active users in August.

More Twitter statistics - particularly daily active and monthly active users - would be useful.

The momentum has been shifting for a while, but now the trend is emphatic. People now spend <a href="http://blog.flurry.com/bid/80241/Mobile-App-Usage-Further-Dominates-Web-Spurred-by-Facebook">more time in mobile apps</a> than they do online. There are more than 500m Android and iOS devices on the market, and giant countries like China and Indonesia are only just getting started in their smartphone and tablet push. Global mobile 3G subscribers are growing at <a href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/69309864/KPCB-Internet-Trends-2011">over 35 percent,</a> year on year, and there’s a lot more room to move – there are 5.6 billion mobile subscribers on our fair planet. Even in <a href="http://singularityhub.com/2011/08/16/80-android-phone-sells-like-hotcakes-in-kenya-the-world-next/">developing countries</a>, <a href="http://www.intomobile.com/2012/04/22/baidu-launch-160-smartphone-running-their-own-custom-android-rom/">cheap smartphones</a> will soon rush into the market. And who here doesn’t think tablet sales are going to go gangbusters pretty much <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/04/27/us-apple-china-idUSBRE83Q07320120427">everywhere</a>?

Mobile is the present, and the future.

Ha, ha.

Xeni Jardin was the target of a "Twitterbombing" attempt to get her attention; when she rejected it, a significant number turned nasty too and were simply hateful in response. Zuckerman notes:

Twitterbombing is a tactic that forces us to think about <a href="http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2012/03/28/the-passion-of-mike-daisey-journalism-storytelling-and-the-ethics-of-attention/">the ethics of attention</a>. We may believe that Reese and Athene are engaged in a deeply important cause – does that mean we’re ethically justified in asking someone else to pay attention? What’s the difference between asking a friend for their attention, and someone you don’t know? A public figure versus a media curator, versus someone who simply has a lot of Twitter followers?

The risk is that it turns those who have many followers away, and into broadcast-only mode. Ring someone's doorbell once and they'll answer the door. Ring it a thousand times, and they'll disconnect the doorbell.

However, we also think a lot about how those patents may be used in the future; we sometimes worry that they may be used to impede the innovation of others. For that reason, we are publishing a draft of the Innovator’s Patent Agreement, which we informally call the “IPA”.</p><p>

The IPA is a new way to do patent assignment that keeps control in the hands of engineers and designers. It is a commitment from Twitter to our employees that patents can only be used for defensive purposes.

That commitment goes with the patents, it says. Laudable. Nathan Myhrvold next?

Loren Brichter devised Tweetie, later bought by Twitter, and came up with the neat "pull-to-refresh" user interface element. He's pleased about Twitter's announcement on patents.

From 1926. Obvious, really. (The question of how and why Twitter's Loren Brichter patented the "pull-to-refresh" interaction has exercised some geeks in recent weeks.)

Just read it. Who'd have thought The New Yorker, the home of long-form journalism, would have such a marvellous exposition of the value of 140-character discussion.

Why Twitter?

Apple does software and hardware really well; they do the integration between the two outstandingly. But they haven’t really done Social particularly well. In fact, Apple may be the only Tech company without a Twitter account. Go ahead, check out <a href="http://twitter.com/apple">@Apple</a> – 0 Tweets / 0 Following / 6067 Followers. Sure, iTunes software is terrific, but the “Ping” social network simply never caught on. Twitter automagically makes Apple a defacto player in social.

Apple’s biggest competitors over the next decade are not HP or Dell or even Microsoft – they are more likely to be Google and Facebook. Which leads us back to Social Networking and that leads to Twitter.

Don't hold your breath.

Now notes whether you "reply" to a tweet and filters who sees it accordingly:

Dan initiated his tweet by “replying” to one of mine (i.e., he clicked “reply”). Back in 2009 <a href="http://blog.twitter.com/2009/05/small-settings-update.html">Twitter changed</a> what “reply” means. But even after that change, prefacing with a “.” did permit all your followers to see the reply (or so I’ve been told). This seems to be one of the most important early lessons most  learn on Twitter. There are loads of blog posts out there that explain this usage, and many since 2009.

Now even that has changed. Clicking “reply” now means that only joint followers see the tweet even if you prefix it with a “.” (or anything else for that matter). You can still tweet at (@) someone with a “.@” construction and have all your followers see it but not if you click reply. When did this change occur? I cannot find anything on the internet that documents it. Is this the first post to do so?

A later addition says: "Dan has been tracking this story and tells me that it appears Twitter has been changing their code over the past few hours. So, folks out there testing “.@” replies may be getting different results than we show above for that reason."

With our most recent app updates, Promoted Accounts are now in Twitter for iPhone and Twitter for Android. And in the coming weeks, we’ll begin introducing Promoted Tweets in the timeline on these mobile apps. Initially, a small number of users may see Promoted Tweets near the top of their timelines from brands they already follow. This will help ensure that people see important Tweets from the brands they care about.

For both products, the experience will be the same as on Twitter.com:
Promoted Tweets will appear in your timeline like any other Tweet, and like regular Tweets, they will appear in your timeline just once; as you scroll, the Promoted Tweet will flow with the rest of the Tweets in your timeline.
As with Promoted Tweets in search, we will only display Promoted Tweets in the timeline when they are relevant. If you see a Promoted Tweet that isn’t relevant to you, you can easily dismiss it from your timeline with a single swipe.
Promoted Accounts appear in your list of Who to Follow recommendations.

Not in third-party apps? Then again, Twitter must know what it does and doesn't control.

Safety theatre, of sorts:

The Department of Homeland Security monitors your updates on social networks, including Facebook and Twitter, to uncover “Items Of Interest” (IOI), according to an internal DHS document released by the EPIC. That document happens to include a list of the baseline terms for which the DHS–or more specifically, a DHS subcontractor hired to monitor social networks–use to generate real-time IOI reports.

It's an infographic, so don't blame us when it offends your tolerance for bright orange.

On Twitter: "4K of IBM memory found in my grandpa's pole barn, captured in a 692K photo".

"This partnership means Verified Twitter Accounts can be distributed into a wide range of products and brands – from smart TVs and automotive infotainment systems to cloud music services and smartphones," says Gracenote president Stephen White. Got that? Verified accounts only.

"Spam, one of the Internet's oldest annoyances, is gearing up for a second act. Unlike traditional email spam, which usually comes from strangers, this new form—dubbed "social" spam—often appears to be from a friend. Criminals find social networks alluring because they can spread messages though a chain of trusted sources.<br />"Such spam puts the usefulness of social networking at risk. Facebook says less than 4% of the content shared on its site is spam and Twitter says just 1.5% of all tweets were "spammy" in 2010. But Facebook adds that the volume is growing faster than its user base. On any given day, spam hits less than 0.5% of Facebook users, or some four million people."<br /><br />Spam is the E.coli of the internet.

An all-time one to refer back to.

"There are inherent problems with binary social networks. The idea that someone is either full-on in your life (and therefore has access to everything about you) or not at all is not how it works offline. You tend to share certain information only with certain groups of people. Only some people will be interested in photos of your new puppy, whereas those same people will probably not be interested in blog posts about your work.

Google Circles aims to solve these problems by allowing you to drag and drop people into distinct buckets, and letting you only share what you want with each circle. And yes, the UI makes it really easy to do this. It’s great design."

But it's impossible for that great design to make up for the fact that you can't maintain the listing of who belongs in which circles (or overlapping circles) for any length of time.

"Saudi Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal today announced that he has invested $300 million in Twitter, via his Kingdom Holding investment group.

"Fortune has learned that the deal is structured as a secondary, which means that Alwaleed purchased shares from existing Twitter insiders. The company would have been required to approve of the transaction, but will not actually receive any of the $300 million, as it would in a more traditional investment."

Heard inside Twitter: "Dammit!"

"So…why are all these people leaving what appears to be a company that builds a product millions of people use every day, and several industries – including Business Insider's – depend on?

"We've asked a former Twitter employee. Does this source have an ax to grind? This source says no. This source asked to remain anonymous in order to be as candid as possible.

"This source told us Twitter's turnover problem has two main, related causes: Twitter, as a company full of workers, has cultural flaws and structural flaws."

John Gruber isn't a fan of the new iOS version of Twitter's app, which began - three years ago - as a third-party app called Tweetie. He goes through the four tabs (Home, Connect, Discover) and finally "Me”: "Oh boy. Stashed into this tab are your profile, your direct messages, your Twitter Lists, and the interface for switching to other Twitter accounts. This tab is the conceptual carpet under which Twitter swept everything that didn’t fit under “Home”, “Connect”, or “Discover”."

The point being that Twitter has ceased to be a way to just message people.

Dan Frommer sums up what the new Twitter is about, and why. Note that not everyone has the new interface yet.

"An email from Twitter sales to prospective advertisers today revealed what brands have been paying for followers on the platform. The memo included cost-per-follower (CPF) rates for Promoted Accounts and cost-per-engagement (CPE) for Promoted Tweets.
The CPF runs between $2.50 and $4, while the listed CPE rates come in from $0.75 to $2.50. For CPE, "engagement" refers to clicks, favorites, retweets and "@Replies."

"As has been the case for a while, Twitter advertisers must commit to three months at a minimum spend of $15,000."

That's some good money.

"Use TwimeMachine to easily browse through your old tweets (max 3200). Read what you said ages ago."

Depending how often you tweet. But it does show up Twitter's lack of a good archive.

Most tweets aren't in English. Then again, the most popular language on Twitter is English.

"Compared to Twitter, Facebook overall generated twice as many events, which Localytics counts as sharing, liking or following by a person from an app. But on a pound for pound basis, Twitter won out handily when it came to driving user engagement. The average Twitter user shared three times as many events than the average Facebook user, Localytics found. When you examine the active user base of each network, Twitter generated 50 events per 1,000 users compared to 11 events per 1,000 Facebook users, said Localytics."

Because tweets are shorter than statuses?

"From today, a selection of our surveyors, field staff and technical experts will be tweeting live as the update the nation’s mapping.

"We make around 5000 changes a day to the digital mastermap of Great Britain, so there’s a lot going on – from the farthest reaches of Scotland and the Welsh peaks, to inner city London."

Good stuff.

Interesting list, and plenty more on GitHub.

This lengthy piece nails it. Go read the whole thing.

"A group calling itself “The Script Kiddies” hacked USA Today’s Twitter account this weekend and used it to solicit requests for future targets and even to promote its own Facebook page. Although this recent hack seems like more of a childish prank, this group is being taken seriously by the FBI due to its earlier hacks involving false terrorism claims posted to NBC’s Twitter account."<br />
<br />
They're a British group. Hope they're using more than one VPN.

Surprisingly easily, it turns out.

Dock Costolo, CEO of Twitter, explains. Sub-140 characters.

Jeff Atwood considers how Google Chrome now needs to download only the tiniest bit of code for its updates - but how work remains to be done: "Since the version updates are relatively small, they can be downloaded in the background. But even Google hasn't figured out how to install an update while the browser is running. Yes, there are little alert icons to let you know your browser is out of date, and you eventually do get nagged if you are woefully behind, but updating always requires the browser to restart."

IFTT - If This Then That - is a Yahoo Pipes-like project for sticking together web apps into ad-hoc programs. What's popular? Facebook, weather alerts and Twitter, just now.

Danny Sullivan: "At the very least, you’d expect Google at this point to relaunch Google Realtime Search with content from Google+ as a replacement. Not being able to search through content on Google’s own social network, from a company that specializes in search, is pretty absurd.<br />
"Google Realtime Search wasn’t just Twitter search, and the ability to use Google to search through content on other social networks got axed when Google closed it. So bring it back, even if it comes back without Twitter — and get moving on that Google+ search feature.<br />
"As for Bing, search without Twitter isn’t old news. It’s old, old news. Bing’s had a deal with Twitter since October 2009, and that deal hasn’t really seemed to do much to attract visitors over to Bing."<br />
<br />
Can anyone think of anything that *would* attract visitors over to Bing, aside from Google's servers all dying? (And even then..)

"How long is a link “alive” before people stop caring? Does it matter what kind of content it is, or where you shared it? At bitly we see a lot of links, and while every link is special, we’re learning a few general principles that we can share.<br />
"Let’s take a look at one particular story - Baby otter befriended by orphaned kittens - which was first shared by StylistMagazine on Facebook on Tuesday at 7:12am."<br />
<br />
Jeez, could they have possibly picked a link that wasn't going to be retweeted everywhere? Short of picking one about aliens landing, this is probably the tweet with the maximum possible life *anywhere*.

"Bootstrap is a toolkit from Twitter designed to kickstart development of webapps and sites. It includes base CSS and HTML for typography, forms, buttons, tables, grids, navigation, and more."<br />
<br />
Er.. thanks.

"If you’re not familiar with Bagcheck, it’s a fun way to create and share lists of the things you are passionate about using on your computer, in your kitchen, for photography, when parenting, and everything in between."

Did monitor feeds to see if tweets had vanished. No longer: "Unfortunately, Undetweetable has been asked to shut down and we can no longer function without Twitter's support. This project was meant to begin a discussion about privacy and digital identity and, thanks to the overwhelming response from users like yourself, we hope that we have accomplished that goal. For now, you may continue browsing Undetweetable, but we will no longer gather deleted tweets."

"When you tweet--even if you tweet under a pseudonym--how much do you reveal about yourself? More than you realize, argues a new paper from researchers at the Mitre Corporation. The paper, "Discriminating Gender on Twitter," which is being presented this week at the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing in Scotland, demonstrates that machines can often figure out a person's gender on Twitter just by reading their tweets. And such knowledge is power: the findings could be useful to advertisers and others."<br />
<br />
Gender-skewed words for men: "http" and "google". For women: "chocolate" and "husband", among many others. Can an algorithm stereotype? Then again, it's right about 75% of the time at present.

"When was the last time Twitter introduced a killer feature? Photos? We still don't even know how those are supposed to work. And, for what it's worth, we see the company's founders using Instagram a lot, so there's obviously something busted with Twitter's photos."

"Fundamentally, I believe Twitter’s priorities here are wrong. Twitter needs a far more aggressive, automated, proactive, heuristic-based anti-spam system. And if someone has trouble legitimately tweeting a link with no text to 100 people in a row who don’t follow them at precise 1-minute intervals, that’s just the price we’ll have to pay.<br />
"In the meantime, I’m never using the “Report Spam” feature again, because it just seems like I’m wasting my time."<br />
<br />
Though this does assume that spam on Twitter actively annoys people. There's not a lot of evidence that it does, though, because unlike email it hasn't reached the point where it's any significant proportion of a timeline - and has any single spam account actually tweeted the same person twice?

Useful for any time you might want to scrape Twitter for, well, anything.

"It is even worse than it appears for Twitter. The Google+ APIs are coming. When that happens, third-party Twitter clients will start baking in Google+ integration, especially because Twitter has been kicking their developers all year.<br />
"What does Twitter do in response?<br />
"Do nothing? The bleeding increases. Backbone users, after all, are big fans of third-party clients.<br />
"Kick developers who dare to integrate with Google+? That sounds like it would generate a devastating backlash.<br />
"Buy more clients / pay developers to favor Twitter? That doesn’t sound sustainable.<br />
"Alternatives?"<br />
<br />
The difference, though, is that an app for Google+ will need to be able to show the huge amounts of verbiage and comments that people add to it. Tolerable on a smartphone, but not so easy - oddly enough - on the desktop.

"That's an artifact of population density and Flickr and Twitter users. What's more interesting though are the areas outside of the city dominated by blue and orange. For example, in the North America map above, the east is dominated by blue, whereas the west seems to be more orange.<br />
"What compels people to tweet over taking a picture and vice versa? Or are we just seeing a Twitter scrape that happened in the early morning, before the west coast woke up?"

"As Twitter raises even more money, it’s getting more serious about making money. The service is set to start showing ads in users’ “timelines” within the next month, following through on plans it has talked about for more than a year.<br />
<br />
"Twitter is pushing a new ad product called “Promoted Tweets To Followers,” set to launch by early August."<br />
<br />
This will either go very well (nobody will notice them) or catastophically (everyone will notice them).

Intriguing. Of course this will all be solved by Google+. Won't it?

"What happens to BackType?<br />
"The BackTweets product will now be offered to current users for free. However, as we begin to focus on our work at Twitter, we will not be accepting any new registrations for BackTweets, and we will discontinue the BackType product and API services."<br />
<br />
BackTweets let you find out if people were tweeting links you'd put out. This landgrab by Twitter begins to feel a bit worrying.

"In a practical sense, the news that verified accounts on Twitter can receive direct messages from any Twitter user without the verified account having to follow them means that it’s really easy to get in touch with the intern running the social media engagement project that’s been commissioned by the management of someone who’s big in Hollywood (and Robert Scoble, presumably)."<br />
<br />
Not clear why Twitter has done this at all. But it means you can now DM Stephen Fry. Assuming you have a need to.

Neat.

"As for the bulk of my time day-to-day, I'm thrilled to announce that Evan Williams, Jason Goldman and myself will be relaunching The Obvious Corporation as co-founders. Our plan is to develop new projects and work on solving big problems aligned along a simple mission statement: The Obvious Corporation develops systems that help people work together to improve the world. This is a dream come true!"<br />
<br />
Collaboration? Lots of things this could be. Then again, he has a good track record - Twitter, Blogger. Should it have been Obviouser to guarantee success?

Click through for his comment on Google+ that follows from that premise.

"At WWDC this year Apple and Twitter announced a new partnership to bring Twitter to iOS devices. While this is impressive, the total number of new iOS users is dwarfed by the number of people who use feature phones worldwide. So how will services like Twitter bridge this opportunity gap?<br />
"The answer may be found in BlueVia, a prime example of the next generation of developer-friendly telco platforms. BlueVia is a spin out from Telefonica, itself a large telecommunication provider. The BlueVia platform exposes a simple set of REST APIs that enable developers to use SMS, MMS, location, and other services previously obscured with telco-only technologies like IMS and ParlayX. Perhaps more importantly, it is based on an attractive business model: pay developers for using telco APIs."<br />
<br />
Interesting too that it means the mobile operators are becoming smart pipes, not dumb ones.

Fantastic reporting as usual from BusinessWeek on how MySpace became the Detroit of social networking. "Inside News Corp., analysts say Murdoch has turned his focus to his IPad-only news outlet, The Daily. Myspace is yesterday's future."

Benford's Law has fantastic predictive abilities; it might usefully have been used on the Greek government's finances to see if it was fibbing. Lots of datasets here, with pretty graphs and info. (Via @johnrentoul).

"A large part of my job is dealing with people who work in public relations. The vast majority of those whose do PR for video game companies are polite, well-intentioned, and extremely professional. They need us to get their games coverage, and we need them for access to the developers and early code to review games in a timely manner. The press and PR relationship may sometimes be strained, but it's rarely adversarial.<br />
"That is, until the Redner Group's official Twitter account posted something you almost never see: an open threat stating that outlets who reviewed Duke Nukem Forever poorly may not receive review copies of games in the future."<br />
<br />
Now games are bigger than Hollywood, some publicists are trying to act like they're Hollywood publicists. Bad idea, really.

"Apple and Facebook actually have several conflicting strategic objectives, and their platforms are juxtaposed. Apple wants to push users' content to the device, whereas Facebook wants to pull content to the cloud. The differences will be starker when Apple rolls out iCloud, presumably concurrently with iOS 5 and iPhone 5 in the Fall. Contrary to some Net punditry and commentary, iCloud is not an online storage service. It is fundamentally a synchronization service, using the cloud to help Apple customers better manage their content on iOS and Mac OS X devices.<br />
<br />
"User-generated content is important to both companies, but in dramatically different ways that create, in some respects, incongruous customer priorities. Apple wants user content flowing freely among the devices it sells, while Facebook's priority is content going into the service -- and not easily coming out."<br />
<br />
Score 5: Insightful.

"As we know, numbers don’t lie. eMarketer also projects that Twitter advertising revenues will soar from $140m in 2011 to $225m in 2012.  In contrast, the once bursting place for friends, MySpace, will generate $184m in ad revenue this year."<br />
<br />
And yet, it's not mainstream in the way that MySpace (sort of) was. The paradox is that it doesn't have to be mainstream to succeed.

"Facebook has set itself up as the leading identity provider on the Web, with more than 2.5m sites that operate Facebook Connect and social plug-ins, and something like 700m active users. Now Apple is propping up the smaller–and different–Twitter as a competitor.Twitter has 200m total accounts–it doesn’t specify how many of them are active, or how many of them are real people. Apple, coincidentally, has sold 200m iOS devices total.<br />
<br />
"Path CEO Dave Morin, who knows firsthand the challenges of social log-ins from his photo-sharing app, tweeted during the keynote yesterday, 'Twitter is the luckiest company on earth today.'<br />
<br />
"But at least one analyst and many onlookers are playing devil’s advocate by arguing that Apple is the bigger winner, having avoided paying to buy Twitter and reducing it to utility status."

Being included in iOS really is, as one person commented, the anointing of Twitter. If you're built in from the ground up there, you've arrived. And if you can't monetise that, nobody can help you.

"On March 21, 2011, my MacBook was stolen from my apartment in Oakland, CA. I reported the crime to the police and even told them where it was, but they couldn't help me due to lack of resources. Meanwhile, I'm using the awesome app, Hidden, to capture these photos of this guy who has my MacBook."<br />
<br />
He doesn't any more, though, because the Oakland Police Department picked him (and the computer) up. Have you got any tracking software installed?

Google kills off a number of its APIs - including Google Translate (which Eric Schmidt once said would help world peace. So what does killing it mean?)<br />
<br />
Commenter: "i have a question: why should any developer, any company which wants to build a valuable product for the long term use any of your APIs ever again? As you can argument that some of these API do not get used as much as they used to be and there are better alternatives, this is obviously not true for the translate API, where you even state the shutdown is due to 'extensive abuse'."

"This suggests that the big tech brands have harnessed, or exploit, the brain areas that have evolved to process religion,; one of the scientists says. A meeting with the Bishop of Buckingham, who reads the Bible using his Apple iPad, appeared to back up this assertion. <br />
<br />
"He pointed out how the Apple store in, for example, Covent Garden has a lot of religious imagery built into it, with its stone floors, abundance of arches, and little altars (on which the products are displayed)."<br />
<br />
This must make Ellen Feiss - remember her? - the equivalent of Mary Magdalene or something.

"Internet users tap Facebook Inc.'s "Like" and Twitter Inc.'s "Tweet" buttons to share content with friends. But these tools also let their makers collect data about the websites people are visiting.<br />
<br />
"These so-called social widgets, which appear atop stories on news sites or alongside products on retail sites, notify Facebook and Twitter that a person visited those sites even when users don't click on the buttons, according to a study done for The Wall Street Journal."

Good graph.

"Are you a developer or engineer with a passion for building real products and crafting great code? Fresh out of uni, or looking for your next move?<br />
<br />
"Did you know that London's top tech startups are hiring for over 100 technical roles right now?"

"Yesterday, I saw a quote from Martin Luther King Jr. fly across my Twitter feed:  "I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy." - Martin Luther King, Jr".  I was about to retweet it, but I hesitated.  It didn't sound right.  After some Googling, I determined that it was probably fake, which I blogged about last night.<br />
"Here's the story of how that quote was created."<br />
<br />
Send three and fourpence, we're going to a dance.

"Twitter is experimenting with sponsored text ads on their website that show-up just after the 'trends' section. The first round of text ads mainly promoted Twitter apps and other services built around the Twitter ecosystem but that is no longer the case.<br />
"Twitter’s new ad format includes a website URL that takes you straight to the advertiser’s website (NFL in this case) and there’s a related hashtag to help you see related tweets on Twitter search.<br />
"A bit surprising thing about this new format is that nowhere does it says that these are advertisements or sponsored links."

"Scott McNealy, who co-founded and led Sun Microsystems for many years before its sale to Oracle last year, is once again engaging in the technology world.<br />
<br />
"Fittingly for the one-man sound bite factory, McNealy has taken to Twitter, dishing up snarky remarks and relishing the fact that not being CEO of a company means he doesn't have to be politically correct. And he's involved in business again, too, as chairman of stealth start-up WayIn.McNealy isn't dishing on WayIn, but some details are bubbling up."<br />
<br />
WayIn will be something like a way to play user-created games while watching TV or live events. Hmm. Twitter it ain't.

"But wait: Two months ago, TweetDeck was reported to have sold to UberMedia, a company that owns a portfolio of Twitter clients and related applications. Shortly thereafter, Twitter blocked UberMedia's applications, citing a variety of concerns including trademark violations and privacy issues, and then reinstated them several days later. And then earlier this month, a CNN report surfaced that claimed UberMedia was going so far as to construct a service designed to rival Twitter, suggesting that the bad blood between the two companies was even thicker than expected."

"In a study to be presented at a conference in July, a team of researchers from the University of Cambridge and Korea’s KAIST show how Twitter can provide users greater access to different political viewpoints and media sources than they might otherwise get."<br />
<br />
Bonus point: written by Bobbie Johnson, formerly a writer here.