Tag: twitter

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Twitter Peeking into the Past

Many, many gadgets may seem like a good idea, but never make it to market. Then, some do. And in even rare occasions, they never should have. Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook know that all too well. One device that needed a crowd to say “No!” was the Twitter Peek. Back in the infancy of the iPhone and the modern smartphone era, the Peek was a small single-purpose device that allowed you to access your Twitter feed without a smartphone or computer. It was one of the first standalone devices made specifically for social media, and it was supposed to be…

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Twitter Data Breach is Another Reason to Hate it There

Twitter being in the news lately is generally due to some new nonsense by Elon Musk. This time though it’s for bungling their data security. It came out now that 200 million email addresses and other records for Twitter users have been exposed in the endless line of data breaches. Lawrence Abrams at Bleeping Computer has more of the story. Since July 22nd, 2022, threat actors and data breach collectors have been selling and circulating large data sets of scraped Twitter user profiles containing both private (phone numbers and email addresses) and public data on various online hacker forums and…

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Hive Temporarily Forced Offline

With people looking for Twitter alternatives, because… you know why, there have been many giving Mastodon and others a try. One that has come up is called Hive, a social network I’d never even heard of a month ago. The influx of people has been so massive though that this 2-person company is feeling the crunch. So much so, they were forced to offline the entire service to fix security issues. Sarah Perez at TechCrunch has more. The company has now taken the fairly radical step of fully shutting down its servers for a couple of days in response to…

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A Silly Little SmartPhone

Over on “The Birdsite” there continues to be no end of apologists, seekers of Lord Manchild’s (as I’ve nicknamed Musk) attention, and defenders of Elon Musk’s every move. Twitter is Going Great chronicles so much, but this new nonsense takes the cake. Attention-Seeker Liz Wheeler jumped into the fray on Twitter basically challenging Musk to take action if the Twitter app is pulled from the App Store and Google Play. According to her, “Half the country would happily ditch the biased, snooping iPhone & Android. The man builds rockets to Mars, a silly little smartphone should be easy, right?” I…

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WWWTF

It’s been… a week in the tech sphere. So much so that I felt the need to write about it all in a Lightning Round update because it stretches far and wide. For starters, there’s the trainwreck that is Twitter & Elon Musk. To call it a crisis is an understatement. A billionaire with thin skin is running his $44B company into the ground. From public firings to fights with advertisers to enduring shenanigans with their update to the paid “Blue” service that was incredibly foreseeable, Twitter is all over the place. I soooo want to write about it but…

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Twit Show

In the words of Ian Malcolm: Well, there it is. The long-running saga of if shitposter extraordinaire Elon Musk would own Twitter is now over. It comes as no surprise that a man who impulsively signed a purchase agreement could not get out of it, no matter how much he tried. As of last Friday, the company is his. The immediate changes were swift with him cleaning out the executive suite. Again, no surprise. In leaked chats, he showed no affinity toward Parag Agrawal, the now-former CEO. The Twitter.com homepage was redirected to the service’s Explore section, which surfaces everything…

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Five Four-Twenty

It’s difficult to fully process the landmark news that Elon Musk has successfully purchased Twitter. Was this something we all should’ve seen coming? Maybe it was naïve of me to believe it was someone trolling a company who’d invited him to come aboard and then the entire deal fell through. It’s hard to say. But what is easy to say is this is big news. Huge. In the social media space, there has traditionally been two places. For a while, it was MySpace and Facebook. Then it was Facebook and Twitter. There was a span of time where Google was…

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For Whom The Tweet Trolls

Twitter. Elon Musk. Insert sigh. Yeah, it’s been a lot over the past two weeks with these two. It’s difficult to go into the entire Elon / Twitter fiasco because I simply can’t gauge how much this affects or even is on the radar of people who aren’t fully in tune with social media. The true TL;DR is Elon bought a ton of Twitter stock. Twitter, knowing this could be bad, offered him a board seat in exchange for not buying more. Elon said yes. Celebrate. Elon says no a few days later. Elon offers to buy Twitter. Twitter begins…

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From the Terrible Ideas Department

Twitter’s Twitter Blue premium (and paid) service posted this head-scratcher about a new ‘perk’ to paying the company money to use Twitter: gm! You asked (a lot), so we made it. Now rolling out in Labs: NFT Profile Pictures on iOS I’m not sure why people would ‘need’ this feature when an NFT is literally an image you can screen shot and upload as your profile photo. Even worse is the growing fad of companies jumping into NFTs as if it’s some super-hot market. From what I can tell, most people have no clue what an NFT is nor can…

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Jack Dorsey Leaves Twitter

From the “things I didn’t see coming” category is the announcement by Jack Dorsey (Twitter’s co-founder) that he is stepping down as Twitter’s CEO. He, of course, announced it in a tweet. It’s more of a one-liner of text accompanied by a screen shot of his email he sent to the company. not sure anyone has heard but, I resigned from Twitter Originally tweeted by jack⚡️ (@jack) on November 29, 2021. To tl;dr the whole thing, he basically doesn’t want Twitter to be a “founder-led” company at this time and feels it would be better if someone else were at…

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The Paid Social Network Nobody Wanted

In the early 2010s there were two mighty giants in the social media landscape: Facebook and Twitter. One behemoth was scrapping its way in an attempt to be a third. This company was backed by lots of money, a thoughtful design, and a single focus to topple the others. It wanted to be king. But this is not about Google with their Plus endeavor or even the weirdly-limited Path wherein you were only allowed 50 friends. This is the story of a scrappy startup that set its sights on Twitter. A company that felt that enough people were willing to…