Interesting Snippets

A total of 123 world leaders out of 164 countries have accounts on Twitter set up in their personal name or through an official government office,” continued Digital Daya. “In our last report in August of 2011 only 69 out of 164 countries were using Twitter.

Am I the only one thinking they picked some random guy so they can lure him into North Korea and use him as a political prisoner/bargaining chip?” one commenter at Gizmodo said. Another suggests that Dushku play it cool, without making Pyongyang angry, saying, “Never unfollow anybody with nuclear weapons.

But the library hasn’t started the daunting task of sorting or filtering its 133 terabytes of Twitter data, which it receives from Gnip in chronological bundles, in any meaningful way…. “You often hear a reference to Twitter as a fire hose, that constant stream of tweets going around the world. What we have here is a large and growing lake. What we need is the technology that allows us to both understand and make useful that lake of information.

Although the majority of tweets are in English, a market research firm has estimated that 11 % are in Portuguese, 6 % in Japanese, 4 % in Spanish, and 18 % in other language. Small local languages such as Haitian Creole, Maori, and Wolof are even present on Twitter

Alexis Madrigal, described Twitter as ‘a kind of human recommendation engine in which I am the algorithm’. It’s one of the most suggestive explanations I’ve found yet as to why social media have so drastically and rapidly reshaped the dynamics of the internet. They answer to a particular need that algorithms alone cannot serve: the opportunity to speak, and listen to others, from that unique position of authority each one of us occupies

bands like One Direction are teaching their fans how to be expert Twitter users. I read a book once where a female journalist said that she’d learnt how to organise people by planning trips to see David Cassidy when she was younger… This is similar.

Life inside successful Web startups—especially the really successful ones—can be nasty, brutish, and short. …
Venture capitalist Peter Fenton calls this phenomenon “the violence of a startup.” …

Throughout its first five years of existence, Twitter always seemed on the verge of committing some excruciating form of startup seppuku. There were constant service outages (epitomized by the ubiquitous “fail whale” cartoon message), an embarrassing security breach in 2009 that released a torrent of internal documents, and nonstop departures of key employees. The pièce de résistance was the turmoil at the top: Twitter had three chief executive officers in as many years. …

Now something freakish is happening in San Francisco. Twitter, which for years treated the responsibility of earning money as an annoying distraction, may be turning into a viable business

Like Twitter, the Notificator enabled people to post short messages on an ever-rolling public display. First patented in 1932, it was inspired by similar machines in Japanese railway stations and was designed “to aid persons who wish to cancel appointments or inform friends of their whereabouts”.

Essentially, it was a very simple device: a large mechanical paper scroll sits behind a sheet of glass with a hatch at the bottom. By inserting two pennies, any passerby could open the hatch, write a message on the exposed paper, and close it again

When Charlatans frontman Tim Burgess told fans on his Twitter website he wanted to create a breakfast cereal called “Totes Amazeballs” it’s fair to say he was joking. But when bosses at breakfast giants Kellogg’s heard about the idea they… got in touch to develop the cereal, based on Tim’s favourite cakey treat Rocky Road, by mixing Coco Pops Rocks, marshmallows, shortbread pieces and raisins.

Mr. Kariuki regularly sends out tweets about missing children and farm animals, showing that the power of social media has reached even into a dusty African village. Lanet Umoja is 160 kilometres west of the capital, Nairobi.

“There is a brown and white sheep which has gone missing with a nylon rope around its neck and it belongs to Mwangi’s father,” he tweeted recently in the Swahili language. The sheep was soon recovered.

Mr. Kariuki said that even the thieves in his village follow him on Twitter. Earlier this year, he tweeted about the theft of a cow, and later the cow was found abandoned, tied to a pole.

When a man in his late fifties in Mr. Kariuki’s village fell into a pit latrine in December, the village administrator’s tweets mobilized area residents and saved him.

Mr. Kariuki’s official Twitter page shows 300 followers, but the former teacher estimated that thousands of the 28,000 residents in his area receive the messages he sends out directly and indirectly