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Hundreds of 'Twestival' fundraisers springing up tonight

If you're looking for something "good" to do Thursday night, you're in luck. Volunteer-organized Twestivals are planned in more than 200 cities around the world.

The Twestivals are a loose coalition of fundraisers that aim to use the social-media tool du jour--Twitter--to raise money for Charity Water, a nonprofit devoted to bringing clean drinking water to developing countries.

It's not officially organized by Twitter, but enthusiasts are hoping that the series of Twestivals can be an example for future fundraisers and how the likes of Twitter can fuel volunteer and donor efforts. Word has spread … Read more

The 404 277: Where it's too early for Veronica to podcast

Veronica Belmont of Revision3's Tekzillaand PlayStation's Qore rubs the sleep out of her eyes and joins us on today's show all the way from San Francisco. We chew up a little East Cost/West Coast beef, address Justin and Veronica's fleeting encounter at CES 2009, and jump right into our Valentine's Day plans. The three of us discuss our lonely and pathetic V-Day schedules, but we're all floored when Veronica reveals her top-secret wild and crazy plans. I'm not even sure where she rented a crane and a trailer full of Capuchin … Read more

Twitter may charge companies that 'tweet'

Update at 4:30 p.m. PST with an excerpt from Twitter's afternoon blog posting clarifying that it doesn't plan to charge for "existing services."

It seems that Twitter may have figured out a way to make money.

Biz Stone, co-founder of the microblogging site, told Marketing magazine that his company is considering charging companies that use the service to market their brands.

"We are noticing more companies using Twitter and individuals following them," Stone said. "We can identify ways to make this experience even more valuable and charge for commercial accounts." … Read more

Which apps are using the new Facebook APIs?

This past weekend's announcement by Facebook that the company would be opening up its APIs to allow for posting of notes, videos, and more has left some companies scrambling to add new functionality to existing applications. Below we've highlighted a handful of the ones that let you post to Facebook from a desktop client, be it standalone or something that plugs into your browser.

We've talked to the people at each one to see when you should be expecting to be able to make use of the new API in each app:

"Blogo already supports Facebook … Read more

Whee! New numbers on social network usage

The blogosphere simply loves to slurp up social-networking traffic stats, and on Monday we got a nice tasty serving of them with some new numbers from Compete.com for the month of January. The results? Facebook is in the lead, with about 68 million unique visitors, well ahead of MySpace's 58 million. (The two are pegged at 1.1 billion and 810 million page views, respectively.)

This may be the first survey we've seen that puts Facebook ahead of the News Corp.-owned MySpace in U.S. traffic. It also puts Twitter as the third-biggest social-media site in … Read more

Challenges in monitoring Web apps, the Cloud

With the rise of cloud computing and Web applications, monitoring and management complexity has crossed the line from the network deep into applications. Businesses that are dependent on the web (companies like Facebook, Twitter and Salesforce.com) are concerned with more than just the red light/green light mentality of the client/server days.

Monitoring has evolved from "Am I alive?" to "How well is everything running?" and "Is my performance maximized?" It follows that businesses need performance data from applications, not just infrastructure, to ensure proper delivery and function (and, down the line, … Read more

Desktop Twitter

Built on Adobe AIR, Twhirl is a stand-out desktop Twitter service that rolls the functionality of many ancillary services into one. For example, Twhirl automatically posts TinyURLs in place of long URLs, sends photos to TwitPic, and searches for Twitter topics using a built-in TweetScan engine. In the settings, you can configure Twhirl to cross-post updates to Jaiku and Pownce; it now also rolls in support for Ping.fm, itself a service that updates multiple social networks.

Twhirl's other goodies include spell check, improved search, and a Bit.ly link shortener. In addition, Seesmic users can record video, whereas … Read more

Fake Dalai Lama exiled from Twitter (he's back now)

Microblogging service Twitter has suspended an account that claimed to be run by the Dalai Lama, according to an Agence France-Presse story.

The account purporting to belong to the Tibetan spiritual leader was only a few days old, but had already attracted tens of thousands of followers. To date, it's probably the most high-profile case of a bogus Twitter account actually getting the boot from the service.

Fake accounts that spoofed media personality Ira Glass and comedian Stephen Colbert gained notable followings until they were unmasked. In both of those cases, the impersonators offered to give the accounts to … Read more

Buzz Out Loud 907: Sealed mummies (eat as is)

Once again we find something that Natali can't cook: mummies. But she does suggest they be used as jerky. Don't worry, we also have lots of thoughts about the Kindle 2 and Psystar's suit against Apple. Plus, somebody owns the name Netbook. Is that allowed?

Listen now: Download today's podcast EPISODE 907

Live blog: Amazon unveils Kindle 2 http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-10159334-1.html http://cnettv.cnet.com/2001-1_53-50005200.html http://www.engadget.com/2009/02/09/amazon-kindle-2-announced-359-on-feburary-24/

Google Sync for iPhone, WinMo, SyncML http://googlemobile.blogspot.com/2009/02/google-sync-beta-for-iphone-winmo-and.html

Mac clone maker wins … Read more

The 404 275: Where Wilson Kindled himself

Wilson is off getting Kindled, so Jeff and I take the show by the horns and relate our weekend stories. I got a chance to watch the live taping of Saturday Night Live, and sat next to Kirsten Dunst (yes, I wussed out and didn't ask her to come on the show). I also checked out Comic Con on Sunday, and a big thanks to David from Comixology for hooking it up with his extra pass. Listen in to today's show for a two-man conversation about Twitter spam, child subway performers, more opinions on the Michael Phelps controversy, … Read more