Social networking

Twitter grammar police say musicians can't write

I had always thought that technology was freeing burdened souls from having to follow ancient rules. The cherished principle of disruption has taken an ax to any supposed truth that's more than seven years old.

Yet some still want to preserve old ways. Grammarians, for example.

What use is grammar, really? You know what someone's trying to say when they tweet: "LOL. SKOOL SUX!!!!" -- even if the grammar gods might feel the bile rising toward their vocal chords.

Surely the most important thing about communication is the communicating part, not the following-some-old-Englishman's-rules part.

And yet there is an app called Grammarly, whose sole existence is predicated on preserving linguistic decorum.

In order to prove its alleged worth, Grammarly decided to analyze the tweets of the famous to see just how terminal grammar skills had become.… Read more

Twitter refreshes TweetDeck for Web and Chrome

Those of you who use TweetDeck on the Web to access your Twitter account will find a new design the next time you launch the page.

The top bar has been moved to the left side of the screen where it offers virtually all of the commands you'd use on a regular basis. The New Tweet button appears at the top of the bar with an icon for Search directly underneath. Icons for all of your current columns then appear under Search so you can easily navigate from one to another, especially if all of your columns don't … Read more

Impact of Twitter outages grows as stock traders go social

Twitter suffered its largest outage in some time Monday following an error in a "routine change" to the microblogging site.

In a statement, the company said the site was not available from 1:08 p.m. to 1:33 p.m. PT. A mere 25 minutes. For the 200 million Twitter users, that was a while, at least since the days of the regular "fail whale."

But now that Bloomberg terminals -- the computers that Wall Street analysts, financial types, and traders use -- have tweets flowing through them, there's a greater onus of responsibility … Read more

Draw Something team included in Zynga layoff

After Zynga announced it was laying off 18 percent of its staff, former employees took to Twitter to reveal that the action resulted in the closure of three offices for OMGPOP, the studio behind the popular Draw Something franchise. That leaves Zynga's remaining U.S. offices to pick up the slack the popular series and other games like CastleVille and CoasterVille.

The layoff announcement will lead to the closure of offices in Dallas, Los Angeles, and New York. While Zynga won't confirm the specific closures, former employees have tweeted about their fate. Zynga acquired New York-based OMGPOP for more than $200 million … Read more

Pinterest adds ability to search your own pins

Pinterest is rolling out a new search feature that will let users search through their own pins, the company said Tuesday.

The image-centric social-media site says the feature will come in handy when looking up recipes for dinner or crafts for weekend projects. According to a blog post from Pinterest Software Engineer Hui Xu:

When you type a word into the search bar -- like San Francisco, beaches, or BBQ -- you can filter results by clicking "Just my pins." We'll show you everything you've pinned with that keyword in the pin description. Be sure to … Read more

Parents lack bandwidth to monitor kids' online activity, says study

When the world's most famous companies are run by boys who seem to have only slight familiarity with shaving, it's easy for grown-ups to give up.

Somehow, this newfangled digital world has created an entirely new species of human -- one that ultimately wants to eradicate all species that are currently thought of as human.

Who can even lift an eyebrow, therefore, at new research that suggests parents are largely clueless about their kids' activities on laptops, phones, Facebook, and all the other places to which kids choose to disappear?

A new study from McAfee, touchingly called Digital Deceptions, … Read more

Pepsi vending machine takes Facebook love, not money

These days, most marketing stunts are aimed at going viral online through social-media shares. Pepsi's new Like Machine marketing stunt makes social media a requirement, not an option. The vending machine doesn't want your cash, it just wants your Facebook cred.

The Pepsi Like Machine is putting a twist on the age-old art of sampling. Normally, a hired gun dressed up in brand apparel hands out samples to anyone walking by. The specialized vending machine hands out samples, too, but you have to give it a "like" on Facebook before it coughs up the goods.… Read more

Facebook file-transfer app Pipe goes wide Wednesday

Pipe, a peer-to-peer file-sharing app for Facebook along the lines of Dropbox, is set to launch for the public at large Wednesday, creating a simple way for people on the massive social network to share big files that, thus far, Facebook itself hasn't provided.

The Pipe app allows users to simply drag and drop a file for a friend to receive it directly.

"We've worked really hard to make Pipe this simple," Simon Hossell, founder and chief executive of Pipe, said in a statement. "We've made the technology invisible."

The company took its … Read more

Turkish users sneak past censorship of Facebook, Twitter

Many Turkish Internet users are staying connected to Facebook and Twitter despite reported government censorship of the two sites.

To get past the blockade of the two popular social networks, Turkish citizens have been using VPN software such as Hotspot Shield, which opens a tunnel through the Internet so the connection can't be detected. This past weekend, more than 120,000 people in Turkey downloaded the software, according to the Guardian, a huge leap from the 10,000 new users seen on an average day.

On Saturday, blog site TechCrunch said a number of sources told it that both … Read more