Twitter is an online social networking service that enables users to send and read short 140-character messages called “tweets”. Registered users can read and post tweets, but unregistered users can only read them. Users access Twitter through the website interface, SMS, or mobile device app. Twitter was created in 2006 and rapidly gained worldwide popularity, with more than 100 million users in 2012 and 340 million tweets per day. In 2013 Twitter was one of the ten most-visited websites, and has been described as “the SMS of the Internet.”
The New York Times has been criticized because some of its senior editors and writers — including its executive editor — don’t use Twitter. That may seem trivial to some, but… Read more »
Bogged-down cellular networks and the looming threat of government censorship have led Chinese protestors to turn to FireChat, a smartphone messaging app that doesn’t need an internet connection to work. Read more »
Facebook had to turn over account information about 381 people at once this summer as a result of a “bulk search warrant” process the company says is illegal. Now, a higher… Read more »
Stripe is starting to rack up payment processing deals with the heavyweights of social media, opening up huge potential for the growth of its credit card transactions business. Read more »
The U.S. firms have reportedly been told they must store Russians’ local data and metadata on Russian soil, and abide by the same restrictions on free speech to which traditional Russian… Read more »
Twitter recently open sourced an algorithm designed to ease the process of running recommendation engines at large scale. Called DIMSUM, the algorithm pre-processes pairs of possible matches so the other algorithms… Read more »