Twitter has announced a new partnership with major satellite providers to give their subscribers access to Twitter SMS, the original text-based Twitter service. According to a statement released Thursday, the company has partnered with Iridium and Thuraya, the world’s two largest satellite providers, to increase the number of people that can use Twitter SMS worldwide. The company said the new partnership will help guarantee greater global access to the microblogging network. “Now, even if phone...  show all text

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Over the last decade the major music labels — and their trade organization, the Recording Industry Association of America — have established a repeated pattern of attacking consumers in the name of squelching illegal file-sharing. Piracy, they claim, has been the industry’s undoing, accounting for an over 50% drop in sales since 1999 (the industry likes to discount the impact of legal per-song music downloads via services like iTunes, and the myriad other changes facilitated by the rise of high...  show all text

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In a cost-cutting move and a signal of the company’s poor financial situation, Eastman Kodak on Thursday announced it plans to stop selling digital cameras. The company, which filed for bankruptcy protection last month, will instead focus on online and retail-based photo printing as well as desktop inkjet printing. Kodak plans to phase out all digital camera sales within the first half of this year. The move is expected to save Kodak $100 million. Kodak expects to incur charges of $30 million f...  show all text

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If I tell you, "I'm going to the baseball game," it seems as though you're likely to understand what I mean. Of course, you won't. When George Will goes to a baseball game, it's a religious experience. Me, I don't even like baseball. Or maybe it's my nephew's ball game (the playoffs), or maybe going to the game causes me to miss an important event, and on and on. We label the experience with just two words, and two words can't possibly capture the emotions and circumstance surrounding an event....  show all text

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Netvibes has just been acquired by European product design company Dassault Systèmes (sure this isn’t the type of thing I usually write, but I like the founder Tariq Krim so bear with me here … ). French startup Netvibes is a sentiment analytics dashboard that allows Fortune 500 companies to track their social media presence throughout the realtime web. Dassault is a “3D experience” design company — which lets designers virtualize how products will work in the real world — so the acquisition ac...  show all text

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Daniel Atwood works with organizations in the social sector to craft meaningful experiences for customers and constituents, and to find innovative product, campaign and messaging ideas in unexpected places. We live in a world where new digital products are solving problems daily — from managing our finances to remembering the groceries. Often, they’re solving problems we didn’t know we had, like the need to connect several times a day in 140 characters or less. Occasionally, they’re creating new  show all text

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Some people always see the good in people and some people always see the bad … Gawker just published a post with what at first seems to be some pretty damning evidence against Path founder Dave Morin, publishing an email where he assured writer Ryan Tate that Path wasn’t storing user data. While today’s headlines would lead one to believe that the statement was a lie, Morin (who is a friend) tells me that the exchange is misleading out of context. He was actually talking about Path 1.0 in the e...  show all text

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Path and Pinterest are probably two of the hottest social services right now, racking up millions of users and generating an ocean of favorable coverage. But both have gotten tripped up by the same thing that has made the social web a minefield for both Facebook and Google: namely, decisions that put their interests ahead of their users and a lack of disclosure about what was going on behind the scenes or under the hood of their services. Will these missteps spell doom for either company? Proba...  show all text

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Guest blogging is one of the most efficient, yet misunderstood, social media marketing tactics. It’s not new. In fact, it’s almost as old as blogging itself.  It started becoming a standout tactic just a few years ago. This post answers one of the most frequently asked questions: Is guest blogging good for “big guys?” By the way, “guest blogging, the time waster” is one of the myths I busted in my previous post for Social Media Examiner. Today’s article is one more argument in favor of guest bl...  show all text

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It’s beautiful, it’s addictive, and now Pinterest is having its glorious hockey stick moment. TechCrunch has attained exclusive data from comScore showing Pinterest just hit 11.7 million unique monthly U.S. visitors, crossing the 10 million mark faster than any other standalone site in history. In fact, users are spending so much time sharing their favorite images that now only Facebook and Tumblr have more social media time on site than Pinterest. Who’s propelling its rise? 18-34 year old upper  show all text

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So yes, LinkedIn has bought contact management startup Rapportive, according to multiple sources we’ve contacted, as was first reported by Liz Gannes at AllThingsD. The startup — which aggregates and displays the social networking accounts of the people you contact through Gmail — was backed for $1 million by seed investors Charles River Ventures, Paul Buchheit, Scott Banister, Jason Calacanis, Gary Vaynerchuk, Dharmesh Shah, Shervin Pishevar, Roy Rodenstein, Kima Ventures, Zelkova Ventures, 500  show all text

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Path uploads your entire iPhone address book to its servers 8 Feb 2012 – Singapore It all started innocently enough. I was thinking of implementing a Path Mac OS X app as part of our regularly scheduled hackathon. Using the awesome mitmproxy tool which was featured on the front page of the Hacker News yesterday, I started to observe the various API calls made to Path’s servers from the iPhone app. It all seemed harmless enough until I observed a POST request to https://api.path.com/3/contacts/a...  show all text

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A federal appeals court Tuesday struck down California's ban on same-sex marriage, clearing the way for the U.S. Supreme Court to rule on gay marriage as early as next year.

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Have you noticed less interaction on your Facebook page in the last few months? Getting your updates to appear in the coveted news feed is more challenging than ever. I don’t have answers as to how the elusive Facebook algorithm works. What I do have are some suggestions on how to ensure that your page posts are being seen by your fans to give your page the maximum visibility. #1: Train Your Audience to Watch for Your Content You want to make sure you are delivering good content so that your au...  show all text

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Traffic numbers provided by companies should always be questioned — I mean, of course each company is going to try to present the data in a way that makes them look as good as possible. Which is what New York Times finance writer Andrew Ross Sorkin has understandably done, going to town on Facebook for how it counts its active users in an article out tonight called “Those Millions On Facebook? Some May Not Actually Visit.” His main criticism is that Facebook counts 845 million monthly active us...  show all text

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1. Castle in the Sky on TV Anime movie Laputa: Castle in the Sky was televised in Japan on Dec. 9, 2011. The movie was made in 1989 by famed director Hayou Miyazaki, who also directed Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke. During one point in televised broadcast in 2011, viewers joined forces, sending tweets at the same time to symbolically help the movie's characters cast a spell. Data compiled by Brian Anthony Hernandez; gallery created by Chelsea Stark. Image courtesy of che_fox, Flickr. C...  show all text

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There have been whispers in the past of augmented reality goggles or glasses, but generally we have been able to dismiss them as exaggerations or concepts. The technology, while it isn’t unrealistic, simply isn’t quite there yet. Apparently that hasn’t stopped Google: a new report is appearing corroborating earlier ones that they are working on a pair of augmented reality glasses. They’d piggyback on your phone’s connection and overlay information like directions, news, and so on. Whether you t...  show all text

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Except for a few stints at a shelter, Mark Quinlan has spent the past few years living in Plaza de Cesar Chavez Park, right across the street from the San Jose Fairmont Hotel.

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By Altimeter’s Jeremiah Owyang, Brian Solis, and Zak Kirchner Findings: Five Trends Indicate Cross Channel Integration a Mainstay. Super Bowl ads, while only representing the nation’s largest consumer facing ads represent a bellwether for advertising trends for the remainder of the year, so marketers know to pay attention. To best understand these trends, Altimeter Group’s research team analyzed each Ad in real time, and conducted analysis to best understand the advertising trends for 2012.  Us...  show all text

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The band OK Go is known for their imaginative and original videos, and their latest, for Needing/Getting, is no exception. This time the folks from OK Go decided to play the instruments used in the song – with a car. They outfitted a Chevy Sonic with retractable pneumatic arms, and then drove it around with the arms hitting more than 1,000 actual instruments posted on the side of the road in a desert near Los Angeles. What makes the entire project really amazing (and a bit crazy) is the fact th...  show all text

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Big TV events are becoming an increasingly popular catalyst of activity on social media, with sporting events being at the top of the list. Many of us can no longer enjoy a Super Bowl without checking Twitter every three seconds. Last year, there were several moments during the Super Bowl that set records for the most tweets per second during a sporting event, with a high of 4,064 TPS. The highs during the Super Bowl were no match for New Years Eve 2011 in Japan, which saw 6,939 tweets per seco...  show all text

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Facebook is still working on deleting photos from its servers in a timely manner nearly three years after Ars first brought attention to the topic. The company admitted on Friday that its older systems for storing uploaded content "did not always delete images from content delivery networks in a reasonable period of time even though they were immediately removed from the site," but said it's currently finishing up a newer system that makes the process much quicker. In the meantime, photos that ...  show all text

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Brand Bowl monitors Twitter and ranks the Super Bowl television ads based on those who are watching and tweeting about them. As people watch this year's commercials, the scoreboard tells us which brands are winning their hearts and minds.

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On Sunday night, millions of people will be watching Super Bowl 2012 on their televisions, while others might be watching it on their smartphones. This year marks the first time the Super Bowl will be streamed live online, and with the trend of sports becoming more social, you will be able to participate along with the game while you watch. Many companies have developed mobile apps, so when you tune in on Super Bowl Sunday, you’ll have the opportunity interact with both the game and advertiseme...  show all text

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Whether you can obtain a job, credit or insurance can be based on your digital doppelgänger — and you may never know why you’ve been turned down.

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The rage in social networks right now is Pinterest, partly because it’s probably the first social network that has a much higher adoption rate by females than males, and partly because it’s an interesting concept: somewhere between visual social bookmarking and scrapbooking. What also might not be immediately obvious is that it’s just “easier” to interact there. In that way, Pinterest has something in common with Instagram, which is community around photos. What I’m interested in, though, is Ge...  show all text

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I’m not the most avid user of social media. It’s not the media part that turns me away – I’ve spent more than a decade of my life writing for various print and online publications. I understand the value of sharing information. It’s the social part that gets me – I’m kind of a loner. Social media is like an online conversation, and there are many times when I don’t feel like conversing.

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The New York Giants official website accidentally announced the winner of Super Bowl XLVI more than 24 hours before Sunday’s big game even started, by the look of images floating around the web. The error was immortalized Saturday in this TwitPic screenshot (above), which Jeff Frias posted to Twitter. No signs of the mistake are left on the team’s site other than a reported link that leads to the image below: The Giants have yet to publicly confirm whether this whammy is real or the handy-work ...  show all text

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