Search Results for: Twitter

Twitter removes the 140-character limit from Direct Messages

Staff Writer
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Twitter has today removed the 140-character limit on direct messages (DMs) for all users. The move was first flagged in June, hours after CEO Dick Costolo announced he’d be standing down as CEO of the social platform. From today, the change becomes reality, as the update is rolled out to users across the world. The changes referred to here being the removal of restrictions on who can DM whom – previously you could only DM those following you, now users have the choice to receive direct messages from anyone –…

Twitter Shares Rise After Faked Bloomberg Report

Staff Writer

Takeover rumors about Twitter surface with seeming regularity every couple of months. But one on Tuesday showed a new level of sophistication in an effort to pump up the company’s stock. Shares of Twitter, the social network, briefly spiked after an article that appeared to come from the Bloomberg News website contended that the company had received a takeover offer worth $31 billion. Analysts and Twitter users quickly started poking holes in the online piece and deemed it a fake. (No such report ran on the Bloomberg terminal, where its…

Finally After Six Years President Obama’s @POTUS is Live on Twitter

Staff Writer

“Hello, Twitter! It’s Barack. Really! Six years in, they’re finally giving me my own account.” So, it’s official. After years of signing “-BO” at the end of @BarackObama to signal the tweets he crafted himself from an account operated by the Organizing for Action staff, the President now has his very own handle @POTUS, tweeting for the first time. Sometimes, they said, Mr. Obama will type the words himself, as he did Monday, when he was captured in a photo released by the White House. Other times, he might dictate…

Twitter sues US government over Transparency Report restrictions

Staff Writer

Twitter has been publishing what bits of info it’s allowed to concerning national security requests for some time now, but the social media feed wants the ability to publish the whole thing. Today, the outfit filed a lawsuit aiming to get approval to post its entire transparency report. In a blog post, VP of Legal Ben Lee says that the company is asking a California District Court “to declare these restrictions on our ability to speak about government surveillance as unconstitutional under the First Amendment.” As is stands, Twitter and…

Twitter Reviews Policies After Robin Williams ’s Daughter Zelda Abused

Staff Writer

(CNN) — Twitter is looking to revamp its user-protection policies after Zelda Williams, the daughter of comedian Robin Williams, was run off of the social site by abuse in the wake of her father’s apparent suicide. “We will not tolerate abuse of this nature on Twitter,” Del Harvey, Twitter’s vice president of trust and safety, said in a statement. “We have suspended a number of accounts related to this issue for violating our rules and we are in the process of evaluating how we can further improve our policies to…

Twitter Ban :The Turkish media experiment

Staff Writer

Countries who seek to gain control over their people through the internet have their own agendas. They are in search of larger governmental control or even censorship online. — Marietje Schaake, European Parliament Member, Feb 2014 Politics, claimed the German chancellor Otto von Bismarck, is the art of the possible. Exceed that limit, and you are bound to make a hash of it.  By all means, care to dream, but be aware of limitations.  The Turkish government, led by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has given that sentiment substance.  Ahead of the…

Twitter reports $645m loss for 2013

Staff Writer

Microblogging site Twitter has reported a net loss of $645m (£396m) for 2013, just three months after its flotation on the New York Stock Exchange. The loss was expected by analysts, who highlighted Twitter’s revenues, which rose 110% last year to reach $665m. But a reported slow growth in user numbers was a bigger concern for investors. Twitter averaged 241 million monthly users in the last quarter of the year, up just 3.8% on the previous quarter. The classic example is Satya Nadella, the new head of Microsoft. He used…

Markets are suddenly tumbling all around the world, right as Twitter is going public

Staff Writer

North American stocks have been sliding all morning. The S&P 500 index is down 0.6%, trading at 1760, 14 points off the highs of the morning. The Dow Jones Industrial Average is down 0.2%, but the NASDAQ is the big lagger, down 1.0%. The index is being dragged lower by QUALCOMM (down 3.8%), Whole Foods (down 8.9%), and Tesla (down 7.5%), which all missed expectations on earnings this week. And after a boost earlier, European indices are now giving up gains. The Italian FTSE MIB is down 1.6%, and the…

Twitter to raise $1bn in its stock market launch

Staff Writer

Social networking company Twitter has said it plans to raise $1bn (£619m) in its stock market debut in documents filed with US regulators. In the filing, revealed on Thursday, the seven-year-old company said that it now has 218 million monthly users and that 500 million tweets are sent a day. It made a loss of $69m in the first six months of 2013, on revenues of $254m. It will be the largest Silicon Valley stock offering since Facebook’s listing in 2012. Analysts said that the offering was likely to get…

Twitter Hate Speech Map Pinpoints Racist, Homophobic Hotspots Across U.S.

Staff Writer

he most hateful tweeters in the United States tend to live in the eastern half of the country, according to a new map that pinpoints hate speech from Twitter across country. The map, created by geography students at Humboldt State University in California, looks at more than 150,000 geocoded tweets (tweets that say where the user is located) between June 2012 and April 2013, sorting for those that contained a racist, homophobic or anti-disability word. The researchers then decided whether or not the tweet was using the word in a…