Category: Web 2.0
Geek Chic: a t-shirt, bag or mug with a mosiac of your Twitter friends
My Twitter followers are important to me. No, really, you all are. But I’m not convinced that they’re important enough for me to want to wear them on my chest all day. Still, you might be closer to them than I am, so for £20 you can stick them on on T-Shirt and look down every ten minutes at your lovely disciples.
Also available are mugs (for £11), bags (currently out of stock) and business cards (£5.50). Just think to yourself before you make your purchase – will you genuinely still be wearing that thing in six months’ time?
Twitter Mosaic (via TechCrunch)
10 reasons why Brits love Twitter
So it is official, Brits absolutely love the microblogging (no, I don’t know what that means either) service Twitter. According to online trend watchers Hitwise UK, internet traffic to Twitter has increased 10-fold over last 12 months.
UK Internet traffic to the website has increased by a staggering 974% over this period. Hitwise also admits that Twitter is probably even more popular than its numbers imply, as Hitwise is only measuring traffic to the main Twitter website, not access via mobile (it’s big on the iPhone, I can tell you) or third party applications like Twitterrific and Tweetdeck.
So why is this? It is obvious why Twitter is growing on the other side of The Pond:
1. The Yanks invented it
2. Culturally, Americans are not afraid of…
UK Twitter traffic trebles in a month
Twitter’s popularity in the UK has exploded since January, after a number of high-profile celebrity Twitterers including @stephenfry, @wossy and @schofe started using it, and talking about it. As a result, the site’s traffic has trebled since ths start of the year, according to Hitwise Intelligence.
All that traffic has catapulted Twitter into the top 100 UK sites, where it now sits at #91, above Expedia, Gumtree and Easyjet. It’s also ranking seventh within the “Social Networking and Forums” category. Of course, this still underrates Twitter’s popularity, because many people don’t use the website to interact with the site. Real numbers would be even higher.
(via Hitwise Intelligence)
Woman filing for divorce after husband caught "having it off with another man in a dungeon" in Second Life
The husband in question is John Best, 34, who, if you ever believe what the News of the World says, was using his laptop in bed – while his wife was asleep – to indulge in a bit of M2M action in Second Life.
He had a great excuse for doing it. He said “it wasn’t real life” which, to be fair, is 100% correct. Here’s the NotW’s superb visual representation of the story…
“I couldn’t sleep a wink the rest of the night wondering whether this meant he was betraying me or not – that he’d rather have gay sex on Second Life than…
OPINION: Twitter is for twits – oh really?
My first Twitter update was “Laughing at Katie’s birdwatching geekdom” on January 16th 2007, on the CatwalkQueen Twitter. I wasn’t an early adopter – Twitter launched in 2006 – but I have racked up a couple of thousand updates since that first one. The only thing that’s changed is that I’ve moved to my own account where my updates are slightly more frequent and a lot more irrelevant.
This week the anti-Twitter brigade have been out in full. Now that celebs like Stephen Fry, Phillip Schofield, Andi Peters and Jonathan Ross are spreading the word away from the geeks and the “social media experts” everyone’s jumping on the hate bandwagon. “Twitter is for Twits” read one (predictable) headline in the Telegraph. Congrats to Bryony Gordon (or her sub) for pissing off 6 million people before even starting the article. That’s a pretty good move, I bet the…
His Holiness The Dalai Lama joins Twitter
The Dalai Lama isn’t the first political leaderto join the microblogging phenomenon Twitter, but he might be the first religious leader. Well, the first real one, anyway.
His Holiness, or @OHHDL as he’s known on the site, has been networking like crazy, sending 46 updates and accruing 20,000 followers in just two days. Some of it is just sending out links to his other web presences, but there’s a smattering of other stuff, too, including the wonderful statement: “I’m sure HH will be just as inquisitive about technology as he has been over the past 14 reincarnations”.
Note: this post nearly contained a “Twibet” pun, but I thought better of it after seeing @natelanxon’s rant this morning.
More posts about Twitter: New INQ phone will have Twitter built in | Celebrity Twitter user Stephen Fry in LIVE LIFT TRAP SENSATION
Suspected T-Mobile marketing stunt closes Liverpool Street station
If your journey home last Friday involved traversing Liverpool Street station, you might have had some trouble. The London station was forced to close for an hour and a half, from 7pm, due to an 11,000-strong flash mob mimicking T-Mobile’s recent adverts featuring silent dancers.
New INQ phone will have Twitter built in
The problem with building an entire device around one service is that when the service becomes obsolete, so does the device. Not that I’m saying Facebook, and therefore the INQ phone, is obsolete, but it’s important to keep things updated.
With that in mind, last night Electric Pig got a nugget of information out of INQ’s CEO, Frank Meehan, about the next device they’ll be releasing. When asked if Twitter would feature in the next INQ, Frank replied: “I think we’d be stupid if we didn’t”. So there you go.
(via Electric Pig)
More on the INQ: INQ1 heading to more networks | REVIEW: INQ1 Facebook phone from 3
Husband tells wife about divorce via change in Facebook relationship status
That happy couple over on the right are Emma & Neil Brady. They’ve been married for six years, but just before Christmas, after accusing her of liasing with another man, Neil threw Emma out of the house, injuring her wrist. He was brought to court for assault, and pleaded guilty. During the case, though, an interesting detail emerged.
Neil had announced his divorce to his wife via a change in his relationship status – “Neil Brady has ended his marriage to Emma Brady”. His wife only found out when her best friend, who lives in Denmark, saw it, complete with a comment from a girl in Canada which read “You are better off out of it”. Nice. Still, at least she didn’t kill him over it.
(via the Next Web)
More Facebook: PROFILE: Mark Zuckerberg | Will it still be around in five years?
OPINION: Here's what I want from Google Latitude
I don’t really care about privacy. I recognise the fact that other people do, but I don’t have anything to hide. Add that to the fact that I’m not especially interesting, and that I’ve been on the internet so long, and have such a unique name, that there’s a lot of me out there already.
That’s why I’m not bothered by commenters saying that Latitude is a massive privacy invasion. For me, the social proprioception offered by Latitude far outweighs the downsides of having my location available to my friends.
