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PeopleBrowsr wins temporary injunction against Twitter

PeopleBrowsr, the social media analytics service behind Kred, has won a temporary restraining order against Twitter that allows it continued access to the microblogging site's firehose of data.

PeopleBrowsr sued Twitter in San Francisco Superior Court today, alleging that Twitter was restricting its access to the tweets and data that is key to providing real-time statistical analysis sought by its clients. The court scheduled a hearing to discuss the injunction for January 8, 2013.

In its complaint (see below), PeopleBrowsr said that it had paid Twitter $1 million a year for the past four years for access to the … Read more

Obama tax plan hashtag hijacked by conservative think tank

A hashtag launched today by President Obama to push his tax cuts plan was quickly appropriated by a conservative think tank.

In the face of the approaching "fiscal cliff," Obama began promoting the hashtag #My2K on Twitter today as a way of encouraging discussion about his plan to preserve tax cuts for the middle class while letting expire those tax cuts on Americans households earning more than $250,000. The hashtag reflects the extra $2,000 the average middle class family of four could expect to pay if the tax cuts are allowed to expire.

The president used … Read more

Weatherman's fiancee stages naked coup of his Twitter feed

There are some people to whom things just happen.

It may well be that John Bolaris is one of those people.

Last year, he was suspended from his job at WTXF-TV in Philadelphia (he was subsequently fired) after Playboy wrote that he had been the alleged victim of "bottle girls" in a Miami club.

These women, it seems, had the bottle to wring $43,000 from his credit card.

Now, more woman trouble.

As the New York Daily News reports, Bolaris appears to have been asleep when his girlfriend wrestled her way onto his Twitter account and began … Read more

Google's Horowitz: Facebook is social network of the past

NEW YORK--Facebook is the social network of the past, and the way it implements advertising doesn't really work, a Google executive overseeing the search giant's social-networking product said today.

Bradley Horowitz, the Google vice president of product for Google+, said Facebook isn't set up in a way that's compatible with the real world. People should be able to have a conversation with a certain group of friends without involving others. And they should be able to have real conversations, he said, not 140-character blurbs like Twitter.

"In designing Google+, we keep thinking about the real … Read more

Proud parents name child 'Hashtag'?

The sad conventions of society demand that the world is populated by Peters, Pauls, and Marys.

This is nothing more than lamb-like conformism. Better to be one of the crowd than one endowed with a name like "Bannister."

So I find myself doffing my cap and lowering my quiff on hearing that a pair of proud parents have allegedly refused to bow to convention. They appear to have named their child after something that creates a new convention: Hashtag. … Read more

How to secure your Twitter account

Twitter took some heat earlier this month for resetting more passwords than necessary after detecting a security breach in its microblogging network, as CNET's Daniel Terdiman reported on the Internet & Media blog.

The more followers you have, the more potential damage may result from a compromised Twitter account. That's why it's big news when the Twitter feeds of media organizations such as Reuters and Fox News are breached by hackers who post false news stories.

CNET News Editor Steven Musil describes the two attacks on the Reuters Twitter account last August, and Fox News' infamous erroneous … Read more

NHL star retweets message wishing commissioner dead

I know that hockey is important to some misguided souls.

I can't entirely fathom why, but I'm prepared to respect those who feel the need for a little institutionalized violence in their lives.

The thing is, the National Hockey League also enjoys institutionalized lockouts that seem to make whole seasons disappear.

There's one occurring right now. Progress seems to be running slightly behind the pace of DSL.

Perhaps one shouldn't be surprised, then, that the Chicago Blackhawks' Dave Bolland appears to support the, um, death of NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman.

The what?

The way that ESPN slapshoots it, … Read more

Download the Timehop iOS app to view, share past events

Being reminded of what you were doing exactly one, two, or even three years ago to the day can leave you feeling a bit nostalgic. And that's exactly what the Timehop iOS app accomplishes.

We talked about Timehop once before, when it was an e-mail-only service. You would sign up by linking your Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Foursquare, and Flickr accounts to the service. Then each morning you'd receive an e-mail containing your tweets, links, check-ins, updates, and photos from exactly one year (or longer) ago.

Later, sharing options were added. You could share an event you may have … Read more

The Onion's joyous crucifixion of social media gurus

The present is social. The future is social. Media is social.

It's quite amazing that people still manage to hate each other so much.

Perhaps things are a little more complex than we first thought -- or perhaps social media experts truly are the troubling bags of wind that "Saturday Night Live" recently suggested they might be.

Less leaping on the bandwagon and more skewering the still-twitching carcass, The Onion has just released a video that masquerades as a TED talk.

I am grateful to TechCrunch for spotting this phenomenon, in which a sprightly intellectual young thing … Read more