Twitter | featured news

Amazon's Kindle is proving popular in China because it allows users to log on to banned websites.

Evan Williams may embody a classic Silicon Valley type: the entrepreneur with good ideas for a start-up, but not the leader to execute a sophisticated business strategy.

Despite a few outages in the past few months, Facebook continues to zip along as the fastest social network in terms of average response time for the site, according to a report by web analytics company AlertSite.

The top 25 U.S. newspapers - according to the number of Twitter followers, as recorded by Journalistics a bit over a week ago - is below. Sitting very comfortably in first place is The New York Times with 2.6 million - and they are the only news source on the list that has more followers than print circulation. The Wall Street Journal is number two with 464,591 followers, and The Washington Post comes in at third with 204,514. The Chicago Tribune, however, if you count both of its Twitter accounts, including @ColonelTribune, totals a second-place 879,490. 1. @nytimes – 2,668,948 2.

What was meant to be an announcement from the Whitman campaign heralding the candidate's endorsement by the San Diego Deputy Sheriff's Association inadvertently became an endorsement of a much different nature due to a URL error.

JustSpotted plans to sift through people’s tweets to identify those that claim celebrity spottings, and then to place those celebrities’ whereabouts on a map in real time. It would be similar to the now-defunct GawkerStalker, but it would be faster. (It’s not a novel idea. Last year, start-up OMGICU proposed to do the same thing, supported by text messaging and tweets, except its service requires active user participation rather than data-mining the whole Twitter community like JustSpotted will do.)

As companies actively court customers through Facebook and Twitter, and as more travelers spend time glued to their smart phones, it's time to ponder if travelers are overloaded by social media.

Facebook is down and has been experiencing outages since about midnight Eastern Time tonight, Oct. 5, 2010.Many Twitter users are reporting the outage, with hundreds of tweets appearing about it in minutes. DownRightNow.com confirms the downtime, with the first widespread problems starting about 11:52 p.m. EST.

Sometime in the past few hours, Twitter made a subtle, but not insignificant change: their Promoted Trends are now appearing at the top of the Trends area on Twitter.com.

I'd like to believe that if Facebook changed the order of "Developers" and "Careers" in the footer of their site, it wouldn't lead to a huge user backlash. But history suggests otherwise. Okay, maybe I'm slightly exaggerating, but I'm honestly not sure. It seems that if Facebook does anything to change their site, it's grounds for user backlash.