Twitter, Social Networking | featured news

Has the popular microblogging service become a victim of its own success?

In San Francisco's Mission district, the underground street-food scene is hot with traveling vendors like the "Crème Brulee Guy" and "Sexy Soup Lady" popping up at a twitter-message's notice.

This was one special tweet for Lance Armstrong.

St. Louis Cardinals manager Tony La Russa is suing the social-networking site Twitter, claiming an unauthorized page that used his name to make light of drunken driving and two Cardinals pitchers who died damaged his reputation and caused emotional distress.

The suit filed last month in the Superior Court of California in San Francisco seeks unspecified damages.
Messages left Thursday with La Russa's attorney and San Francisco-based Twitter were not returned.

Chinese censors blocked access to Twitter and other popular online services on Tuesday afternoon, two days before the twentieth anniversary of the crackdown on democracy protests in Tiananmen Square which cost hundreds of lives.

"What are you doing?" For the U.S. military in Afghanistan, the answer to the latest social networking craze seems to be: "Killing Taliban."

After the social-networking service Twitter announced Monday it was in talks to develop an unscripted series based on the site, two of the service's most prolific users have expressed fear that such a jump would mean an unfair intrusion on their lives.

Finally, Twitter has a significant use. It allows you to bypass the endless taxi line at the McCarren airport in Vegas so you can lose money quicker!

Tweetmeme is on a tear. According to Compete, the Twitter-centric link tracker went from nowhere in February, 2009 (with 26,000 unique visitors) to more than tenfold increase in March (to 385,000 uniques). Nick Halstead, The CEO of UK-based Fav.or.it, the company behind Tweetmeme, tells me he is tracking closer to 200,000 uniques a month based on yesterday's visitors, but that he is adding 50 percent a week.

It's happened: America's favorite Tina Fey character - Sarah Palin, former Republican Vice Presidential nominee - has joined Twitter. With the handle AKGovSarahPalin, Palin jumped on the social phenomena the other day and has started posting things like Alaska's swine flu status and her staff being misquoted.