Twitter, Social Media | featured news

The BBC Weather Twitter account began posting some peculiar updates Thursday. You could argue that they were loosely weather themed, yes, but the tweets were a series of digs at countries and heads of state in the Middle East.

As if Facebook weren't annoying enough. The Wall Street Journal reports that the social network may adopt Twitter's arguably most tiresome -- and arguably most Corporate -- feature: the hashtag. Facebook is testing the effectiveness of hashtags and is considering adding the categorizing feature to its site, reports the WSJ citing sources familiar with the matter.

"Hello world from comms center in (hash)Pyongyang." That Twitter missive, sent Monday from Koryolink's main service center in downtown Pyongyang using my iPhone, marked a milestone for North Korea: It was believed to be the first tweet sent from a cellphone using the country's new 3G mobile data service.

Three weeks after tweeting (and then deleting) a series of strange messages, former senator Scott Brown spoke publicly on the tweets for the first time. "Anyone ever hear of pocket tweet, pocket dial? I mean it was pretty simple," Brown told Boston's Fox 25. "I mean, I have an iPhone 5. If anyone has iPhone 5, the keys are small. It's very, very sensitive."

Burger King said Monday that it reached out to Twitter to suspend its account after an apparent hack.

Twitter said it had detected "sophisticated" unauthorized attempts to access information from the short-messaging service used by more than 200 million people.

Amid concerns over adult content popping up on its new Vine video app, Twitter appeared Tuesday to have restricted how users can share sexually explicit clips.

Twitter says it turns over user data to government agencies in the U.S. in 69 percent of the requests made for such information, according to a new transparency report released by the microblogging site.

The Twitter haters are losing the war. You know who they are, or, perhaps, who you are. Those who dismiss the snappy social network as the Platonic Non-Ideal of oversharing undercooked ideas, of blurting out what’s better left unsaid.

It seems Facebook's planetary ubiquity is inevitable ... until you take a look at the sheer size ofthose competitors: Total membership of the four major non-U.S. networks total 778 million. Combine that with Twitter's 500 million active users around the globe, and you've got a social horde that eclipses Facebook's.