Social Networking, Microblogging | featured news

Images from Instagram, the photo-sharing app that lets user spruce up their work with a slate of arty and retro filters, no longer show up on Twitter, a popular place to share them.

Is it possible to say something profound, to create something beautiful or essential, 140 characters at a time? Of course it is! No it isn’t! Oops, that’s already 141 characters. Clearly, the writers in the first-ever Twitter Fiction Festival don't have an easy task. The virtual literary gathering, brought to you by Twitter, begins today. The writers come from 20 countries and were chosen by a committee “composed of experts from around the publishing industry in the U.S.,” according to the official launch page.

... Lawyers for the former Conservative politician, Lord Alistair McAlpine, who was wrongly implicated in connection with sex abuse claims by a BBC show, have vowed to end the so-called trial by Twitter. They said they were looking at a "very long list" of users who wrongly repeated the allegations regarding Lord McAlpine with a view to taking legal action in the British courts. Simply deleting the messages would not be enough, the lawyers told The Guardian newspaper.

President Barack Obama's speech at the Democratic National Convention on Thursday night ranked as the biggest political moment ever on the social media site Twitter.

Mitt Romney has held a consistent advantage over President Obama in positive sentiment expressed in tweets from 12 battleground states in the 10 days leading up to the Republican convention.

The Jamaican sprinter — who repeatedly claimed legendary status after his phenomenal performance Saturday — was the most-mentioned Olympian on both Facebook and Twitter during the London Games, beating out American swimmer Michael Phelps.

China's Twitter was raucous Thursday with horn-tooting over Beijing's gold rush at the London Olympics, a digital reflection of the nation's exuberant mood - embellished with flashing emoticons. Earlier passions have been ignited on the site by a deadly high speed rail crash and outrage over factory pollution....

To the charges of putting the interests of a corporate partner above those of a human user, Twitter pleads guilty. The social messaging service has apologized for suspending the account of Guy Adams, a correspondent for The Independent and vocal critic of the way NBC has covered the Olympic Games.

The Twitter hashtag #NBCfail – about the American network’s Olympic shortfalls — is covering a lot of ground. But a key early frustration was the online viewing experience.

While some Twitter users reported intermittent updates via TweetDeck dashboard applications, the short-message website was down for many late Thursday morning.