latest
Twitter has always been limited to 140 characters, which is a holdover from its days as an SMS service. However, earlier this year Twitter started making noise about potentially raising that limit. It began testing an expanded 280 character limit in September, and now that feature is rolling out to everyone. Worried? Twitter says don't sweat it.
Sure, you're out there every day, posting Instagram Stories and generally oversharing with the world. But... does anyone like what you're doing? If only there were a way to collect the opinions of friends and internet acquaintances via your Stories. Well, now there is with the new two-option polls in Instagram Stories.
Twitter can be a fun place to share and interact with your fellow humans. However, it can also be a wretched hive of scum and villainy. That's why keeping your Twitter direct messages open is a bit of a risk, but Twitter is rolling out a feature to keep the riffraff at bay. Soon, all DMs from strangers will be segregated from the messages you care about.
Google has come up with a myriad of ways to help you discover content on Google+, and today you can add one more to the list. "Topics" are streams of curated content like people, communities, and collections. They appear in a special Topic card, which some of you might have seen before.
There was some consternation last year as rumors swirled that Twitter was set to drop its long-standing 140-character limit. The company ended up keeping the limit, but it's been working to make sure you can actually use all 140-characters. For example, Twitter decreed a while back that photos and videos no longer count against the limit. Now, it's doing the same for usernames. Finally.
The blue badge is now finally within your reach—Twitter has created an official process to have your account verified, proving once and for all that you are who you say you are on the site. It's not a sure thing, but at least there's a way to get your request in front of someone without going through back channels.
Microsoft doesn't have a social network of its own, but it does have a giant pile of money. When you've got that, you can have anything you want. Microsoft has just announced it will purchase business-oriented social network LinkedIn for an incredible $26.2 billion dollars. That's 26.2 Instagrams or roughly the entire annual GDP of Estonia.
Since its founding, Twitter's 140 character tweet limit has been sacrosanct. That won't be the case in a few months, though. Twitter has announced a plan to exempt certain @names and media links from the character count. Retweets and the way conversations are broadcast will also change. It's actually a bit complicated.
Like all social networks, Twitter is only fun and useful if you follow people who say things you're interested in. How you find those people is the tricky part. Starting today, Twitter is rolling out a new Connect tab on iOS and Android that allegedly makes it easier to find the right people and accounts to follow.
You may have heard about the fury last week over a rumored change to the way Twitter organizes Tweets. The rumor claimed the stream was going to become algorithmic like Facebook, but it appears now that was overblown. Twitter just announced a new feature that allows users to see the "best Tweets" at the top of the timeline, but it's optional and doesn't alter the overall layout.
Twitter always set itself apart from the competition by keeping things succinct. The 140 character limit forced everyone to get to the point rather than drone on a la Facebook. However, the company is now said to be close to essentially doing away with that limit. Multiple reports claim Twitter is planning to make the new character limit a whopping 10,000, just like Direct Messages.
Say what you will about certain social networks, LinkedIn is the one basically all of us can agree isn't any fun to use. That's not its purpose. We go there either to get a job or to tell everyone about the job we just got. It's easy for people with stable employment to end up with profiles as current as their Myspace pages.
Sometimes you just don't want to hear everything people on your Twitter timeline are saying, especially if you follow a lot of accounts. Also, some people just get annoying. This is why third-party Twitter clients have long included muting. Now Twitter itself is embracing the idea with official support coming to its apps and website.
Sony's Socialife is an attractive app, but it has thus far only found its way into the hands of a limited number of users. This isn't an indictment of its quality. Rather, it speaks to the app's previous exclusivity. The news reader and social network aggregator has only been available for Xperia phones, tablets, and Sony VAIO PCs. Now it's open to any Android device running Jelly Bean or higher. Here it is running on a Nexus 5.
If you're a regular user of almost any social network, you probably know how powerful crowdsourcing questions and answers can be. That's the basis behind a new search engine dubbed Jelly, created by Ben Finkel and Biz Stone, one of the co-founders of Twitter. Jelly is a social network for question-and-answer style interactions with friends you've already made connections with on Twitter and Facebook. Instead of going to traditional search engines, users are encouraged to snap a picture and post a question, which can then be answered or forwarded to others who might be able to help.
If you need to mass spam - I mean, notify - a bunch of people at once, Everypost might be the app you need. With Everypost, users can upload photos, videos, or text and blast it out to Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Tumblr, and other networks, including the anti-social Dropbox. As social networking continues to grow in importance, tools like this are real time-savers. But here's the thing, there are plenty of options out there, so is Everypost worth your time? That depends on if you can get it working.
Mashable is sort of the middle ground for breaking stories and Internet memes: it includes metrics so that the most popular stuff gets to the top, but the formatting and content are friendly enough to appeal to a wider group of users than, say, Reddit. Now there's an official app available in the Play Store. Samsung seems to have secured an exclusive for the launch.
Google Makes Its Waze Acquisition Official, Mapping Apps To Remain Separate For Now
This weekend the tech world was abuzz with rumors that Google had purchased Israeli mapping and navigation software maker Waze for a sum of over a billion
This weekend the tech world was abuzz with rumors that Google had purchased Israeli mapping and navigation software maker Waze for a sum of over a billion dollars. Today Google has made it official, thanks to a post on the company blog from the VP of Geo, Brian McClendon. While Google declined to mention exactly how much it spent on Waze, it's a safe bet that it was a lot, since both Apple and Facebook had previously expressed interest.
Quick quiz: can you name how many different beers you've had in the last week, their country of origin, and their brew style? Do you know what beer to recommend with barbeque shrimp? Have you ever successfully used the word "mouthfeel" in a sentence? Then Beer Citizen is for you. It follows the basic formula for enthusiast "social" apps (in other words, just like BeerAdvocate) but presents all that information in a mobile-friendly format that's got more taste and is less filling.
Twitter's official Android app has gone through a number of iterations, and it's not half bad these days. It might not conform to Android's Holo UI, but the app has many millions of downloads. A new update just hit the play Store, and it should make the experience noticeably better.