TWITTER GETS A MAKEOVER....AGAIN

Twitter has released an update to their popular micro blogging site. The visual update will "make it easier than ever to follow what you care about, connect with others and discover something new." Four new tabs bring you instantly closer to everything you care about.

The website has been update and launched with mobile apps coming soon.

GOOGLE BUZZ GOES BYE BYE

Google announced on Friday that it is shutting down a number of properties in the coming months, the most notable of which is likely its failed social network, Google Buzz. Best known as that annoying thing under “Inbox” in Gmail, Google Buzz was a Twitter-like service that never gained traction. Buzz encouraged users to share status updates, photos and more that could then be viewed by friends in real time, however it offered no compelling features compared to already established services such as Facebook and Twitter.

Google will also shutter several additional services in the near future, including Jaiku, a social network the company acquired in 2007, and Code search, a tool that helped programmers search for open source code. Google Buzz will shut down in the coming weeks while Jaiku and Code Search will both go offline on January 15th, 2012 along with a few other seldom-used Google services.

SOCIAL MEDIA CRACK DOWN BEGINS IN UK, TEEN ARRESTED FOR BBM

Lending further gravity to the proposed crackdown being bandied about in British parliament, an Essex teen has been arrested for sending a BBM that ran afoul of the Serious Crime Act of 2007. The 18-year old, now free on bail, allegedly used the service to encourage copycat attacks of the violent rioting that's swept London, and is set to appear in court on September 1st. It's the second known case to put RIM's private messaging service -- "popular among urban teenagers" as a cheap texting alternative -- in the UK's legal hotseat. For its part, the Canadian electronics maker has since reached out to police, promising to aid the investigation "in any way [it] can." Although no decision has yet been made to extend law enforcement's powers over social media services, such as Twitter and Facebook, arrests like these seem to indicate a murky free speech future.

RIM WORKING WITH LONDON AUTHORITIES OVER USE OF BBM DURING RIOTS

BlackBerry maker Research In Motion has agreed to work with London authorities as they begin their investigation into recent riots. According to some Londoners, rioters were using RIM’s BlackBerry Messenger service, along with social networks such as Twitter, to organize the attacks. “It is clear that technology is being used, including in demonstrations, to direct people and undermine the police,”

London’s deputy assistant commissioner Stephen Kavanagh told Bloomberg. “It is not for us to to moan about this, but to adapt policing style and deal with it.” RIM typically prides itself on the security of its BBM service and has denied access to governments worried the chat platform could be used for planning terrorist attacks. “We feel for those impacted by the riots in London,” RIM wrote in a recent tweet. “We have engaged with the authorities to assist in any way we can.”

Despite RIM’s efforts, one Member of Parliament, David Lammy, has called on the Canadian company to suspend BlackBerry Messenger services while the riots continue, Reuters said. “This is one of the reasons why unsophisticated criminals are outfoxing an otherwise sophisticated police force,” Lamme tweeted. “BBM is different as it is encrypted and police can’t access it.” Twitter isn’t giving up information as quickly. A spokesperson for the social network told Bloomberg that it would require a “subpoena or court order” before giving the police access to private user information. Read on for more on how one group of hackers is reacting to RIM’s cooperation.

ONLY 92% OF NEWT GINGRICH'S TWITTER FOLLOWERS ARE FAKE

Yesterday there were reports based on a former Newt Gingrich staffer that Gingrich assembled his 1.3 million Twitter followers—a number that he's taken to bragging about—in part by buying fake Twitter followers. A lot of people did not think that was true! Today social networking search firm PeekYou announced that it had crunched the data and come to the conclusion that roughly 106,055 of Gingrich's million-plus followers are real people. The rest are fakes.

There has not been any direct evidence of Gingrich or his campaign buying followers, until PeekYou's report was released. PeekYou scoured through all 1.3 million followers on Gingrich's account and found that only 8% are real. "We just started running the 2012 candidates' numbers three weeks ago," said Josh Mackey, PeekYou's general manager of business and product development, "and when we saw [the] story, we went back to pull the Gingrich numbers. The huge majority of his followers are either completely anonymous people who have no other web presence, or they are spambots."

Mackey said PeekYou actually scrubbed each and every one of Gingrich's 1.3 million followers, using 23 criteria—including name, location, and inbound and outbound links in their feed—to determine whether they were real people. "We usually find out that real people have real web identities," he says. For the vast majority of Gingrich's followers, that wasn't true. They were either business accounts, private accounts, anonymous accounts that had only a user ID and no other discernible connection to the internet, or spambots. The average Twitter user, Mackey says, has a follower count that consists of anywhere from 35% to 60% real people. At 8%, Gingrich's is the lowest PeekYou has ever seen. "When was saw it, we actually had our quality assurance people go over the numbers for two days to doublecheck," he says.

CROWD SOURCED CONSTITUTION SUBMITTED TO ICELAND'S GOVERNMENT FOR APPROVAL

A committee of 25 Icelanders submitted the first draft of a rewritten constitution to the country's parliamentary speaker Friday. The democratic experiment bravely asked citizens to log on to Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, and Twitter to engage with the committee in a discussion about the nation's future.

While the project's Facebook page played host to pleads for free ice cream and more volcanoes, the constitution's creators managed to stay on task, focusing on issues of decentralization and transparency in government. The draft is slated for review beginning October 1st.

NATIONAL REPUBLICAN SENATE COMMITTEE SENDS OUT FAKE TWEETS TO SMEAR DEMOCRATS

For those not on the Twitter, it's a little complicated to follow this story, but bear with me. These are the tweets from the National Senate Republican Committee account. Now in Twitter parlance, "RT" refers to "retweet" and is customarily used at the head of someone else's tweet that you wish to amplify to your followers. It does not necessarily connote approval or agreement with the original tweet, but simply a desire to share it with your followers.

Well, here's the thing with all those RTs on behalf of the Sen. John Cornyn-headed NRSC: they're all fakes. They wrote them themselves and crafted them to look like they were merely re-tweeting something written by prominent Democrats and Democratic groups. And this goes out to the more than 14,000 followers of the NRSC twitter account.

Calls to both Cornyn's office and the NRSC to defend this have as yet not been returned. Allen at ABLC imagines if this kind of behavior is considered fair play what fun could be had retweeting faked tweets from Cornyn's account.

FRANCE BANS MENTION OF FACEBOOK AND TWITTER ON TV TO HELP MARKET COMPETITION

The words "Facebook" and "Twitter" are now verboten on French TV, because France thought it'd be a good idea to follow its own laws. Last week, the country's Conseil Supérieur de l'Audiovisuel (CSA) ruled that TV networks and radio stations will no longer be able to explicitly mention Facebook or Twitter during on-air broadcasts, except when discussing a story in which either company is directly involved. The move comes in response to a 1992 governmental decree that prohibits media organizations from promoting brands during newscasts, for fear of diluting competition. Instead of inviting viewers to follow their programs or stories on Twitter, then, broadcast journalists will have to couch their promotions in slightly more generic terms -- e.g. "Follow us on your social network of choice." CSA spokeswoman Christine Kelly explains:

Why give preference to Facebook, which is worth billions of dollars, when there are many other social networks that are struggling for recognition? This would be a distortion of competition. If we allow Facebook and Twitter to be cited on air, it's opening a Pandora's Box - other social networks will complain to us saying, 'why not us?

Fueling competition via aggressive regulation may strike some free-marketeers as economically depraved, but it certainly won't kill social media-based commerce. Facebook and Twitter have already become more or less synonymous with "social networks" anyway, so it's hard to envision such a minor linguistic tweak having any major effect on online engagement.

MAYLASIAN MAN ORDERED TO APOLOGIZE 100 TIMES ON TWITTER FOR DEFAMATION

The punishment, the saying goes, should fit the crime. When working within the legal system, however, it can be pretty tough to come up with a truly appropriate sentence. Settlements, on the other hand, offer a little more room for creativity, and after a Malaysian political aide / social activist used Twitter to air a grievance about a pregnant friend's employer, the publishing company turned to the social network for inspiration.

Fahmi Fadzil tweeted an apology shortly after, but BluInc Media wasn't satiated. The two parties finally reached an elementary school-esque out of court decision, requiring Fadzil to apologize for his initial statement 100 times on the microblogging service. He began the apology today at 9:00AM his time, and will continue on until June 4th, as per the rules of the agreement.

LEAK: TWITTER TO ANNOUNCE PHOTO SHARING SERVICE THIS WEEK

Twitter will announce a photo-sharing service at the D9 conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif., this week, according to sources familiar with the matter. Twitter CEO Dick Costolo is set to speak at D9 on Wednesday. Twitter spokespeople did not reply for a request for comment on the matter.

Currently, Twitter users who wish to post photos in their tweets must host them elsewhere, with popular options including Twitpic, Yfrog, Instagram and Flickr. Users then include links to the photos within their tweets. Many Twitter clients, including those developed by the company, use the links to go fetch the images and display them inline. But the process could certainly be smoother.

WINDOWS PHONE 7 SUFFERS SECOND OUTAGE IN A WEEK

Microsoft has confirmed that its Windows Phone 7 platform on Friday suffered its second major outage this week. Early on Friday, users began reporting that they could not access Xbox LIVE services from their Windows Phone 7 devices. BGR had independently confirmed the issue on two separate devices, and now Microsoft has acknowledged the outage via its official Windows Phone support team Twitter account. “It’s a new issue that users are unable to access Xbox LIVE features at this time,” a Microsoft official posted to the Twitter account. Earlier this week, Microsoft’s Windows Marketplace suffered an outage that prevented users from accessing the company’s mobile app store during a scheduled maintenance that was extended due to complications.

LEAKED: TWITTER BUYS TWEETDECK FOR $50 MILLION

According to source speaking to TechCrunch, Twitter purchased the popular third-party client TweetDeck for between $40 and $50 million on Monday. The Wall Street Journal originally reported that Twitter was in “advanced talks” to purchase TweetDeck – a 15 person company – back in April. Sources speaking to TechCrunch said that Twitter made the purchase in an effort to stop Uber Media, another third party company with a handful of Twitter applications across multiple platforms, from buying TweetDeck first. Neither company has officially announced the acquisition, yet.

VERIZON'S 4G LTE NETWORK BACK UP NATIONWIDE

Verizon Wireless announed late Thursday that their 4G LTE network is back up and running. The network went down earlier in the week, but Verizon says they determined the cause of the issue late yesterday afternoon, and posted an update to their Twitter account to let the public know they’re working with their vendors to resolve it. Now, it looks like everything is back to normal.

Verizon Wireless hasn’t fessed up to exactly what caused the issue in the first place, or what they’re going to do to ensure it doesn’t happen again. Even so, no carrier with as much riding on their network as much as Verizon Wireless has riding on its LTE network would move forward without examining the root cause of the outage and taking whatever corrective action is necessary.

The company did say that while Thunderbolt owners should be relieved, 4G modem owners may still have some issues when moving between 3G and 4G modes. They did note that any issues 4G modem owners had would continue to improve as they continue to work on the network, but stopped short of explaining why. In the meantime, 4G owners can be happy that they have their super-fast network back.

VERIZON ENGINEERS WORKING TO RESOLVE 4G LTE OUTAGE

Verizon Wireless has acknowledged a problem with its 4G LTE network and is keeping its customers up-to-date via Twitter. “We’re aware of an issue with the 4G LTE connections and our network engineers are working to resolve quickly,” Verizon’s official account tweeted today. It followed up three hours later with “Investigating 4G LTE network issue; ThunderBolts making voice calls, may get slower 1xRTT data.” Verizon says it will keep its customers updated as its works to resolve the problem.

It appears 4G is slowly coming back online. There are reports out of San Francisco that 4G has been restored there, but so far that is the only city seeing the return.

RUMOR: TWITTER TO PURCHASE TWEETDECK

According to a report by The Wall Street Journal, Twitter is in “advanced talks” to purchase TweetDeck — the popular desktop and mobile third-party Twitter client. The deal could be worth as much as $50 million, although neither party has commented on the possible acquisition. TweetDeck, based in the U.K, has 15 employees on its payroll. Twitter could use the acquisition to immediately offer a “native” Twitter client in the PC desktop space, especially if it has plans to begin targeting enterprise Twitter users.

TWITTER APP UPDATE REMOVES QUICKBAR FROM iDEVICES

Last month's Twitter update for the iPhone and iPad launched with a new feature Twitter dubbed Quickbar. The Quickbar was designed to give easier access to in-app notifications. In the just released update to the Twitter app, the Quickbar has been removed. From Twitter's blog:

We want Twitter to instantly connect people everywhere to what’s most meaningful to them. In support of this, we will frequently experiment by trying new things, adding new features, and being bold in the product decisions we make. After testing a feature and evaluating its merits, if we learn it doesn’t improve the user experience or serve our mission, we’ll remove that feature.

Rather than continue to make changes to the QuickBar as it exists, we removed the bar from the update appearing in the App Store today. We believe there are still significant benefits to increasing awareness of what’s happening outside the home timeline. Evidence of the incredibly high usage metrics for the QuickBar support this. For now, we’re going back to the drawing board to explore the best possible experience for in-app notification and discovery.

TWITTER ENABLES HTTPS

As of today, Twitter users can check the “Always Use HTTPS” setting at the bottom of Settings on their profiles. HTTPS, or Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure uses the SSL/TSL protocol in addition to HTTP to ensure encrypted communication over a secure channel. This protects users on insecure networks like conference or coffee bar WiFi.

While Twitter users could use HTTPS prior by visiting https://www.twitter.com, they now have the option to have it always on. In addition HTTPS will be used when you log into Twitter and on Twitter for iPhone and iPad.

Users on mobile browsers have to visit https://mobile.twitter.com to access the feature for now, but Twitter is trying to make the setting work across all devices, hoping to eventually make HTTPS the default setting.

MOTOROLA XOOM UPDATE HITS, BRINGS FLASH 10.2 SUPPORT

Motorola’s corporate Twitter account sent out a tweet announcing that the Motorola XOOM will be receiveing an OTA software upgrade starting late Friday.

Improvements for daylight savings time and support for the upcoming Adobe Flash 10.2 release are expected. The OTA will hit XOOM tablets later on in the evening and your device can be updated over 3G or Wi-Fi.

TWITTER FOR iDEVICES UPDATED

Twitter just pushed out a major update for its iOS application, which is a universal app compatible with the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch. Twitter 3.3 adds a variety of functionality, the most obvious and painful of which is the new “Quick Bar” that dangles ads and Bieber-ish Twitter trends atop the main timeline. It’s very unique and remarkably annoying. Twitter lists other changes as follows:

• Photos. Uploading photos is now easier than ever. There’s a camera button in the toolbar and we improved the image preview, so you can quickly choose a photo from your library or take a new picture.
• Follow your friends. Now you can find which of your friends are on Twitter that have chosen to be discoverable through the contacts on your phone.
• Local trends. See trends based on your location.
• Shorten links. When you want to share a link on Twitter, just paste it into the Tweet box and we’ll automatically shorten it.
• Tweet box design. We redesigned the “New Tweet” screen so it’s now cleaner and simpler.
• Autocomplete. When tweeting on-the-go, speed and accuracy are important. Autocomplete for @usernames and hashtags help you tweet faster
• Direct Messages. The new Direct Message conversation view helps you better keep track of messages.

Twitter 3.3 for iOS is available immediately and the app is still free.

TWITTER SUSPENDS UBERTWITTER AND TWITDROYD FOR POLICY VIOLATIONS

Twitter on Friday suspended two very popular third-party Twitter applications for violating policies put in place for third-party developers who access Twitter’s APIs. UberTwitter, a top Twitter app for BlackBerry smartphones, and twitdroyd, an Android client, are both owned by UberMedia and have both been suspended. A Twitter spokesperson said they “violated Twitter policies and trademarks in a variety of ways,” citing a Twitter policies covering “a privacy issue with private Direct Messages longer than 140 characters, trademark infringement, and changing the content of users’ Tweets in order to make money.” It is unclear exactly what functions the apps were performing that violated Twitter’s policies. In its announcement of these suspensions, Twitter recommended that affected users download Twitter’s official mobile apps or other third-party apps instead of using UberTwitter or twitdroyd.