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Twitter Tuesday - this week's Twitter news, apps and more
Welcome back to the best damn Twitter column on the web ... period. It's Download Squad's Twitter Tuesday! News, apps, and Twitter-based services abound this week, so grab a cup of coffee and strap yourself in. We've got party time at Twitter HQ, Twitter passing MySpace in number of status updates, and lots more...so let's go!
First up: Twitter hired its magical 140th employee this week, and threw a party to celebrate. BT showed up to DJ, and Twitter HQ was rockin'. With the way Twitter's growing, it won't be long before they hire employee #141.
Speaking of Twitter's growth, the (relatively) new kid on the block just passed old-school social networking site MySpace in terms of total status updates, and it's coming up on passing Facebook (although what counts as a status update on FB is a bit harder to define). ReadWriteWeb reports that Twitter just passed the 50 million updates/day mark, compared to an estimated 33 million a day for MySpace.
Oooh, burn!
Twitter also now has the seal of approval from The Dalai Lama. @dalailama used to be a fake account, but it's now verified and posting official Lama-approved tweets. No personal communication from the Lama himself yet, but Mashable's Ben Parr speculates that it will happen eventually.
JustUnfollow is a new service from Twi5 that tells you which of the people you follow aren't following you back, in case you want to act hurt and deliver some swift, unfollowy justice. No bulk unfollowing here, though, because that apparently violates Twitter's terms of service. Mike Arrington of TechCrunch tried out JustUnfollow, and found that the results aren't always accurate, so definitely double-check follow status before you get too upset at one of your (so-called) friends. A similar service that I've used in the past with some success is FriendOrFollow.
Yet another phishing attack has been going around Twitter lately, so be careful of strange DMs if you want to protect your password. The phishing messages say things like, "Lol, this is funny" and "Lol, is this you?" Don't click on any of the links that come along with messages like these. (Heck, even when phishing's not involved, you should just ignore people who say LOL as a general rule.)
I'll close out this Twitter Tuesday with a somewhat amazing graph from the Twitter blog. This is what Twitter's growth has looked like, in terms of tweets-per-day, over the three years it's been around:
See you next week!
Comments
2
Subscribe to commentssodapopFeb 23rd 2010 3:17PM
An interesting to note from personal experience. Nearly all my friends and their friends have abandoned MySpace for Facebook. MySpace updates, bulletins and friend requests are too spam-y.
And, that's beginning to be the response on Facebook too. Too many updates. Too many game notices etc. One friend posts so many YouTube links I just hid his updates.
Twitter, on the other hand, was built to be spam-central. Disposable musings, links and advertisements. No one I know goes in to the past to catch up on Twitter posts. We read what we see at the time we are looking.
Personally, Twitter is where I rant. The 140 char limit keeps it brief. I described it to a co-worker as a place to "shout into space." Slap an "@" on it and maybe you'll get a response. I have literally started shouting to Twitter at all the venues I patronize when I want help or just want to criticize them. And it works. Many of them respond.
3tearFeb 23rd 2010 4:42PM
I found this neat greasemonkey script for twitter: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/40617