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Tag: tweets

  • Big Bird, Rush, And Fallopian Tubes

    Twitter is a wonderful place for one-liners. To be funny on the site, you’ve got to be sharp and practice economy of language. You’ve only got 140 characters to make an impression.

    And what better way to wind-down the work day than with a selection of some of the day’s most entertaining tweets.

    Enjoy!

  • The Expendables, Ctrl-Z, and the Debates

    The Expendables, Ctrl-Z, and the Debates

    Twitter is a wonderful place for one-liners. To be funny on the site, you’ve got to be sharp and practice economy of language. You’ve only got 140 characters to make an impression.

    And what better way to wind-down the work day than with a selection of some of the day’s most entertaining tweets.

    Enjoy!

  • Planned Parenthood, Justin Bieber, and Flowers for Algernon

    Twitter is a wonderful place for one-liners. To be funny on the site, you’ve got to be sharp and practice economy of language. You’ve only got 140 characters to make an impression.

    And what better way to wind-down the work day than with a selection of some of the day’s most entertaining tweets.

    Enjoy!

  • The McRib, Wayne’s World, and Taylor Swift

    The McRib, Wayne’s World, and Taylor Swift

    Twitter is a wonderful place for one-liners. To be funny on the site, you’ve got to be sharp and practice economy of language. You’ve only got 140 characters to make an impression.

    And what better way to wind-down the work day than with a selection of some of the day’s most entertaining tweets.

    Enjoy!

  • Missing Teen’s Cryptic Final Tweet Generates Concern, Controversy

    A New Jersey girl is still missing after a mysterious tweet suggesting foul play went viral late Sunday evening.

    16-year-old Kara Alongi has been missing for over 12 hours following a 6 pm tweet that said “There is someone in my hour ecall 911.” It’s assumed that Alongi meant that there was someone in her house.

    Here’s the tweet:

    According to police, Alongi’s parents have been made aware of the situation and the search continues for the girl. Police tell the Star-Ledger that there were no signs of foul play at Alongi’s house on Sunday night, and there’s no reason to think that she is in danger.

    Apparently, Alongi was alone as her house on Sunday evening, as her family was away at a sporting event.

    The chilling final message went viral on Twitter, as users created the #HelpFindKara hashtag. There’s also a #KaraIsFound hashtag, but police confirm that she is in fact, still missing.

    Though many twitter users have tweeted their legitimate concern, some are questioning the validity of the “disappearance.” This image is going around, purportedly showing a tweet sent out by Alongi around 6 hours after the initial cryptic tweet. The tweet, if it really existed, has been deleted. Though some are touting this as proof that this is all a hoax, others are claiming that the image is photoshopped:

    (image)

    UPDATE: Police say that a cab driver told them that he picked Alongi up at her home and dropped her off at a train station around the time of the initial tweet.

    This isn’t the first time we’ve seen tweets (possibly) mark the final moments before a crime. In August, a teen’s final tweets were used by police in her murder investigation.

  • Cole Slaw, Apple Maps, and Fox News

    Twitter is a wonderful place for one-liners. To be funny on the site, you’ve got to be sharp and practice economy of language. You’ve only got 140 characters to make an impression.

    And what better way to wind-down the work day than with a selection of some of the day’s most entertaining tweets.

    Enjoy!

  • Twitter Turns Discover Tab into Media-Rich Stream of Tweets

    Twitter’s Discover tab was launched last December in an effort to give new Twitter users suggestions on who to follow, help them find friends, and browse categories. Another part of the Discover tab provided top news stories from around the network, as tweeted by influential users.

    Today, the company has announced an upgrade to the Discover tab that will provide a media-rich tweet stream. It’s “what’s happening now, tailored for you,” says Twitter.

    Here’s what they had to say on the Twitter blog:

    Last December, we introduced Discover to bring you essential information from the web. This May, we added stronger signals and a new design that made it more personal for you with better stories and Tweets from people you know.

    Now we’re improving Discover again: when you visit the Discover tab on twitter.com, you’ll see a continuous stream of Tweets, which automatically expand to show you the most relevant stories and most engaging photos.

    The big change here is that now, the tweet stream shows the tweets already expanded with media, either in the form of articles, photos, or videos.

    Mobile seems to be unaffected by this change. Twitter says that the new Discover tweet stream will roll out to users gradually.

  • NFL Refs, Jimmy Hoffa, and Sister Jewish

    Twitter is a wonderful place for one-liners. To be funny on the site, you’ve got to be sharp and practice economy of language. You’ve only got 140 characters to make an impression.

    And what better way to wind-down the work day than with a selection of some of the day’s most entertaining tweets.

    Enjoy!

  • Twitter Users Tweet the Word “Faggot” Over 200,000 Times a Week

    In an effort to “put an end to casual homophobia,” the Institute for Sexual Minority Studies and Service at the University of Alberta has fashioned the NoHomophobes tracker, which logs every use of the word “faggot” and other gay slurs across Twitter.

    And the results are pretty staggering.

    It’s definitely no surprise that phrases like “faggot” and “so gay” are often used on the social networking site. But the sheer volume of use is pretty impressive. NoHomophobes.com began tracking the words on July 5th, and in just 11 weeks the word “faggot” was used over 2.5 million times. That means that every week, around 228,000 tweets go out containing the controversial word.

    The site also tracks uses of the phrase “so gay,” “no homo,” and “dyke.” In 11 weeks, they’ve seen 896,756 uses of “so gay,” 818,652 uses of “no homo,” and 346,977 uses of “dyke.”

    If you visit the site, you can also see a constant feed of all tweets containing these phrases.

    Of course, words like “faggot” are not always used in a purely derogatory manner. They have been inserted into our lexicon in ways that vary from the original meaning. That’s precisely the point, according to the initiative. They want to make people aware of just how casually people throw around the words that are oftentimes hurtful to large portions of the population:

    “This website is designed as a social mirror to show the prevalence of casual homophobia in our society. Words and phrases like “faggot,” “dyke,” “no homo,” and “so gay” are used casually in everyday language, despite promoting the continued alienation, isolation and — in some tragic cases — suicide of sexual and gender minority (LGBTQ) youth.

    We no longer tolerate racist language, we’re getting better at dealing with sexist language, but sadly we’re still not actively addressing homophobic and transphobic language in our society,” they explain.

    If you extrapolate their data, you find that the word “faggot” will be tweeted almost 12 million times this year. If you want to show your support for their cause, they ask you to tweet using the #nohomophobes hashtag.

    [via ThinkProgress]

  • Dr. Seuss, Britney Spears, and Bacon

    Dr. Seuss, Britney Spears, and Bacon

    Twitter is a wonderful place for one-liners. To be funny on the site, you’ve got to be sharp and practice economy of language. You’ve only got 140 characters to make an impression.

    And what better way to wind-down the work day than with a selection of some of the day’s most entertaining tweets.

    Enjoy!

  • Life Alert, Replacement Refs, and Pandas

    Life Alert, Replacement Refs, and Pandas

    Twitter is a wonderful place for one-liners. To be funny on the site, you’ve got to be sharp and practice economy of language. You’ve only got 140 characters to make an impression.

    And what better way to wind-down the work day than with a selection of some of the day’s most entertaining tweets.

    Enjoy!

  • Monday Night Football Debacle Sees T.J. Lang Generate Massive Twitter Buzz

    If you were on Twitter late last night and early this morning, you probably saw a few an epic ton of tweets about the Monday Night Football game, the NFL replacement refs, and a spectacularly botched call. You may have even seen a few expletives.

    And you may have seen all of this combined in the tweets of Packers’ guard T.J. Lang, who became the poster boy for the players’ frustrations following one of the worst pieces of officiating in modern sports history.

    You probably don’t follow T.J Lang on Twitter. He currently sits at just over 100,000 followers, many of which jumped on board following his vocal tweets last night. But that doesn’t mean that his tweets weren’t all over your stream.

    That’s because his tweets saw an incredible number of retweets over the last 15 hours. According to Twitter, Lang’s series of three outspoken tweets saw over 150,000 retweets combined.

    This one currently sits at over 66,000 retweets:

    And this one at over 84,000:

    Finally, the last tweet in the tirade generated over 21,000:

    Plenty of other athletes, both Packers and non-Packers gave their opinion on the call including Drew Brees and Reggie Bush. But none of them had the impact of Lang with his impressive bluntness. No doubt it will cost him, but he doesn’t regret the tweets at all. Well, except for one aspect:

  • Twitter Extends a Lifeline to Japanese Users

    If there’s one thing that Twitter is engineered for, it’s providing a large volume of information in real-time. If you don’t know what I mean, click on a trending topic and watch the tweets roll in. Sometimes, it’s dizzying trying to keep up with the pressurized firehose that is a tweet stream.

    Admittedly, not all of this information is important or even relevant in any way. That’s kind of what’s great about Twitter, though. In the same medium, there are thousands of tweets about an uprising in the Middle East, or new about the U.S. Presidential race flowing at the exact same time as thousands of tweets about Justin Bieber’s new single.

    Twitter has found a true purpose when it comes to natural disasters, as we’ve seen the service used as a real-time news feed, message board, and SOS dispatch for people stuck in earthquakes, hurricanes, tornados, and tsunamis around the world. Twitter knows this, and has just announced a new feature called “Lifeline.”

    According to the Twitter blog, it’s a “new feature for Japanese users that helps people there find critical information when the need it most.”

    To find and follow essential local accounts in Japan, people simply search their postal code on twitter.com. If there’s an earthquake in the Aobadai district of Yokohama, for instance, people can use Lifeline to find a variety of timely accounts — those tweeting about the earthquake and sharing updates from the district (Aobadai), city (Yokohama), and prefecture (Kanagawa) governments; they can also find accounts from local media and utility companies providing information about gas, water or electricity. Of course, Japanese users can also set up notifications to receive Tweets from these accounts on their mobile devices.

    It appears that the Lifeline will function similarly to Twitter’s recently-unveiled event pages, which organize the most relevant tweets surrounding events when users enter certain search terms.

    Lifeline was launched by Twitter’s Tokyo team, and is currently only available to Japanese users. They say that they hope to expand it worldwide in the future.

    During the Japanese earthquakes of 2011, Twitter reported a 500% spike in Tweets coming from the country. With Lifeline, that giant volume of information can be streamlined, making it easier for crisis victims to find the help they need.

  • Cat Accents, iPhone 5, and Kato Kaelin

    Cat Accents, iPhone 5, and Kato Kaelin

    Twitter is a wonderful place for one-liners. To be funny on the site, you’ve got to be sharp and practice economy of language. You’ve only got 140 characters to make an impression.

    And what better way to wind-down the work day than with a selection of some of the day’s most entertaining tweets.

    Enjoy!

  • Psychics, Paris Hilton, and iOS 6 Maps

    Psychics, Paris Hilton, and iOS 6 Maps

    Twitter is a wonderful place for one-liners. To be funny on the site, you’ve got to be sharp and practice economy of language. You’ve only got 140 characters to make an impression.

    And what better way to wind-down the work day than with a selection of some of the day’s most entertaining tweets.

    Enjoy!

  • Tribal Tattoos, Lindsay Lohan, and Siri

    Tribal Tattoos, Lindsay Lohan, and Siri

    Twitter is a wonderful place for one-liners. To be funny on the site, you’ve got to be sharp and practice economy of language. You’ve only got 140 characters to make an impression.

    And what better way to wind-down the work day than with a selection of some of the day’s most entertaining tweets.

    Enjoy!

  • Gangnam Style, New Twitter, and Coffee

    Gangnam Style, New Twitter, and Coffee

    Twitter is a wonderful place for one-liners. To be funny on the site, you’ve got to be sharp and practice economy of language. You’ve only got 140 characters to make an impression.

    And what better way to wind-down the work day than with a selection of some of the day’s most entertaining tweets.

    Enjoy!

  • Bilbo Baggins, Jay Cutler, and 32oz Sodas

    Twitter is a wonderful place for one-liners. To be funny on the site, you’ve got to be sharp and practice economy of language. You’ve only got 140 characters to make an impression.

    And what better way to wind-down the work day than with a selection of some of the day’s most entertaining tweets.

    Enjoy!

  • Twitter Finally Gives Up Occupy Protester’s Tweets

    The saga of New York criminal court, Twitter, and #Occupy protestor Malcolm Harris appears to have come to a close, as Twitter has officially handed over tweets that they had been fighting to protect for months.

    The story, which begins with an arrest stemming from Occupy Wall Street protests, has a few twists and turns. Here’s the recap:

    In October of 2011, Malcolm Harris was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct after participating in an #OWS protest on the Brooklyn Bridge. On January of 2012, the Manhattan District Attorney’s office sent a subpoena to Twitter, demanding that the company release user information and past tweets related to Harris. It later came out the prosecutors wanted Harris’ old (and currently inaccesible) tweets to try to undermine his argument that police led protesters to the Bridge and then arrested them for obstructing traffic.

    A few days after receiving the subpoena, Twitter notified Harris (which is a common practice for the social network). Harris then decided to file a motion to quash that subpoena.

    In a ruling handed down in April, Judge Matthew Sciarrino Jr. denied Harris’ motion to quash the subpoena. In short, the Judge concluded that Harris had “no proprietary interests” in his tweets. Basically, Twitter owns your tweets and because of that, even your deleted tweets can be obtained without a warrant.

    Less than a month after this decision, Twitter shocked everybody when they went to bat for Harris. They filed their own motion to quash the original subpoena, arguing that Harris did in fact have proprietary interest “in the content he submits to Twitter.” Twitter also cited the Stored Communications Act, the Fourth Amendement, and the lesser known Uniform Act to Secure the Attendance of Witnesses from Without a State in Criminal Proceedings. Heavy-hitting legal stuff from the folks at Twitter.

    In July, the Judge said no dice, and ordered Twitter to hand over the tweets. An appeal also went nowhere, and Twitter faced a Friday, September 14th deadline to comply with the subpoena. Otherwise, the company would face a hefty fine.

    And today, Reuters reports that Twitter has complied and turned over the desired tweets.

    Good on you, Twitter, for going to bat for privacy rights. Even if this failed battle only centers on some disorderly conduct charges, it sets a precedent for Twitter (and other social) networks to be forced into giving up user information on the whim of a court order. Your tweets aren’t really yours – remember that.

  • Hipsters, the Chinese Justice System, and Tupac

    Twitter is a wonderful place for one-liners. To be funny on the site, you’ve got to be sharp and practice economy of language. You’ve only got 140 characters to make an impression.

    And what better way to wind-down the work day than with a selection of some of the day’s most entertaining tweets.

    Enjoy!

  • Dog Beers, Baby Powder, and the New iPhone

    Twitter is a wonderful place for one-liners. To be funny on the site, you’ve got to be sharp and practice economy of language. You’ve only got 140 characters to make an impression.

    And what better way to wind-down the work day than with a selection of some of the day’s most entertaining tweets.

    Enjoy!